A Hint on the Future of Locomotion?
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In an interview with Steven Bartlett of Operation Sports, Madden NFL creative director Ian Cummings discussed the future goals of the franchise and also detailed locomotion, a feature common to the central gameplay of both Madden NFL 11 and NCAA Football 11.
Cummings talked about locomotion in the game and how there was discussion of adding triggers and bumpers to the mix (along with the right stick), but those ideas were put on hold for a year or two to allow gamers to 'train' themselves for the moves on the right stick and no speed burst on the right trigger. He also shares some tips on the auto-speed burst - always try to run straight ahead to reach top speed quickly.
Would you like to see the bumpers and triggers included with Locomotion? If so, what moves would you like to see them control?
Operation Sports: How does the "shoulders squared locomotion" feature function? Can you comment on the philosophy behind it? It would appear that players naturally want to turn it up field -- when was this idea brought to the table?
Ian Cummings: The locomotion system for us was about really getting back to the core of the game, you know? We just had so many problems that we couldn’t really solve with the old system, and so one of the big facets of locomotion is actually layered animation. And, typically a run cycle is a small clip of animation, but what we have been able to do with layers (we implemented a little bit of it in Madden NFL 10 with quarterbacks being able to throw out of sacks early) is really the ability to separate the parts of upper body from the lower body.
So what you see with locomotion is that [ball carriers] have the ability to still stay in control –- still be able to run left and right. You know you’re always in control. You’re always in control of the same animation set, but his upper body can be kind of split off and turn to up field -- the illusion of cutting left and right to hit holes without turning your entire body. Along with that was the kind of dual-stick control of that with the right stick where you can lean your guy forward or twist his torso left or right. Those types of things were all done with layers. So the lower body is still fully in your control. It’s all on the left stick but the upper body is now totally kind of separate, and you can turn and twist and do all kind of cool things there that we just really didn’t have the technology to do that before.
OS: I did the review for Skate 3, and I don’t know if you’ve played that, but the controls are amazing in that game. It’s very similar where you are controlling your board left and right with the left stick and you are controlling your weight and balance on the right stick. And you have the right bumper and left bumper as right arm and left arm. Have you guys looked into that type of control for future types of gameplay features and animations? Last week I was saying on our radio show maybe as a defensive back when you go to swat a ball use the left bumper with left hand and right bumper to swat with the right hand. Are these things that come to mind or have you looked into other controls of other games like this?
Ian: Yeah we definitely… I play a ton of games, you know? I try to play everything. I am just a huge gameplay purist, too. I love kind of digging into the details of the way [developers] do stuff. We definitely talked about using triggers and bumpers, but this year we felt like we couldn’t do anything new in that respect because we think we had to take a year to train -- a year to get rid of the sprint button. And so we knew if we added like, say as a ball carrier, say if we added right and left arms on the triggers. Every single person would be doing stiff arms all game because they are so used to holding the sprint button. So we wanted to take a year and basically keep all those buttons kind of free, at least the triggers -- the ones that people are used to -- and we will do some more separate arm stuff.
On defense we’ve actually prototyped some things with the right stick for your different arms doing different things. It’s really tough because of the direction your player is facing and how the screen is tilted. It’s really tough in that split second to decide if I need to use my left arm or right arm or things of that nature. And so it’s a really hardcore control that most people wouldn’t be able to use. I mean what we’re looking at right now [with] the dual stick -- the torso twisting part not many people are using at all. People are using the truck stick and the one-to-one juking but it’s so tough. The game is so fast that people don’t get the ability turn their body away from contact in that fraction of a second. So you always just try to keep it simpler with a good layer of depth underneath it.
OS: I want to know how the auto turbo kicks in for the prioritized running lanes? Is the game programmed to know what lane you are supposed to be going to and does it kick in when you find that lane? How does that function exactly?
Ian: No, basically the way the locomotion works now is that [the ball carrier] just accelerates to top speed as long as you are running straight ahead. Any time you veer off of that path, [you] have to re-accelerate. We definitely have talked about that concept,of like, you know, if you hit the holes you get a burst of speed or things like that. When you take a pitch, you're always at full speed. But we just felt that once we got that core locomotion in there we didn’t need any of that because it’s up to you. If you hit the hole straight ahead, you hit the hole faster because you haven’t had to turn your body. If you cut it back, you got to slow down and now there’s a whole three or four [defensive backs] running at full speed and are able to track you down. It all kind of evened out when we just sort of started obeying the real laws of momentum -- everything kind of worked itself out.
For the full interview, visit Operation Sports.
