old article but still very informative http://sports.ign.com/articles/700/700108p1.html April 4, 2006 - NFL Head Coach is a new kind of football game, but EA Tiburon went old school in choosing the senior producer. Jeremy Strauser is working on 11 years of football history at Tiburon, from Madden to NCAA, and he sat down with IGN to talk about a whole new genre of videogame, the visual sports strategy title. IGN: So NFL Head Coach. What's the big idea? Jeremy Strauser: It's a new genre of sports game for us. We started looking at the opportunities the new NFL deal provided for us and the different products we could do. We looked at what are called manager games, which are fairly successful in Europe as soccer games, but frankly those games can be boring, very text based, very data heavy. So we wanted to take that kind of game and make a new genre called visual sports strategy game, or 3D sports strategy game. We wanted to actually put you in the role of an NFL head coach, give you visual representation of the coach, put you in all the positions where coaches make decisions: on the sideline, in office, on practice field and in the draft war room. IGN: It seems like football, because of the nature of the game, would be even better suited for a sports simulation than most sports out there. Strauser: Absolutely. One of benefits of head coach is that it's a year long activity. You are constantly scouting players for the draft and free agency, then you go into training camp, regular season, playoffs and then it starts all over again. The interesting thing about head coach is that you start the day after the Super Bowl. In Madden or other football titles you start in the preseason or Week One. We start you off in free agency right before the draft. Razor 3 Go! Razor 3 Go! IGN: Football is a chess match on the gridiron. How do you represent this in NFL Head Coach? Strauser: Football is a very strategic game -- there's a clear start and stop point where you can call new plays. The way we represent that in the game is the game plan and the playbook. You're preparing that, choosing which plays you practice, which plays you bring to the game, which plays get called. But then you also deal with real time strategy and motivation with your team as the game is going on. The big change for NFL Head Coach is that the game is always running. If you choose to make subs or talk to players on sidelines and strategize, the game's happening in the background. You can actually turn your back on the game and miss a touchdown, either for or against your team. The coordinators will take over playcalling for you, but you realize how much coaches do on the sideline and in how many directions their attentions are being pulled. There's a lot going on on the sideline, a lot that I had never considered before. IGN: Who's the toughest coach in the game? Strauser: Obviously Coach Cowher is one of those guys, but I think every NFL coach is an elite coach. There are only 32 guys in the country that can be an NFL head coach. That's one of the things we're trying to represent in the game, that this is truly a unique position to put people in. There's lots of football coaches in the country, from high school to college to pee wee, but to be an NFL coach is a pretty prestigious thing. You're responsible for leading that team out on the field and there's a lot of pressure that goes with that. That said, I'm sure there are some coaches that are better than others, and we have our coaching attributes, but they are all challenging in their own way. IGN: No, seriously, who is the big boss, the coach you fear the most in the game? Strauser: It's not a fear. Well maybe it is a fear. It's a fear of being outworked or out-prepared and that's, when we talk to coaches, that's what motivates coaches. Guys like Gruden in Tampa Bay and Andy Reid in Philadelphia, those are guys that go to all ends to gameplan and prepare. We'll tell you soon enough who the best coach in the game is, but not now. IGN: Gruden puts in some serious hours, huh? Strauser: Yeah, he's kind of famous for that. We worked with these coaches for a couple of years now. We get a set amount of time with them at the NFL annual meeting. We set appointments, and Coach Gruden wanted to meet early in the morning. I'm thinking like 8 a.m., but he wanted more like 6 a.m. And when we met him, it was clear that he had already been up for a few hours. IGN: How exactly did the NFL head coaches influence the game? Strauser: We didn't really know what it was like to be a head coach. We talk with the coaches at the annual meetings and find out what it means to be a head coach, what they think the important roles and responsibilities are. Also, we dug into the archives of NFL Films. One of the advantages of working with the NFL is having access to that, and they have tremendous amount of material on coaches as they just follow coaches around. We got to see a lot of stuff that never made it to final production. We also went out to Jacksonville and Tampa and followed the coaches around for a day or two to see how they work. IGN: You've also had a lot of assistants in the office throughout the years, and they are even licensed in the game. Strauser: We get real deep on the strategy side with those guys, like offensive line play with an O-line coach. It was also interesting to talk to these guys about their goals and aspirations as coaches. What it means to be an assistant, who influences them, where do they see themselves in five years, what great coach to they model themselves after. We've talked to some coordinator people who don't see themselves going past that level. There's a difference between a head coach and an assistant coach. The head coach is responsible for the entire team and coaching staff and had to deal with the owner as well. An assistant only has to focus on his particular area. IGN: So what's the goal in NFL Head Coach? Strauser: The overarching thing that we want you to do is to become the greatest head coach of all time. In career mode, you take over an NFL team and track your career progress against the greatest coaches of all time. We have many, many of the greatest coaches of all time, Lombardi, Shula, Walsh and all those guys -- we won't tell you the exact order. IGN: What were the major obstacles you dealt with in creating this game? Strauser: The biggest obstacle is building a new game from the ground up. We're fortunate enough to have the Madden engine running at the base, displaying the game, but the game modes and menus, probably 75 percent of this game is completely new. From a gameplay standpoint, there were plenty of arguments about what head coach should be about, in our design phase. Is it more of a Sims-coach type thing, or manager game where you're responsible for spread sheets and stats. I think we came up with a nice balance of those things so that it's not a role playing game per se, but it definitely has a nice role playing feel. We're going to run the old fumbleroosky. IGN: You do so many different things in the game. How do you keep the gamer focused and having fun? Strauser: This is definitely a deep game. We did some math today and figured out that one season could take 20 to 30 hours. That's a lot of time, so when you're talking 30 seasons that's a tremendously deep game. You can sim through most tasks and we have a sim log that keeps you posted on what happened, but the tasks are so different week to week that you want to do them to benefit your team. I'm not going to lie. It's an extremely deep game. You have to be a football fan. This isn't Mario Party and it's not Madden. When I first started playing, I was getting killed by the computer because I wasn't preparing my team. In Madden, you win by your twitch skills and not your football knowledge. You can just take Michael Vick and use the juke stick or playmaker control and win. You don't rely upon playcalling and football skills and preparation and things like that. I have an old Madden T-shirt that says, 'Are you a playmaker?' I put that on the other day and was like, that is so not Head Coach. Here, you're preparing your team, setting them up to make plays. IGN: What goes into making one good play? Strauser: It all starts in the gameplan. We have a whole play library and you can add to that library by creating your own plays. Then you get on the practice field and practice that play. If you don't practice, guys will run the wrong route or miss the handoff. It's really important to practice a handful of plays so the team becomes proficient enough that they become money plays in the game. Those are the plays that, when you need a play on Sunday, third and long, those are the plays you are going to go to.
IGN: Got any good trick plays in there? Strauser: I would say it's not about trick plays. Let's say you're playing Tampa Bay. Your scouting director is going to tell you that they play a cover 2. In the play editor, it's about the creativity of the plays you draw up. You're going to want to figure out how to get the ball over the middle short, like a tight end trying to exploit those zones. So when you use the play editor like that, it's not so much a trick as it is using plays to take advantage of your opponent. IGN: Still, I love a good flea-flicker. Strauser: Same here, and we do have all that kind of good stuff in the game, like the wide receiver reverse that the Steelers used in the Super Bowl. Your first duty as head coach is to can the interior decorator. Great carpet! IGN: Is there anything you really wanted in the game but just couldn't squeeze in? Strauser: Obviously we wanted to include game film of previous games, but there are problems in the capabilities of the current systems versus next-gen systems in terms of storage space and processing speed, but there's a lot of stuff we're thinking about for the future. IGN: Obviously you're targeting a lot of Madden franchise players. How did you integrate the two titles? Strauser: We would have been silly to not have them tied in some way. You can take your team from the career mode in Head Coach, take the players you've built up and export them to Madden and play. This is like a father-son mentality, where the father has the advantage in Head Coach but then exports the team and loses to the son in Madden. In Madden, the winner is going to be the player with the quickest thumbs. In Head Coach, it's about the best football strategy. IGN: Where does ESPN show up in NFL Head Coach? Strauser: We've included two key NFL talents. There's Trey Wingo, the host of NFL Live, who basically hosts your career. We've also included Mel Kiper, one of the foremost draft experts. With him, we've drawn up analysis of 40 different draft classes. When you start the draft you'll get Mel's take on the draft, overall, and some of the key players. In year one, you'll get the real stuff, Leinart, Bush and Young, but in year 22, you'll get analysis on any one of those 40 draft classes. In the game, you'll be doing this year's draft class, so it will be interesting to see how our AI and sim-logic match up with the real thing. IGN: Where do you see NFL Head Coach in the future? Strauser: I'm not sure. We've still got a lot of work to do on this NFL Head Coach, so I'd like to finish this one first. But I'd hope to eventually see an NFL Coach 2 or 3 or 2007 or whatever. IGN: Thanks Jeremy. See you on the sidelines.
