Spider Man 2

aka1819
Feb 20, 2024
3 min read

Updated: Sep 14

Crimes

Marvel's Spider-Man 2 | Insomniac Games | Role: Game Design Intern—Crime Missions (Combat Design)

I had the incredible opportunity to work on Marvel's Spider-Man 2 during my internship at Insomniac Games. Which I then focused on working on the crime mission that makes NYC in the game. My main goal was to ensure that the random enemy encounters were not only fun but also challenging and polished. This is because even a small bug can break player immersion within the game.

Obstacles:

The open-world crime system is designed to spawn encounters anywhere in the city. The biggest challenge was making sure player immersion for crimes happening around the city felt seamless. Early on there were issues with how and where the enemies spawned within the game, such as some enemies spawning inside walls or inside giant crates near the ports. As an intern, I collaborated with other designers who worked directly on the crime missions to ensure these encounters felt well spaced and scaled correctly in difficulty and provided the right level of challenge whether the player is playing for theor has dedicated hours to the game.

How was this resolved?

As a game design intern, working on the crime missions, I worked on scripting, tuning, and polishing the crime missions. My past experience of creative design and technical design helped with resolving these issues.

Fixing Spawns Locations & Validation:

I conducted a thorough, area-by-arealook over of the spawn points across the entire New York City map. I established a validation checklist for what looks like "logical" spawning for enemies and worked closely with my lead to use the proprietary tools to adjust or remove directly in the engine.

A side-by-side comparison. UP: Shows areas that there are unusual clusters of enemies spawned in for someone just starting the game of Spider-Man, which is too many for a brand-new player. Down: A cleaned-up version that introduces the player to different types of crime missions and will slowly increase in difficulty as the player progresses as a way to create immersive encounters with different crimes.

Designing Engagement: Enemy Encounters:

It wasn't just about fixing bugs but also about ensuring enemies, vehicles, and interactive objects were placed correctly in order to create fun and engaging combat scenarios or missions. I balanced enemy encounters and pacing to make fights challenging without feeling overwhelming but still challenging.

Dynamic Difficulty Scaling & Progression Tracking: Balancing Combat for Spider-Man 2's Crime Missions

I helped with documenting the difficulty variables for the different crime mission types, for example, the tougher symbiote encounters. Coordinating and communicating with my lead and the team to manage scaling and ensure smooth and satisfying difficulty as players progressed.

System Analysis: Crime Mission Logic in Spider-Man 2

A part of my role was not just placing enemies but understanding how and why they spawned. I utilized this knowledge of my understanding of the core logic flow to ensure every encounter felt intentional and immersive.

This chart maps out my understanding of how the crime missions work in Spider Man 2:

My Understanding: To ensure I understand how the spawn points work in Spider-Man 2 to ensure I know how the enemies were spawning in NYC.

Preventing Too Many Spawning: I had to help with clean up the search radius for looking for new crime missions for the player without it being to aggressive and making sure that the spawns are logical and made sense for the spawns across the map.
Balancing: The flow chart starts by the game loading the appropriate enemies to spawn.Understanding this system helped me understand that enemies were allocated to different crime difficulties, which ensured that the player wasn't overwhelmed.

Conclusion:

The Crime Missions I worked and helped ship a polished and balanced crime mission, contributing to the open-world experience that players loved. It was incredibly rewarding to see my work fixing issues with the enemy spawning become an immersive adventure for fans alike. This internship gave me hands-on experience working in AAA combat design pipelines and taught me how to effectively collaborate and solve problems within the game.