Spider Man 2

Crimes

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

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Overview

During my time at Insomniac Games, I worked on open-world crime missions for Marvel’s Spider-Man 2. My primary focus was improving enemy spawn logic, encounter pacing, and difficulty scaling to ensure crimes felt dynamic, readable, and fun across the city.

Crime missions are a core part of Spider-Man’s open-world experience, and my work helped ensure these encounters supported player freedom while maintaining challenge and clarity.

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Obstacles:

Design Problem

Open-world crime systems must balance randomness with structure. Crimes need to feel organic and reactive, but also fair, readable, and scalable across different player skill levels and progression states.

Some challenges included:

• Enemy spawns appearing illogical or overwhelming

• Inconsistent difficulty spikes across crime types

• Crimes feeling repetitive or predictable during extended play

Rhr

My Contributions

• Scripted and fixed multiple open-world crime missions, focusing on enemy spawn logic and encounter flow

• Adjusted spawn points across New York City to improve readability, pacing, and immersion

• Documented difficulty scaling variables for Symbiote crimes, creating clear references for progression tuning

• Implemented and tested interactive assets (enemies, vehicles, combat triggers) to support varied encounter outcomes

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 .

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 remaining flexible to player movement and combat style.

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.

Key principles I worked with:

• Clarity over chaos: Ensuring players understood where threats originated

• Scalable challenge: Supporting different player progression states without frustration

• Systemic reuse: Designing crimes that felt fresh through variation, not bespoke scripting

Iteration & Collaboration

Crime missions were iterated through close collaboration with designers, engineers, animators, and QA. I regularly:

• Tested crimes in live city environments

• Logged bugs and edge cases related to spawn timing and placement

• Revised designs based on playtest feedback and performance constraints

This process reinforced the importance of iteration and cross-discipline communication in large-scale AAA development.

Conclusion:

My work contributed to improving the consistency and flow of open-world crime encounters across the city. More importantly, the experience strengthened my understanding of:

• Designing systems that must scale across hundreds of play hours

• Working within established combat and traversal frameworks

• Communicating design intent clearly through documentation and implementation

Spider Man 2 solidified my interest in systems-driven gameplay design within open-world action games.