Q&A with NCAA Football 10 Designer Greg Heddlesten

This message was edited 6 times. Last update was at 11/10/2009 14:22:18

Hello everyone,

This is Greg Heddlesten, one of the designers on the NCAA Football Team at EA-Tiburon. Just wanted to take the time and introduce myself to you all on our update forums. You've probably read some of my blogs I've posted on http://insideblog.easports.com about super sim and cameras. We still have more content to post as we march towards our release date this summer.

I'm mainly here to talk with everyone about the various areas of the game that I work on and get some feedback and answer questions from our community about NCAA Football.

I'm pretty knowledgable in the areas of Custom Stadium Sounds, Campus Legend/General gameplay cameras, Loading Screen facts, Super Sim/Greatness Score tuning, the Post Game Montage, Mascot Mash Up, and various other areas of presentation.

Unfortunately, I'm not totally versed in Gameplay, Playbooks, Online Dynasty, Art, and some areas of Campus Legend and Dynasty as I do not normally work on those areas of the game.

Look forward to hearing from everyone.

-Greg

Since you work on Mascot Mashup, not to be rude or anything, but why is it there if nobody plays it and will it still be there in 2010?

xbox.A Dizezed Zebra wrote:Since you work on Mascot Mashup, not to be rude or anything, but why is it there if nobody plays it and will it still be there in 2010?

You can't assume "nobody" plays it... It's not intended for the hardcore audience in the first place, and was added to hit our younger users. Also, we were able to get a sponsorship with Coke Zero, and that means more money for development of our other features.

The amount of development time for this mode was very small; about 1/2 a day. Mascot Mash Up is basically a Play Now game with an art swap (since all of the mascots are on the disc already). Yes, it will be there in NCAA Football 10 as there is no reason to remove it as the mode has very little impact on our disc space.

This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 03/23/2009 12:47:26

easw.EA_GregHeddlesten wrote:

xbox.A Dizezed Zebra wrote:Since you work on Mascot Mashup, not to be rude or anything, but why is it there if nobody plays it and will it still be there in 2010?

You can't assume "nobody" plays it... It's not intended for the hardcore audience in the first place, and was added to hit our younger users. Also, we were able to get a sponsorship with Coke Zero, and that means more money for development of our other features.

The amount of development time for this mode was very small; about 1/2 a day. Mascot Mash Up is basically a Play Now game with an art swap (since all of the mascots are on the disc already). Yes, it will be there in NCAA Football 10 as there is no reason to remove it as the mode has very little impact on our disc space.

Ok those are good.

Greg, now when you say that you work with custom stadium sounds, does that mean you work on the feature that allowed us to customize it like last year, or do you do even more in the general sound design area? I didn't use the custom sounds feature much last year, but I'm looking forward to trying it out this coming year (I need to have some Stones and other standard music from the Husker games). If you also handle sportscaster dialogue and crowd noise, what sorts of changes can we expect in that area this year? I know there was mention of a new PA system, but is Corso/Herstreit commentary completely new this year? Will the crowd be a lot more active in the game, reacting to big plays/stops? I'm sure I'll have more questions for you guys, but right now I'm drawing blanks. Thanks, Greg.

Greg...my man... You have to bring back the pre-game montage where the camera pans over the top players on the field, all the while going over the keys to the game. More has to be done to build the excitement of the game, but don't overdo it and have it do it every game. This was a good feature before, but it did it for EVERY game. Make a rivalry game or BCS bowl game exciting by adding these scenes only for them.

And as far as post-game goes, let's bring back a player of the game and analysis of any awards the player might be available for.

xbox.deusmortuus wrote:Greg, now when you say that you work with custom stadium sounds, does that mean you work on the feature that allowed us to customize it like last year, or do you do even more in the general sound design area? I didn't use the custom sounds feature much last year, but I'm looking forward to trying it out this coming year (I need to have some Stones and other standard music from the Husker games). If you also handle sportscaster dialogue and crowd noise, what sorts of changes can we expect in that area this year? I know there was mention of a new PA system, but is Corso/Herstreit commentary completely new this year? Will the crowd be a lot more active in the game, reacting to big plays/stops? I'm sure I'll have more questions for you guys, but right now I'm drawing blanks. Thanks, Greg.

I was the designer of the feature was what I was trying to say. You should give it a shot, basically what it does is either replace an existing sound (like a fight song or drum cadence) or adds it to the mix. It's pretty slick.

We do have a new PA guy this year, we had to re-record everything (took 4 full days!) to have it ready for this year. There should be a fair amount of new TV commentary as well. We're not going to do a full re-record with Nessler, Herbstreit, and Corso, however each year we bring them in for a few days and record new lines for new features or record variants for situations that happen in the game.

We've talked about getting the crowd more into the game. We're in alpha right now, so the crowd should definately be tuned during this time (one of the other designers controls the crowd logic tool).

MAIN.minkagain wrote:Greg...my man... You have to bring back the pre-game montage where the camera pans over the top players on the field, all the while going over the keys to the game. More has to be done to build the excitement of the game, but don't overdo it and have it do it every game. This was a good feature before, but it did it for EVERY game. Make a rivalry game or BCS bowl game exciting by adding these scenes only for them.

And as far as post-game goes, let's bring back a player of the game and analysis of any awards the player might be available for.

The pregame was updated some this year, but that is all I can say. I hope you like the new addition when we announce it.

Is there a way we can get stadium sounds to be played at visiting stadiums? Instead of just the user's home stadium? I wouldn't mind going to some of these away games and hearing their chants and fight songs that I added to it.

Thanks Greg, your reply was much appreciated. Most of what held me back from trying the custom stadium sounds this year was lack of space for anything on my harddrive, but I'm getting the larger one soon, so that shouldn't be an issue. Is there a reason why we can't get any of the other ESPN reporting crews to show up for the game? A suggestion for next year I'm partial to: only keep Corso and Herbstreit for pregame/postgame commentary and let us vote on a reporting crew to do most of the game announcing. I really don't know how much space the commentary takes up on the disc, but I'm assuming that it wouldn't be possible to have two or three full sets of commentary from different crews?

Greg do you have anything to do with the instant replay part? Because the game sometimes shows replays automatically and if that happens you can't challenge a play which sucks.If you could still challenge it or do away with all auto replays that would be great. also would be nice if u could challenge in a online dyn game vrs a user.

about the sound thing I heard that some music gave away pwrts of the game because that music would always happen in a certain instance like tiotally giving away what the opp is doing? I never got my custom sounds to load all the stuff I wanted so I didn't try it but heard music would let you know if someone was punting or going for a fake on 4th down.not sure if that s true just wondering if u heard any thing like that.

cem_ea_id.RebelNutt48 wrote:Is there a way we can get stadium sounds to be played at visiting stadiums? Instead of just the user's home stadium? I wouldn't mind going to some of these away games and hearing their chants and fight songs that I added to it.

I believe we fixed that in the 2nd patch. If you set a specific team's sounds they should play when that team is playing at home. But if you set it to "ALL" they will only play if you are the home team.

xbox.deusmortuus wrote:...Is there a reason why we can't get any of the other ESPN reporting crews to show up for the game?

They are under contract and we only have so much budget for talent each year. We can try to bring another person on, but we might have to lose someone. We aren't able to swap out talent on the fly; we have great working relationships with our commentators and it would be hard to lose any of them. (Not to mention all of the audio we'd have to re-record with the new talent and the new stuff as well)

xbox.deusmortuus wrote:...I really don't know how much space the commentary takes up on the disc, but I'm assuming that it wouldn't be possible to have two or three full sets of commentary from different crews?

You are correct, the audio takes up a good chunk of dics space (~20% on XBox 360) so adding another crew isn't really possible at this time (at least on the XBox 360). Also, we may not be able to vote on who shows up as there are various parties that have a say in what talent we can use. Maybe sometime in the future, but I couldn't say for sure.

MAIN.TRUJDUB12 wrote:Greg do you have anything to do with the instant replay part? Because the game sometimes shows replays automatically and if that happens you can't challenge a play which sucks.If you could still challenge it or do away with all auto replays that would be great. also would be nice if u could challenge in a online dyn game vrs a user.

Funny you mention the instant replay stopping a challenge from occuring... I just had that fixed this past Friday. Watching an auto-intant replays should not block you from challenging a play anymore.

In online games there is no reason to challenge because the computer does not make "mistakes" in the call on the field.

MAIN.TRUJDUB12 wrote:about the sound thing I heard that some music gave away pwrts of the game because that music would always happen in a certain instance like tiotally giving away what the opp is doing? I never got my custom sounds to load all the stuff I wanted so I didn't try it but heard music would let you know if someone was punting or going for a fake on 4th down.not sure if that s true just wondering if u heard any thing like that.

I thought I had this fixed before we shipped, if not in the second patch... I'll look into this, I'm pretty sure this was corrected because I remember hearing about it.

There definitely were mistakes in online dynasty games by the refs. I never played regular online games, but in dyansty, they definitely reviewed things on their own and changed them. Though, it never showed us the replay, it just said it was reviewing, went to some stadium overview type view, and then told us the result of the review.

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