Coach Skills was one of my favorite features to design while I was working on NCAA. While the concept was first discussed several years earlier, it was frequently tabled in lieu of other features. As much as I love the feature, we only have a limited amount of resources and that is just how it goes sometimes. The other reason I enjoyed designing this feature is that I was able to leverage some newer design processes. Not to mention it incorporated my love of RPGs into a sports title.

To start I established a few pillars for the system:

Each skill should be exciting for the user.
Create an engagement loop for earning XP and spending upgrades in the Front End.
Balance the trees to encourage Scouting, Recruiting and the game.
Target levels for the player's XP progression. Level one after week one.

I think we definitely delivered on the second pillar and came close to delivering on the other two. The tree concept actually went through several iterations. We did wireframe mocks of systems that borrowed greatly from Mass Effect, Dragon Age, Borderlands, League of Legends and WoW. If it was an RPG with skill progression the team was evaluating it.

Ultimately the system we decided upon is the result you see above, which to me always seemed closest to Borderlands. Once the mocks were in a good place I was continuously dragging people over to my desk, putting a controller in their hand and had them walk me through how they would want the screen to function. A bit odd, but I feel it yielded some positive results.

On the back end of the system we wanted the player to progress quickly at first to introduce the system as seamlessly as possible. I established the target of at least one level in the first week and a target max of ten levels in the first year (depending upon difficulty). I created the target XP earning trend in excel, using a modified formula that I had discovered from vanilla WoW. This would of course be tuned significantly, but it helped provide an initial target XP curve, which helped guide the number of Goals and how much XP was awarded for each.

From there the first list of Goals/Objectives was established, along with the UI design for how it would look in game. Reminding the user going upon entering, during the game, and upon exiting was our objective. The concern was accomplishing this objective without spamming the player with annoying reminders. Sometimes a subtle notification can be more efficient and later testing would prove this was the result.

The skills themselves were initially brain stormed by the design and development team and we ended up with a list that was probably ten times longer than what we had time to deliver. From there we started trimming it down, adjusting and tuning for the next few months until we had a list that we were happy with. This would actually go on and change slightly during development, because it's inevitable that at some point during the project someone realized, "Would it be cool if...".

Overall though, we did a significant amount of wire frame prototyping, system prototypes, and really stuck to the pillars that we established early on. This seemed to help significantly throughout the process. The other benefit was we hired a new designer that was coming from 38 Studios, with 10 years of design experience and a significant amount of RPG design. Steve would take over the production of the feature as I transitioned to a different title.