I contributed to the Madden series as an Experience Technical Designer from Madden 19 - Madden 22. I was the Lead Experience Technical Designer of a team with 6 in house and 6 externally contracted designers from mid development of Madden 21 - Madden 22. Using Flash, Frostbite, Photoshop and ActionScript I implemented art and scripted functionality for intuitive interfaces.
One of the features I had the most fun working on for Madden 20 was the Score HUD. I had the chance to work on a complete redesign, the first time it had been significantly changed in several years. I updated the look entirely, including all of the many dropdowns and state changes the Score HUD supports. I enjoyed working on this feature so much that I decided to continue my ownership of it for Madden 21, where I once again completely changed its look. In addition I skinned the brand new Score HUD for The Yard game mode.
Pictured above is the main menu which I skinned for Madden 20. I added large mode icons to the tiles for quick user recognition of which tile they want to select. I removed as much unnecessary background UI as possible to allow the actual art to shine. I also made the textfields on the middle left of the screen modular and editable by designers, with Title, Sub-heading (not pictured), and Description fields. This allows designers to update the text on the fly for live events or possible design changes.
This is the snapshot gallery. It’s an entirely new screen that I created for Madden 19, tied in with the snapshot feature. I’m proud of the snapshot feature as I took UI ownership of it across all areas that it appears in the game. This includes skinning work for the gallery here, on the instant replay screen where you take snapshots, as well as in the news screen where they can appear as part of news stories. This screen is set up to allow you to view many photos without blocking them with too much UI. The top left and right allow for sorting by team and week. The bottom bar shows information about the snapshot being viewed. I animated all the UI on the screen to fade out after a few seconds of inactivity, allowing the user to see an unobstructed view of their snapshot. If they touch any input on the controller, the UI returns instantly without animation to prevent confusion and ensure the UI feels responsive.
The franchise news screen is not a new one, but had some aesthetic changes this year along with the addition of the snapshot news stories (seen on the left) which display your snapshots along with the story info. While the screen as a whole was not majorly changed, I did end up rewriting the UI code almost in its entirety to meet my standards of cleanliness and clarity. I was able to do this and create the new features in the amount of time I was given to add the new features alone. My work allows for new types of news articles to be added much more easily in the future.
The Team Needs screen is one of many “Big Decision” screens I worked on for Madden 19. The player tiles use modular pieces as the other screens have tiles with similar sections, but are not completely the same. This meant I didn’t have to do the same work multiple times.
