Hey everyone, my name is Ryan Burnsides and I am the Lead Gameplay Designer for Madden NFL 11. I normally like to stay behind the scenes, but since Ian coaxed me into writing this blog post, I figured I should write some sort of introduction. I am a huge football fan (college and pro) and an even bigger fan of football video games. I started at EA as an intern at the San Mateo studio (now in Redwood Shores) on the wildly successful Future Cop: LAPD (I’m sure you have all played it) and when given the chance to work at any EA Studio after my internship, the choice was an easy one. I wanted to work on Madden and joined the Madden 2000 team in mid-cycle. At various times over the last 11 years, I’ve been a lead software engineer on NCAA, Madden, and NFL Street, focusing mainly on AI, gameplay, and animation. From Madden NFL 07 through Madden NFL 10, I was the lead software engineer for our Central Gameplay Group. This year I have shifted more focus to the design side and I couldn’t be happier in my new role. Now that you have suffered through that, I’ll get to the good stuff.

Madden NFL 10 was a pretty dramatic departure from Madden NFL 09’s emphasis on twitch control. We really focused on trying to make the game look and feel more like what you see on Sundays. In the end we did a decent job, but we found out pretty quickly that the tech we were using wasn’t giving us the control that we needed to match our vision. Things like acceleration, direction changes, and momentum were very difficult to tune and while the end result was a fun user experience, we knew we had to make a pretty dramatic change in our tool set to allow us to achieve our goals. Click here to read the entire blog.

From EA Sports