> Did you work on Madden at EA (since you mention it in the intro)?
I did, though I didn't really touch gameplay. I was a UI programmer on Madden PC 2002 (Oh God that's over a decade ago now, what happened to time?) and I worked on the first version of Madden for the X360 doing mostly animation and tool pipeline stuff.
I'm not the best person to ask about it, but the part that blows my mind is that the "AI" for the game is deeply tied into the animation system. Madden has hundreds (thousands?) of individual player animations: runs, tackling, blocking, catching, you name it. The AI works roughly by searching for an animation that lines up with what it wants to do.
For example, if the ball is coming towards a receiver, it looks for a catch animation that will put his arms in about the right place and that stitches together well with the animation he's currently playing. If it finds one, then it transitions to that animation and makes the catch.
This means the producers who are building and tuning the gameplay do much of it by tweaking animation: changing timing, deciding to add more animations of certain types, etc.
As far as I know there is no holistic set of data or code that says, "this is the AI of Madden". Instead, it's just the sum of all of these animations.
I did, though I didn't really touch gameplay. I was a UI programmer on Madden PC 2002 (Oh God that's over a decade ago now, what happened to time?) and I worked on the first version of Madden for the X360 doing mostly animation and tool pipeline stuff.
I'm not the best person to ask about it, but the part that blows my mind is that the "AI" for the game is deeply tied into the animation system. Madden has hundreds (thousands?) of individual player animations: runs, tackling, blocking, catching, you name it. The AI works roughly by searching for an animation that lines up with what it wants to do.
For example, if the ball is coming towards a receiver, it looks for a catch animation that will put his arms in about the right place and that stitches together well with the animation he's currently playing. If it finds one, then it transitions to that animation and makes the catch.
This means the producers who are building and tuning the gameplay do much of it by tweaking animation: changing timing, deciding to add more animations of certain types, etc.
As far as I know there is no holistic set of data or code that says, "this is the AI of Madden". Instead, it's just the sum of all of these animations.