Spider Man 2
Updated: Sep 6
Crimes
Engine: Proprietary (Insomniac) | Team Size: AAA | Role: Game Design Intern-Crime Missions | Genre: Action Adventure / Open World
Overview
During my internship at Insomniac Games, I worked on open-world crime missions for Marvel's Spider-Man 2. My focus was improving enemy spawn logic, encounter pacing, and difficulty scaling to ensure crimes felt dynamic, readable, and consistent across the city.
Crime missions are a core part of Spider-Man 2's open-world experience. These encounters needed to challenge players at different skill levels while supporting player freedom and encounter variety throughout New York City. I focused on ship-ready quality, ensuring that systemic gameplay logic functioned seamlessly within the high-density environment of Insomniac's proprietary engine.
CHALLENGES:
Open-world crime systems must balance randomness with structure spontaneous and unpredictable, but still fair, readable, and scalable across skill levels and progression states.
Key problems I was solving for:
Enemy clustering — spawns overlapping or grouping illogically.
Difficulty spikes — certain map areas spiking in challenge inconsistently.
Repetition — crimes feeling predictable across long play sessions.
Spatial/technical debt — resolving collision and spawn triggers in a dense environment.
The Pivot: Spawn Placement & Bug Debt
Early in the process, enemies were spawning inside geometry, on water surfaces, or in tight clusters breaking both immersion and playtest reliability. I audited spawn placement across the NYC map, resolving these placement bugs directly, which improved encounter quality and raised playtest pass rates.
What This Work Included
Designed and tuned enemy spawn logic and encounter flow across multiple crime types including Standard, Kraven, Sandman, and Venom encounters contributing to smoother pacing and more consistent readability before ship.
Balanced encounters by documenting and adjusting difficulty scaling variables, establishing spawn composition and enemy tier guidelines.
Coordinated with engineering and animation leads to ensure crime triggers and enemy assets functioned correctly within the combat system, reducing integration bugs.
Implemented and tested interactive triggers for enemies and vehicles to expand crime mission variety and outcomes.
DESIGN APPROACH
I approached crime design with a focus on player readability and systemic consistency. Each encounter needed to clearly communicate threat, escalation, and resolution while staying flexible across player skill levels and combat styles.
The flowchart below maps my understanding of how crime missions function within Spider-Man 2's open world.
KEY PRINCIPLES
Entry-level clarity — players could immediately understand where threats originated.
Scalable challenge — supporting different progression states without frustration.
Systemic variety — crimes felt fresh through variation, not randomness.
WHAT I WOULD IMPROVE
Given more time, I would have pushed for more varied encounter scripting across crime types rather than relying primarily on spawn logic adjustments and explored difficulty ramping tied to observed player behavior rather than fixed progression thresholds.
CONCLUSION:
Marvel's Spider-Man 2 gave me my first look at AAA-scale open world design from the inside. Working within an established combat and traversal framework taught me how to contribute meaningfully without disrupting systems that were already functioning well.
TAKEAWAYS:
Designed systems built to scale across hundreds of hours of play.
Worked within an established AAA combat and traversal framework without disrupting what already worked.
Communicated design intent clearly through documentation and cross-discipline collaboration.
Built a deeper understanding of AAA technical pipelines, including coordinate validation and bug debt management.
Developed a deep understanding of AAA technical pipelines and the importance of work like coordinate validation and bug debt in maintaining player immersion.
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