ROLE
Development Manager
Electronic Arts – EA Sports
2016 – 2017
XBONE / PS4
The first Madden NFL created in EA’s Frostbite Engine, Madden NFL 18 is the most visually stunning game in the franchise. Harnessing the power of the Frostbite Engine, Madden 18 brings the full NFL presentation to your living room.
With Frostbite, Madden NFL 18 is the first title in the franchise to include the Longshot story mode, praised by Polygon.com as the best sports game of 2017.
ROLE
On Madden NFL 18 I served as Development Manager and Scrum Master for the Broadcast Presentation, Audio, Commentary and UI scrum teams, having managed them through a port transition, ramp up, pre-production and development.
I was the go-to in-game cinematics DM, transitioning our tracking pipelines into Shotgun asset tracking software alongside Madden's Art Director.
With Shotgun we would drive all in-game cinematics through the new software, allowing us to effectively visually communicate between creative direction, animation outsourcing, first party clients and compliance.
KEY CONTRIBUTIONS
• Port-Lander – Took on an additional 4 game areas from my tenure on M17, facilitating handoff of the Frostbite transition to the M18 Development team. At one point running daily and sprintly scrum master duties for 7 game pod areas.
• Facial Rig Salvage – I identified technical discrepancies between facial rig technologies that would leave legacy cinematics unusable. I coordinated Tech Art and Animation Direction in identifying a low-cost remapping solution that would salvage our legacy animation while keeping it within quality requirements, successfully mitigating the need to fund 2600 man-hours of cinematic team work for Madden 18.
• Cinematic Pipeline Optimization – Identified disconnect between Broadcast Presentation creative goals and the existing technical limitations. I optimized our pipeline for creating cinematic sequences, increasing our output from 300 Scenes to over 1500, ensuring pre-game always impresses the player.
• Commentary Kanban – Streamlined the commentary recording and implementation process, decreasing production lead-time from 5 weeks from initial recording, to a predictable 2.
• Shotgun Style – After discovering a large lead time in working with our Chinese Animators in our cinematic pipeline, I worked with Animation Direction to switch our pipelines into Shotgun asset tracking, enabling immediate feedback and reducing lead time by a week, doubling our team's capacity.
• First Party Coordination – As the In-Game Cinematic DM, I facilitated the creative backlog, budget, and execution of all M17/18 promo and instructional motion graphics, delivering over 40 videos from concept through partner approval and first party compliance. Including press-start screens and a Jimmy Kimmel Live promo.
• Animation Instinct – Identified a disconnect between the facial animation pipelines between Port and M18, developed and led a strike team that successfully mitigated over 2500 man-hours of dev and animation capacity.
• Continuous Dev – Managed prioritization and execution of 3 patches worth of additional Commentary content updates for M17 post-launch, alongside driving M18 port handoff efforts and pre-pro for Audio/Commentary/Broadcast/UI for M18.