Interview with Tiberon Studios (EA)

I’m sure many of us have wondered what it’s like to work on video games with one of the top companies. When I found out that a friend of mine’s son works on the Madden projects for EA, I immediately asked for an interview. Timothy Hart agreed to the interview.

Tim describes his Job at EA:

"I am a Development Manager here at the Tiburon Studio of EA in sunny Maitland, Florida. My team for the ‘07 product worked on the XBox360 version of Madden, and we are currently working on getting the PS3 version ready for ship. My team (or Pod as we call it) consisted of seven developers and two producers."

What is his pod responsible for?

• Franchise Mode Enhancements
• New Player ratings
• Create-a-Player
• Madden Gamer Level
• Rehab Injury/Train for Game
• Interfacing Franchise and Rehab to the new Minigames (the actual Minigames were in another pod)
• Helped final out Superstar mode
• Online (including Live Opponent, online Minigames, and all the misc. online tasks)
• Hall of Fame
• Quite a few enhancements that didn’t fall into an easily labeled bucket

How did you get into video game development?

Actually, I found my way to Tiburon (EA) in a very strange way. For the last twelve years, I was a software engineer working on large scale systems and systems of systems. Most of the work was for government agencies and Departments (such as DoD, DoS and the DOJ). About seven or so years ago, I was at Lucent Technologies and was looking for something new.

One of my wife’s high school friend’s husband was a recruiter at Lockheed Martin, and I interviewed there and began to work for them in their Biometrics Identification mission area as a senior SE. Roughly five years later, Shawne, the recruiter from Lockheed, moved on to EA. I was starting to look for more in my job at LM, but was unable to find any way into management, until Shawne, who had moved to EA, called me.

Since my wife, for years, had been saying “since you play video games so much, you should go make them,” I answered the call and interviewed at EA for both an SE position and a Development Manager (DM) position. The rest is history.

Was your first job managing a “Pod” or did you work you way up into that position?

At EA, yes, I’ve only ever been a DM here. However, no one (well, for the most part) just starts managing a POD developing software. For you to be successful, you have to work your way up to it. Software Engineering is much more than just writing code. It’s schedules, designs, cutting, resource allocation, mentoring, patience, and a slew of other things that can only be learned by working your way up.

You don’t have to have been a developer previously to be a POD manager, but you do have to have paid your dues in learning the software development process and understanding what it really takes to make an application from cradle to grave.

How much coding, play testing etc. do you do?

(Snicker) I haven’t written a line of code that has gone into any customer visible application in over a year. That’s what happens when you begin to manage and stop developing. Yes, I do get the C++ and J2EE withdrawal tremens from time to time, but I do write tools for my POD and the game team to use - tools that allow other managers to do their jobs more effectively.

So I guess it’s safe to say that while I don’t write game code, I do keep myself sharp by making apps that make people’s jobs easier, mainly mine. I do play the game a lot. It’s my job. (snicker again) Since I’m the POD manager, the quality and ease of play stop at my desk too for the features we develop.

What’s it like working for EA?

Where do I start? I have worked for Lucent Technologies, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and a few smaller companies in my almost 25 years in the industry (I wrote my first functional program on a Apple IIe when I was 13 – it kept track of car lot inventory), but, I have never worked for a company like this.

Tiburon Studios is by far the most enjoyable job I have had to date. I don’t say that lightly either. I’ve had the opportunity to work on some of the world’s most cutting edge technology, most of which I can’t talk about do to government clearances.

I’ve worked for fortune 500 companies almost my entire career and none of them compare to this studio. The people and the environment are unequalled. There is not that “corporate” feel to the workplace, people can freely exchange ideas without any feeling of “not going with the company line.”

It is a very fast-paced job, every day is dynamic in terms of what will happen and what challenges will be overcome. The work time is very flexible, as you can imagine, to meet our aggressive and market driven schedule. Work attire is casually comfortable. All of this kind of swirls together in the mix to create a really cool place to work. I could probably write a mini novel about work life here, but, in the end, we make great games. We make great games that affect people the world over. You can’t ask for much more than that.

What are the facilities at Tiburon like? Could we come take a tour?

The facilities here at Tiburon are incredible compared to what I have seen at my other jobs. We have a six floor facility in the main building, a QA facility nearby, and we are slowly taking over the building next door.

The main building has a game room on the first floor, a few pinball machines and some of the more popular arcade games, a pool table and an air hockey table. We have a very nice garden area outside the game room for more serene relaxation. Going up, each floor has it’s own cereal and coffee/tea bar, along with a few stand up arcade machines.

Obviously, the thing that we have in the greatest quantity is people. We house roughly 600 developers, producers, managers and other staff here. That means a lot of cube space. Studio tours are done, but we’d have to schedule you in pretty soon – as you can imagine the spaces fill up real quick. Just recently we had some Cub Scouts and Brownies come through.

What’s it like to meet a Madden deadline?

It can be challenging. Iterative titles like Madden, NCAA, NASCAR and Tiger can be challenging to meet. Mainly because of the start of the season for other games drives the release of the title.

EA, our studio, and our game team take these deadlines very seriously, as it drives the success of the game to some degree. No one wants to start playing Madden half way through the season. So, as managers we understand that as we are choosing feature sets and determining what will and will not be in the game for a given cycle directly impacts how tough it will be to get things done.

One might think that would allow us to go easy on ourselves, but it means exactly the opposite to us. The reasons it is this way are pretty simple: We care about the quality of the game and how it plays. We take our jobs very seriously, and the delivery of the longest running, most popular sports franchise is no small part of that.

We impose such a high level of quality and ownership on ourselves. We won’t let the game be done until we reach that high water mark of excellence.

How do the separate “Pods” communicate with each other?

Very often and with a lot of awareness of the impact your POD has on other PODs. This is one of the easy places for things to get overlooked. We know this so we take great care in POD communication.

We try to set each POD up so that it can be a self contained unit, but inevitably, a feature will span across PODs and makes the cross POD communication even more crucial. On Madden 360/PS3, we have three managers. Terry, Kevin and I are constantly talking about what impacts we force on each other through the cycle and how tasks in their PODs that are dependent on my tasks and vice-versa.

We also rely very heavily on our producers to communicate across the PODs to insure features are being implemented as designed.

What does a developer and what does a producer do?

Production is generally responsible for feature design, documentation, tuning a completed feature, and assisting development during Alpha and Beta. They are the thinkers that come up with far more features than we could hope to develop – this is good so we can pick and choose the high quality features that make it into game.

They are also the quality gate for any finished product. Developers are the feature implementers. They take the designs that production writes and check for technical issues, write the needed technical designs, implement the features, and debug the final product. Both disciplines are responsible for quality of the game, they just see quality differently.

To a producer, quality is in the game play, immersion into other features, and how the game as a whole falls together. Developers see quality in what they implement. Does the feature flow well, is it fast and nice to play; can it be implemented such that it can be reused later on down the road? Both production and development work on our feature sets, just from different ends.

How easy is it working on the 360? Have you guys considered using the new XNA project from Microsoft?

MS did a real good job in constructing the console (hardware wise) and did a great job on the UI. The HUD and the online community that MS has created is very slick. My two year old is able to navigate around in it – he isn’t playing the games yet but he knows how to make them start. That has to say something for ease of use.

Tiburon has looked into the XNA project from MS. However, we will not be using it anytime soon. Not because we think it is problematic or anything, it’s just that we have already developed an environment that has all the needed processes in it.

We have our own build processes; we already have processes for creating assets and a pipeline process to get the asset into game. For us to use XNA effectively it would cost us hours to switch over, which basically means that we would have to sacrifice features to use XNA. That’s my take, not the official studio line.

Do you find that Microsoft is a good company to work with? Do they have any input on the game designs?

Microsoft is a great company to make games with. As I said, their console is solid and their process for getting games to shelf is also well thought out. MS has been very helpful to us during the entire development process.

As far as input into the game design, we hold the reins. MS is primarily concerned with standards in the games for their consoles. Does the start button get used for the same thing, does the game comply with MS standards, does the game violate user friendliness? These are the common concerns of MS when finaling a game.

Now, if we decided to make a game with raunchy or extremely suggestive content, MS might have some input on the game that could be construed as changes to design, but I imagine it would have to be extreme.

How about the Sony and the PlayStation 3, are they easy to work with and do they have input on game design?

Sony is a great company to work with as well, and has about the same level of input into the games as we give MS. We look forward to taking our great relationship with Sony on our current generation titles to the next level in our Next Generation titles.

Electronic Arts has been rumored as development “slave drivers” - Do you guys work long hours on a regular basis?

So, just to get the obvious out of the way, EA Tiburon are not slave drivers. Do we work longer hours sometimes? Yes. But, this can be very deceiving to those that haven’t developed software. We are very cognizant of our employee’s work hours.

I am a husband and a father. I have a family that I enjoy spending time with. If I’m here, I can’t be there – it’s a simple fact of life. One of the biggest parts of my job is to organize, schedule, and direct my pod so that we can keep a reasonable work-life balance. Sure, things get hectic from time to time, but we never loose sight of the need for people to be away from work – to have free time with friends and family.

Much of my time is spent researching, planning and optimizing schedules so that we have a even, load-leveled, balanced development cycle, and it is all aimed at getting people home at reasonable times, and ensuring a high quality product that we are proud to put on shelves.

Without getting into exact numbers, I can say this: The time that I spend here at the studio is no more than the time that I spent at work at Lucent Technologies and Northrop Grumman. The time that I spend here at the studio is considerably less than the time I spent working at Lockheed Martin from day to day.

We have no slaves here. What we have are personally and professionally committed game makers that dedicate themselves to making the best games on the market.

Since you work on the “Madden” project have you ever been able to meet John Madden?

Negative, no Madden for me.

I have played Madden for the 360 and the DS – why is Madden and Michael’s commentary on the DS but so far no commentary in the 360 game?

Creative issues mainly – while EA does like to have similarities between product lines, each game stands on its own. People have different likes and dislikes and this gives them some choices and variation between games.

It also requires that we rework the entire audio flow of the game. Since we don’t have Madden voice over for the entire game commentary, we would have to try to splice Michael’s commentary into the Ask Madden playcall flow.

It’s a feature that would align us with other consoles, but doesn’t really bring that much improved user experience along with it. We prefer to spend our development dollars in things that the user will see, feel and immediately appreciate.

Is there any collaboration between the NCAA games and Madden games?

Absolutely. We use a similar engine for both games, heavily reworked to give each game its own unique feel and play. We trade many things between the two game teams; downloadable content, lighting, game play, and so much more. Both games are truly better games because of this collaboration.

Who comes up with new features – such as the rehab which your pod worked on?

Producers are generally the feature creators. However, that is a general statement. Any good idea is welcome. Many times, as we progress through development, the developers come back to the producers with suggestions on how the feature could work better if it was tweaked this way or that. The point is, some features just evolve as we play the game and develop the software – producers generally design, but all good ideas are welcome in game.

The PlayStation 3 has 50GB of space on the Blu-Ray disc, will you and your team be taking full advantage of the huge amount of space or do you have to keep it limited to 9GB to be easily ported to the other consoles?

Not sure this is accurate. We may take advantage of it.

Do you have any comments for those that say that Madden is simply a “roster change” since your team is working hard to build features?

Oh, I have many comments on this question. As luck would have it, the producer who used to do the roster updating, Ced, is now my POD’s producer. Ced laughed when he saw this one. Last cycle, we made two roster updates (that I can recall) that my POD helped out with.

We also implemented Injury Rehab, Train For Game, Madden Gamer Level, various franchise upgrades, Hall of Fame, Create-a-Player, Import Draft Class from NCAA, Downloadable Content, Live Opponent, EA Online, Player Scouting Enhancements, Point Wagering System and a few more.

That is just the short list for my POD (we only have two other PODs!) Just Roster upgrades? There is nothing further from the truth. We want to thanks Tim for not only spending the time to answer our questions, but for “going out on limb” to answer them.