Backbreaker Devs Evolve Realistic Movements

You may or may not have heard of Backbreaker, the newest attempt to take on the EA stronghold on the football game demographic. Due to the somewhat monopolistic hold that EA has on everything that is NFL, challengers to the football throne have all failed. But what Backbreaker brings to the party is something not even EA has ever attempted. Using their proprietary Euphoria engine, NaturalMotion has created a football game with real time, dynamic tackling.

Rather than pre-scripted tackling animations, like in all football games to date, every tackle in the game is completely real-time, resulting in a more realistic looking hit. However, in order to do that, NaturalMotion had to make every player in the game a completely realistic human analog, using natural movement of real humans to simulate that same movement in the game. But in an era where even scripted scenes and motion capture looks awkward, how does NaturalMotion intend to make, well…natural motion? (Un)natural selection.

Making a full human skeleton, and giving it full musculature, the NaturalMotion team set about tweaking those muscles in such a way as to create a walking motion. 100 different variations were created, and then tested. The 5 that walked the longest were deemed the most successful, and were then each copied 20 times. The team then altered subset nerves connections in variations that would occur naturally in a subsequent generation in a biological species. They tested the walking motion again, and again took the 5 best. Over the course of a few generations, NaturalMotion was able to force digital evolution on the skeletons, creating walking motions more natural than any motion capture or script could do, and leaving it completely dynamic.

Oh, and the really cool part of this whole experiment? This was in 2001. Since then, the (r)evolutionary process has been expanded to balancing, walking, environmental interaction, and yes, playing sports. This also isn’t limited to humans, but any animal that can be conceived of. So long as they can create it in a 3D environment, the evolution process can be replicated until even a create with four legs and 2 knees apiece can move in a believable way.

So what does this mean for us right now? It means that come May 18, we’ll be playing the most dynamic sports game, and maybe any game, ever created. Oh, and by this time next year, EA probably will have bought NaturalMotion. Just sayin’.