Madden NFL 24 Mobile - Art & Visual Updates

Hello, Madden NFL Mobile Fans!

First and foremost, thank you all for playing Madden NFL 23 Mobile! We feel the excitement from you each year and we know how passionate you are about the game.

In this edition of Gridiron Notes, we are going to discuss the updated Art & Visuals in Madden NFL 24 Mobile.

Artists developing on Madden NFL 24 Mobile work on 4 primary focus areas when updating the game. These areas are User Interface, Experience Design, Live Content, and Animation. These 4 areas all have specific artists who focus on these as their discipline and update them throughout the year. We will detail these and what changes are being made for Madden NFL 24 Mobile!

User Interface

This year, there is less focus on large wholesale changes to the UI, such as screen layouts and full reskins. Instead, we are focusing on smaller but more impactful updates, such as visual hierarchy, consistency, and simplification all based on user feedback. We also spent time on polishing the UI, ensuring consistency and industry-standard quality across our components and patterns. This helps us to create a stronger alignment between our front-end experience and the overarching Madden NFL Brand. Finally, we want to ensure that our flows and visuals decrease as much friction as possible in a user’s experience - creating simpler, more focused screens - without sacrificing functionality.

User Experience

It’s critical to ensure we are addressing usability and accessibility concerns, such as colors and values, edge cases, cognitive load, findability, etc. to provide a great experience for new and old users alike. This helps us identify core areas in our game flow where we can simplify or create less friction for essential user actions & navigation. For example, Colors went through multiple color blindness tests to ensure contrast values still communicated screen hierarchy clearly. Icons have been updated to make them visually simpler to understand, and more consistent. Similarly, we’ve even added more visual differentiation for various game items and collectibles to make it easier to understand what they are at first glance. These Impactful micro-adjustments are key in feeling a difference year over year.

Live Content

In Live Content, we want to establish affinity and keep our brands fresh but familiar. We put a focus on refreshing elements on brands as opposed to doing completely new ones. More time, quality, and effort was spent on player items this offseason. Think, AKA, but for every program. For program maps, we are aiming to keep navigation and progression simpler and linear, while focusing on making the narrative rich and unique. We also will continue to update the store and make sure it’s easy to find exactly what you’re looking for.

Animation

The priority for animations this offseason was to drive stronger usability that guide and informs our users, such as user feedback and state changes. We have invested more time in extra animation polish such as ambiance, screen build-ins, and animated tiles to give our product that extra polish that really makes it stand out. We’ve also implemented more animations to reinforce user actions such as unlocks, navigational animations, and notification animations. Finally, one of our biggest improvements across Madden NFL 24 Mobile was upgrading our target framerate from 30fps to 60fps, especially on higher-end devices so animations can play smoother and more seamlessly.