2009 Season Shakedown

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.