One-on-one with Lead Gameplay Director on NBA2K11 Rob Jones
Steve Bartlett: Okay. So you were talking about how both you and developer Mike Wang bounce back and forth with ideas– can you elaborate for me?
Rob Jones: The nice thing about me and Mike has always been…the fact that, you know, on any type of control thing- any type of thing that we wanted to try- we’ve always have a really open conversation. “I want to try this, but okay what if it does this? Or what if it does [that]?” And you know we are able to be…how can I say it? To play devil’s advocate to each other on anything, but we are willing to try anything. And not everybody is like that. And so it really helps because you have two people that are really into what it feels like and then you can sit there and go back and forth until you come up with the right [control] that we think will work for everybody.
Steve: So are you talking about specifically the control of the athletes on the court? What are some of the ideas you have scrapped that or ideas that you played around with?
Rob Jones: Well, I actually don’t want to get into them because we might be using them later on [laughs]. We’ll never know right? But for example, the dribbling control this year or the play calling; [Play calling] was one of the first things that we talked about – how can we make it a lot more fluid for the users so it really [becomes] a part of the game. I feel that unless you are a hardcore guy, play calling wasn’t part of the game. I think this year it’s so open that anybody can use it. It’s just things like that. It’s like okay, why is this buried? Why is this not buried? How do you make it feel really intuitive? It’s really [difficult].
Steve: Yeah. I noticed the spacing is much improved. Have you seen Da Czars videos on Operation Sports? Amazing comparison from last year to this year.
Rob Jones: Yea. It’s really cool. It was a lot of work.
Steve: Is there any type of philosophy that Mike Wang brings to the game that you didn’t have last year during the development of NBA2K10 besides going back and forth about controls?
Rob Jones: No, not really. I think the biggest thing about Mike is he is really open to trying brand new ideas even though they might sound weird. If you say “Hey, I think I want to try this.” Mike will always say “Yeah, this might work.” As opposed to… some people are very traditional so it’s kind of hard. I’ll give you an example. Let’s say I walked in and said “I want to remove turbo out of this game.” I will say 95 percent of people in the office will say no. And then me and Mike…we will say we can make it work if we do this. And we will try it. And we are always willing to eat our words, but we are willing to try it. I think that this is something that as the games evolve, you better be willing to try as much as you can because otherwise you will find yourself behind the eight ball.
Even this year, it’s not like we didn’t discuss dribbling on the right stick and how we can do those things. And we when settle in on certain things, it’s because we have analyzed it and figured it out. You never know for next year, but for this year, I think we can achieve 95 percent of what we want by keeping it where it is right now.
Steve: Very cool. In my opinion, the foot-planting technology is a challenge for all sports games – for all genres. In 2K sports, I’ve noticed it can get a bit clunky at times and this is one of the criticisms I’ve had with the game over the last two years. Have you addressed that? I played through the demo and felt it was more responsive. I noticed on defense, to break out of a defensive stance you can click the turbo button and you break out of it quicker than the past. Are there any other controls that you have used to address this area of the game?
Rob Jones: No, I mean you know one of the big things this year on the dribbler is that we rewrote the way it worked. The planting kind of came in automatically to it. At the same time, there are always challenges to it. If you look at our competitor’s demo, it’s gone. It’s completely gone. So there is always this challenge of does it feel right? Does it look right? For the most part, you gotta go somewhere in between because if you go all feel, people will be saying they are tired of the sliding. But if you go all look, in order to get it to look right, you generally have to wait longer to get there. That’s one of the biggest challenges.
Steve: Okay, so patience in developing it. A lot of our Operation Sports community wants to know about the servers online. Can you comment them on them? Have they been addressed at all?
Rob Jones: Like I’ve always said before, online is a big challenge. It’s definitely a bigger challenge for us because we got online real early – a long time ago. And we had a technology that worked very well until online blew up. You know what I’m saying? For gamers in general, online is a big deal now. So this year we have brand new tech, and brand new servers that should really address all of it. But we won’t know if it’s perfect until it’s live. With that said, we expect everybody to be fine with it when it comes out.
Steve: Right. So how involved was MJ with this new campaign game mode he is featured on?
Rob Jones: You know, I mean obviously I can’t sit there and say Michael is at our office every week- I’d be lying. But Michael and his whole team are very involved in terms of approval and making sure his image is respected and that his legacy is transmitted in the correct way. So our designs always have to be approved directly through his team and through him because even in his Jordan lines, he approves everything that goes out with his name attached to it. From that [perspective], he was very involved. In terms of talking to me on the phone…[laughs].
Steve: [Laughs] Well it’s a different genre. He is into his bike racing team right now instead. Another thing the Operation Sports community is big on is ratings and sliders. Have you used any different philosophies in adjusting the player ratings? I think the games these days are influenced by speed ratings a lot. They seem to be the biggest factor.
Rob Jones: I don’t think that speed is the biggest factor in 2K11. But you know we went back and really tried to address the ratings and how we calculated what everybody was getting this year. Most of it is formulas from the stuff that we did before and then adjusted by anticipating what players are going to be able to do, (or not do), as they get older this season. So, I mean hitting ratings perfectly is absolutely brutal, but we strive every year to do the best job that we can at it. And at least we are flexible enough to react when people say “Hey you know you guys got this guy wrong.” That’s what the updates are for.
Steve: As far as the ratings, how much influence do they have on different animations and the transitions from one to another?
Rob Jones: So how quickly you can go from one animation to another isn’t really impacted. How quickly those animations play is impacted by your speed and quickness. How fast can I do a cross over is all based on how good I am at it. We do a lot of work in that area in plain locomotion. Running back and forth. Speed. That’s straight line speed that anybody should be able to do. When you think about it, you should really be thinking about how quickly you can do a move. So if you and I had the similar move but I was quicker, my move will execute quicker than yours.
Steve: You have skill and animation sets for each position. How do these factor in?
Rob Jones: That’s part of it. If I was quicker than you and we had the same move set, my move is going to execute better than yours even if it’s the same exact move. So what I mean by that is if we have the same exact animation, my move will play out quicker than yours.
Steve: Even chaining them together?
Rob Jones: Just the fact that mine will plays out fast means that I will finish and being a new move quicker.
Rob Jones: The nice thing about me and Mike has always been…the fact that, you know, on any type of control thing- any type of thing that we wanted to try- we’ve always have a really open conversation. “I want to try this, but okay what if it does this? Or what if it does [that]?” And you know we are able to be…how can I say it? To play devil’s advocate to each other on anything, but we are willing to try anything. And not everybody is like that. And so it really helps because you have two people that are really into what it feels like and then you can sit there and go back and forth until you come up with the right [control] that we think will work for everybody.
Steve: So are you talking about specifically the control of the athletes on the court? What are some of the ideas you have scrapped that or ideas that you played around with?
Rob Jones: Well, I actually don’t want to get into them because we might be using them later on [laughs]. We’ll never know right? But for example, the dribbling control this year or the play calling; [Play calling] was one of the first things that we talked about – how can we make it a lot more fluid for the users so it really [becomes] a part of the game. I feel that unless you are a hardcore guy, play calling wasn’t part of the game. I think this year it’s so open that anybody can use it. It’s just things like that. It’s like okay, why is this buried? Why is this not buried? How do you make it feel really intuitive? It’s really [difficult].
Steve: Yeah. I noticed the spacing is much improved. Have you seen Da Czars videos on Operation Sports? Amazing comparison from last year to this year.
Rob Jones: Yea. It’s really cool. It was a lot of work.
Steve: Is there any type of philosophy that Mike Wang brings to the game that you didn’t have last year during the development of NBA2K10 besides going back and forth about controls?
Rob Jones: No, not really. I think the biggest thing about Mike is he is really open to trying brand new ideas even though they might sound weird. If you say “Hey, I think I want to try this.” Mike will always say “Yeah, this might work.” As opposed to… some people are very traditional so it’s kind of hard. I’ll give you an example. Let’s say I walked in and said “I want to remove turbo out of this game.” I will say 95 percent of people in the office will say no. And then me and Mike…we will say we can make it work if we do this. And we will try it. And we are always willing to eat our words, but we are willing to try it. I think that this is something that as the games evolve, you better be willing to try as much as you can because otherwise you will find yourself behind the eight ball.
Even this year, it’s not like we didn’t discuss dribbling on the right stick and how we can do those things. And we when settle in on certain things, it’s because we have analyzed it and figured it out. You never know for next year, but for this year, I think we can achieve 95 percent of what we want by keeping it where it is right now.
Steve: Very cool. In my opinion, the foot-planting technology is a challenge for all sports games – for all genres. In 2K sports, I’ve noticed it can get a bit clunky at times and this is one of the criticisms I’ve had with the game over the last two years. Have you addressed that? I played through the demo and felt it was more responsive. I noticed on defense, to break out of a defensive stance you can click the turbo button and you break out of it quicker than the past. Are there any other controls that you have used to address this area of the game?
Rob Jones: No, I mean you know one of the big things this year on the dribbler is that we rewrote the way it worked. The planting kind of came in automatically to it. At the same time, there are always challenges to it. If you look at our competitor’s demo, it’s gone. It’s completely gone. So there is always this challenge of does it feel right? Does it look right? For the most part, you gotta go somewhere in between because if you go all feel, people will be saying they are tired of the sliding. But if you go all look, in order to get it to look right, you generally have to wait longer to get there. That’s one of the biggest challenges.
Steve: Okay, so patience in developing it. A lot of our Operation Sports community wants to know about the servers online. Can you comment them on them? Have they been addressed at all?
Rob Jones: Like I’ve always said before, online is a big challenge. It’s definitely a bigger challenge for us because we got online real early – a long time ago. And we had a technology that worked very well until online blew up. You know what I’m saying? For gamers in general, online is a big deal now. So this year we have brand new tech, and brand new servers that should really address all of it. But we won’t know if it’s perfect until it’s live. With that said, we expect everybody to be fine with it when it comes out.
Steve: Right. So how involved was MJ with this new campaign game mode he is featured on?
Rob Jones: You know, I mean obviously I can’t sit there and say Michael is at our office every week- I’d be lying. But Michael and his whole team are very involved in terms of approval and making sure his image is respected and that his legacy is transmitted in the correct way. So our designs always have to be approved directly through his team and through him because even in his Jordan lines, he approves everything that goes out with his name attached to it. From that [perspective], he was very involved. In terms of talking to me on the phone…[laughs].
Steve: [Laughs] Well it’s a different genre. He is into his bike racing team right now instead. Another thing the Operation Sports community is big on is ratings and sliders. Have you used any different philosophies in adjusting the player ratings? I think the games these days are influenced by speed ratings a lot. They seem to be the biggest factor.
Rob Jones: I don’t think that speed is the biggest factor in 2K11. But you know we went back and really tried to address the ratings and how we calculated what everybody was getting this year. Most of it is formulas from the stuff that we did before and then adjusted by anticipating what players are going to be able to do, (or not do), as they get older this season. So, I mean hitting ratings perfectly is absolutely brutal, but we strive every year to do the best job that we can at it. And at least we are flexible enough to react when people say “Hey you know you guys got this guy wrong.” That’s what the updates are for.
Steve: As far as the ratings, how much influence do they have on different animations and the transitions from one to another?
Rob Jones: So how quickly you can go from one animation to another isn’t really impacted. How quickly those animations play is impacted by your speed and quickness. How fast can I do a cross over is all based on how good I am at it. We do a lot of work in that area in plain locomotion. Running back and forth. Speed. That’s straight line speed that anybody should be able to do. When you think about it, you should really be thinking about how quickly you can do a move. So if you and I had the similar move but I was quicker, my move will execute quicker than yours.
Steve: You have skill and animation sets for each position. How do these factor in?
Rob Jones: That’s part of it. If I was quicker than you and we had the same move set, my move is going to execute better than yours even if it’s the same exact move. So what I mean by that is if we have the same exact animation, my move will play out quicker than yours.
Steve: Even chaining them together?
Rob Jones: Just the fact that mine will plays out fast means that I will finish and being a new move quicker.
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