Blog

We sat down with NCAA Football 10’s Designer, Ben Haumiller, to discuss game design, EA™, and his thoughts on this year’s college football season!

How did you become a designer at EA? – I started as a QA tester on Madden 2001 PC with the goal of working as a designer on the NCAA Football franchise. The dream to join the NCAA design team became a realization on the NCAA06 title and since then I have been a designer on each iteration of the NCAA Football franchise.

What does your day to day activities include? – As a designer, my day to day activities change based on what stage of development we are in. In any given day I can go from brainstorming and designing a feature, to overseeing its implementation, to  playing the game as if I were a consumer to make sure we are delivering the best quality product possible, to promoting/demoing the game for various media/community members.

What the best part about working at EA? – The best part about working at EA is that I get to do something I love every day. As a lifelong gamer and huge college football fan, being able to work on the NCAA Football series has been a dream come true. Working at EA has given me the ability to not only closely follow the sport I love (can consider it job research) as well as have an impact on my favorite gaming franchise.

What do you think about the 2009 season so far? – As a lifelong Florida State fan and Alumni, this has been a very difficult season so far. On the whole however, this has been a very entertaining season to watch. The greatness of college football is how unique each season is, and how the storylines for the college football season can change so much from one week to the next. As much of a fan of FSU as I am, I’m just as much a fan of the sport of college football, and every Saturday that I am not attending a live game I can be found glued to the couch from the start of ESPN College Gameday at 10am until the last game of the night finishes up after midnight. From the opening week of the season watching Navy give Ohio State all it could handle until the final minutes, Iowa needing two blocked kicks to survive an upset to Northern Illinois, BYU upsetting Oklahoma and Washington showing signs of the life for the first time in years you already knew that this was going to be another great college football season. Each week that has gone by continues to live up to the hype, and I’ve found the events from the real world have transferred back to NCAA Football 10 as I get inspired to replicate what I’ve seen play out in the real world. After the Michigan/Notre Dame thriller I found myself on Sunday starting a Michigan dynasty and playing game after game, which would never have happened if the game was just a 42-7 blowout. Now that we have moved into conference play, and have a better idea of what each school is made of things are going to get really interesting. We’ve never had a “mid-major” in the top 5 this early in the season, and everyone will be waiting to see if Boise State can do the impossible and play for a national championship. Three of the top 4 teams will play each other either in the regular season or in the conference championship game. The season is a long way from over, and it’s going to continue to be a fun ride.

The process of creating a stadium is a long task, it takes almost 2 months, to build a NCAA stadium (not counting all the debugging and testing time) and get a polished, shippable stadium. First we gather reference and information on the stadium; in the case of Minnesota, as with most stadiums, we did a photo shoot of the new stadium and got schematics breaking down the layout and giving us measurements of the facility. In the photo shoot we try and capture as much information as possible, from taking pictures at the field level to up in the press box. After that we start modeling the stadium based off of camera matches inside Maya so that we know the scale and relative size is correct. The images for the camera match are taken from photos during our photo shoot.

Above is a schematic of the stadium layout

Once we have the stadium blocked in and know our layout is correct we start adding in all the details to the scene. We model out as much information as possible within our budgets for the scene, from edge wall tunnels, to the interior of the press boxes, and everything in between.

After the modeling is finished we move onto texturing the stadium. For texturing we will try and use information from the photo shoot when applicable, during the photo shoot we will take close up pictures of just the brick or concrete to then use those images in our scene so they match the real life reference as much as possible. This process is usually as time consuming as the modeling, both being around 3-4 weeks. In the end of the texturing process we will have all the materials in the stadium, from the base color, dirt on walls, and self shadowing of the objects. The last step is for lighting to light the stadium, where we apply shadow information, illuminate scoreboards, and assign light intensities. After all of these steps, the end result is a polished stadium similar to the others you have seen in NCAA.

All you have to do to have your video considered for the weekly Top 5 is include the link(s) to your video(s) in this forum thread along with your Playstation ID/ Gamertag. Once our community and game teams have picked the top 5, winners will be posted to easports.com.

Top 5 NCAA Football 10 User Videos for November 13th can be seen here.

Top 5 NCAA Football 10 User Videos for October 5th can be seen here.

Top 5 NCAA Football 10 User Videos for September 28th can be seen here.

Top 5 NCAA Football 10 User Videos for September 14th can be seen here.

Welcome back to NCAA Football 10 Uniform Watch, where we highlight one of the best uniforms created on the TeamBuilder website. We'll highlight a new team every Wednesday on the Inside EA SPORTS Blog. Want to see your team highlighted? Send us and email with images of your team to footballcommunity@ea.com.

*Respect the intellectual property of others. Only upload content that you own or have written permission to freely distribute.*

This week we've chosen SCHEIB43's South Bend Shamrocks. The first thing that came to mind when I saw the Shamrock's was the competition the team would be facing on the recruiting scene from the hometown Notre Dame Fighting Irish. Check out the uniforms below and let me know what South Bend team has the best uniforms.

Don't forget to share your thoughts on SCHEIB43's uniform in the comments and feel free to make suggestions about other uniforms we should look at for next Wednesday's Uniform Watch.

To read the original blog post and make comments, visit the Inside EA SPORTS Blog.

Thanks!

-Dewiel