AMA: Brian Horton, Creative Director on Insomniac Games’ Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales

[Music] hello and welcome to day five of jd gdc showcase um i'm gamma futures news editor and associate publisher and your host for this ama alyssa mcaloon i'll be moderating today's session with brian horton creative director at insomniac games uh we'll be taking your questions throughout the chat um so feel free to drop those in the questions tab in the little chat box on the right side of your screen throughout um kind of keep things geared towards game development as we are gdc here and we'll try to get your answers um throughout the show so with that uh let's introduce today's ama guest brian hello would you like to introduce yourself hey thanks so much alyssa you know it's honored to be invited at gdc to talk about marvel spider-man miles morales my name is brian horton i'm the creative director at insomniac games a quick bio from me i've been a developer for about 26 years and a creative director insomniac for the past three

um great to have you yeah thanks uh you know i'd like to i'd like to um answer some questions i'm really excited to do that but i'd also like to provide some context and a short story overview and the pillars that helped make our game uh happen so does that sound like something we can do yeah all for it let's go all right so um you know i i would say working on spider-man definitely has been a career highlight because my love for this iconic web slinger runs deep like most kids from the 70s i watched the spider-man cartoons every saturday morning my mom made me homemade spider-man outfits when i was a kid and i rocked them in halloween and of course i poured through all my classic spider-man comics but years later i re rediscover my love for the iconic web slinger in miles morales brian michael bendis and sarah pacelli brought a fresh new energy to the

franchise and it was a huge influence on the insomniac team we fell in love with miles and it was essential to make a video game origin story that was special experience and it started with our first game marvel spider-man miles is an afro-latino teen born and raised in brooklyn his passions include science playing ball mixing beats and his favorite hero spider-man and in our story peter is an older and more experienced hero and this provided us a unique opportunity for a new take on the origin story with miles so when he was bitten by a genetically engineered spider and discovered his new powers it was destiny that peter would be his mentor and show miles the ropes to become a hero so this brings us to the beginning of the game in marvel spider-man miles morales it's a year later and it's the first day of winter break miles skills will be put to the test

when rhino escapes a prison convoy carving a path of destruction across manhattan peter is injured in the battle and miles must protect his mentor bioelectricity will surge through his body an explosive new power helps him to defeat rhino but after this harrowing encounter miles learns his mentor is leaving town for a couple weeks and this huge responsibility weighs on miles but he's not alone his best friend genki lee knows his spider secret and will support miles while he stays with them over winter break the morales family recently moved from brooklyn to his mother's childhood apartment in east harlem it's a vibrant and multicultural community made even more beautiful by the fresh snow and holiday decorations but all isn't well in mile's new home roxanne is days away from opening a new power plant in the heart of harlem powered by an experimentally experimental energy source

called new form rio morales mile's mom runs for city council to fight roxanne's push into harlem and to protect the people and neighborhood she loves and like all great spider-man stories miles personal and hero lives collide when his mother's rally is attacked by the underground a high-tech criminal army led by the tinkerer who steals roxanne's new form when miles tries to stop her his powers to stabilize this experimental energy source resulting in an explosion that destroys braithwaite bridge only deepening his doubts as a hero so that's a little bit of a primer of our story but ultimately this is a game where miles must rise to the challenge to become his own spider-man overcoming his fears and mastering his new powers to stop the war that threatens his new home and we built this game on three pillars that are an evolution from the first game while taking full advantage of the power of the playstation 5.

our first pillar is to become an explosive new spider-man our second was to protect your home from two warring factions and the third is to play a seamless cinematic experience so when our first pillar become an explosive new spider-man we wanted miles to play differently from peter with new combat traversal and gadgets that reflect his unique powers bioelectricity and optical camouflage and his unique personality so when you see miles swing through the city he has his own unique take on how he is a web slanger so these powers are going to grow throughout the game as miles and the player become more experienced in our second pillar protect your home from two warring factions harlem is ground zero for a two-sided war between roxanne and the underground and miles must defeat these threats to protect his family friends and all the people of harlem in our final pillar play a seamless cinematic experience we wanted the player to have an uninterrupted journey from beginning to

end eliminating loading screens that keep the player engrossed in the story and gameplay so insomniac's game's mission is to make a positive and lasting impact in people's lives and miles lives up to these ideals earning the name spider-man by embracing those unique powers to save harlem so it was an honor to work with playstation marvel games and the talented actors and amazing developers at insomniac games to bring marvel spider-man to life and i really want to thank gdc for inviting me to talk to you guys today and answer some of your questions so with that i think we should just go ahead and ask away yeah they've been flowing in so we'll just go ahead and get started here um coming from let's see this is kind of going to mix a question from tremaine in chat with a question from emilius in chat um talking about how miles morales differs from peter as like a protagonist mechanically um so tremaine wanted to know um they noticed that miles is not as strong or can't jump as

high or as far as pete was this a conscious decision made from the start or was this made for balancing with miles's other abilities yeah i think we really looked at ways that we can offset the the power set between peter and miles and one of those was um you know some of the distances strengths that he has as a character he's not as experienced as peter he's not quite as strong but what we do have to compliment against that is the power of his bioelectric punches and with with that with bioelectricity he's also able to dash and go across large distances so when you're swinging through the world and you have a venom bar available you can actually dash using venom dash to gain more speed so we found that our new powers was a way to offset and create some of the dynamism that we may have pulled back from from the first game well uh that kind of flows right into what um amilis was asking here um saying that as peter players would oh no it's scrolled it's girl where'd it go uh sorry this is live chat here uh so as peter the player would progress and earn new abilities via suit upgrades

miles on the other hand already has a few abilities at uh naturally most of them render the ones peter had redundant if transported to this game can you talk a bit more about the creative choice to remove all suitabilities and replace them with passive mods maybe also a bit about intertwining his abilities with key level moments yeah the passive mods was something that we came to as a really exciting way to give the players that mix and match capability of new powers and really to start chasing those suits people love getting new suits so we are still getting a reward for each suit that you could craft um but that said we wanted to balance that against the powers so when you had sue powers before they were like these really amazing op skills which were a lot of fun um but what we wanted to do instead was leverage all of miles uh bioelectric attacks as a way to get some of that spectacle back and balance the suit power so by having the the suit mods we think that was a good way to still encourage suits and acquisition of suits to get new things but um also lean more into miles inherent

powers and abilities awesome um so i'm going to take another question from joaquin here in chat but i'm also going to hijack it a bit with these are all great questions by the way i want to say these are wonderful there's so many more in here that we're going to get to that are incredible and keep them coming throughout we'll get to as many as we have time for um so the next question here is how are you guys able to plan and schedule the development length for this kind of smaller spider-man adventure and i'm also curious personally about doing this during a pandemic if you could kind of talk about your just development for the whole game yeah we we knew we had the fantastic foundation of marvel spider-man which i had the honor to work on with brian intaher and the whole team but so we had a lot of the core key systems from the first game which allowed us to really quickly iterate and our focus was how do we make miles feel unique that was the first thing we did so we spent a lot of our early pre-production time just developing miles unique core skill sets and also we were developing a whole new cast of of enemies so the underground proposed a whole new kind of level of threat and we wanted to make sure that their

powers worked specifically against and con it was a nice ballet between venom bioelectricity and and their programmable matter weapons so we spent a lot of the early development developing those systems and also miles unique traversal style so that's where we spent a lot of our pre-production and we were able to roll into production in a very short amount of time because of the foundation of the first game so we did build our game in vertical sort of slices so we had multiple slice productions where we work on portions of the game and that brought them up to a quality that you could play the whole game from beginning to end we also developed our story very early on and tested it all along the way with storyboards before we went to the mocap stage and that goes into the final set question which is how we dealt with the pandemic luckily we had a lot of our cinematic shot but we had a number of story revisions that came after alpha that meant that we needed to get new data but with a pandemic we couldn't go to the stage so our animation team did an amazing job adapting old data getting new data

either from a remote access safe location or they even recorded some of their own data themselves to help assemble these scenes in a very unique way that we've never done before so i just wanted to give a really big shout out to our animation team for being so ingenious during um during the pandemic i've talked to a couple developers um we taught a gdc podcast episode with uh the jack box folks a while ago and talking to people about the pandemic it's so interesting to hear where the timing works out for like where it hit in this part these projects were kind of like seeing now and saw a few months ago just how like everything was torn asunder towards the end in the middle and how does adapted to it so thank you for sharing that um let's see another one from harris here says it was revealed a couple years ago how much technical wizardry was and excuse me was cleverly concealed by the direction of the opening cut scene of spider-man in ps or spider-man the first one um is there any moment in particular in miles morales that comes to your mind as achieving seamless parity across the technical and the creative sides yeah so we really took on our third

pillar that play a seamless cinematic experience even a step further from spider-man there are no loading screens in miles morales on the playstation 4 and the playstation 5. so that was a big goal for us so we start our game in the subway with miles morales and as soon as you hit start you seamlessly enter into the city and begin begin the video game with no loading screens so there was a lot of trickery we had to do to think about how do we get into miles apartment without a loading screen and then out into the into the world all of those were innovations that um the team worked on together on this uh on miles morales to to make that even more seamless and more immersive um so kind of bouncing off those pillars there again uh zee in chat wants to know um can you tell us a bit about the pillars from the first game for comparison and how they changed the second game to distinguish the experience of miles morales yeah the pillars in the first game was really it was driven off of the idea to play like a marvel movie feels the idea of getting this bombastic amazing uh uh sense of cinematic drama

that you'd get from a spider-man and bring that to um responsive fast gameplay so that that was a guiding principle that i think you know brian anthar and the team really drove towards that um brought a level of spectacle and fun factor to to the spider-man franchise so that is still a foundation of what we we build on build on these pillars were additive they were just a way for us to really be super specific about a miles character the story he had the threats um and our theme of miles learning to learn you know learning his new neighborhood his new home of harlem and how he was going to um let that be fuel to learn how to become a new spider-man so that's i think the biggest change was being very specific about how this was going to be a miles morales experience versus just a versus a peter parker experience um i guess let's talk a bit more about crafting miles as a character um there's a lot of comments coming to chat here about um seeing diversity in a video

game seeing like a deaf character or even like miles's family or like lgbt inclusion uh so we'll start at the top here with tremaine's question got it very quickly um so they say they're all about diversity and love the game so when it was decided that miles would get his own game how did you go about making sure that harlem and its resin residents were properly represented some studios failed to get the properly part but you guys nailed it authenticity was one of our key ingredients too across the whole franchise when we talk about his his new home of harlem a lot of that started with research our team did exhaustive amount of research to ensure that the city itself felt authentic um the people within it as well we actually did um we actually went to harlem with a group of people to talk to the residents of harlem and to show them early builds of our game to get in ideas like hey does this does miles apartment feel correct uh and we we talked to to people uh uh with mixed ethnicities to ensure not only is miles as um as a black american but having

puerto rican roots are those cultures and those different aspects of his personality and the culture being represented correctly so we actually made a lot of and got a lot of amazing data and made some informed decisions how we can get better representation across the game not only in the way the world looks but the people themselves uh and a big shout out to our narrative team ben arfman is the lead writer mary kenny as a senior writer mary kenny worked very closely with evan narciss one of our um story consultants to ensure all the people of harlem the quest givers felt correct so haley is one of our you know we're so proud of bringing haley to the to to the game who um really is just a powerful community organizer but also just the next level of representation by showing authentic asl um between miles and her in the game that was a huge innovation for both story and also animation um so yeah we we just feel like research and uh asking questions and working with people outside

um of our team to help ensure that everything we did on the screen was was authentic and correct um so angel uh sorry angelica in chat here has a question about asl um they say that they love that asl made an appearance in the game can you talk about the decision to bring that into the game and kind of what kind of challenges the team had to do to make that as successful as it was so as mary kenny wanted to create a deaf character in the game and haley was born but that came with a number of technical challenges like how do we correctly capture asl in the game so we actually hired asl actors um haley specifically and and even miles who uh is played by nanji jeter we had uh someone who spoke asl or was fluent in asl to do the mocap and we created brand new technology at the at the capture stage and with our animators to ensure that all the finger movements were were captured correctly so there was a lot of work to ensure that um that this was going to be done right and we actually brought a consultant in as well on the day of the stage

to ensure anything that we wrote in the script if there were any words or anything that needed to be unique um or sorry that was not uh authentic or correct that we would make those adjustments on the stage including the fact that miles is actually not as experienced with asl so his his version of asl is very different than haley's um as a beginner versus someone who's more experienced and like it sounds like that having that kind of technology and taking the time to go through those steps and establish like workflows for that is makes it easier for including that stuff in the future too 100 i think it was an innovation that we'll be building on in the future all right um another question here from another one from tremaine thank you uh can you walk us through a typical day as a creative director for insomniac what are your responsibilities pressures and what do you enjoy um well one you know insomniac games is just an amazing company to work for it's we have a philosophy that great ideas come from everywhere so anyone on the team is contributing

on the core of what makes spider-man or any game we work on unique so it's about finding and pulling and collecting the ideas from our team and trying to come up with a vision that allows people to contribute ideas so if i think about my typical day it starts first very early on to make sure that there is a clear vision and goal once we have that then it really just is a matter of on a day-to-day basis working with the team and helping steer to to the final result that we're trying to accomplish but um it is a day-to-day usually is a lot of conversations early um working very closely with cam christian um the game director jess reed um that head of production uh and other leadership group to make sure that every single person that is uh leading this effort has a clear direction and goal of what they need to do uh and then you know throughout the day it's it's a lot of meetings it's a lot of playing the game um and asking questions and and hopefully providing some direction

that's going to get us to the next level and uh and then you know we do it all over again every day so it's a really fun and collaborative experience just kind of building on that um obviously you didn't like wake up one day join the game industry and suddenly be a creative director how did you kind of get to where you are now and i guess what lessons did you carry forward from other roles you've had yeah um i've been very fortunate i i i went to art school uh so i am uh trained as an illustrator and a painter and i got my first job at um disney interactive in 1994 uh right out of college and then from there i just progressed um from different companies worked at dreamworks i worked at electronic arts i worked at crystal dynamics on tomb raider and that was where i really learned a tremendous amount of that aaa video game development before uh going to infinity ward and eventually coming to an insomniac game so yeah across 26 years i've picked up a lot of things but one thing i will say is um working

at insomniac it is a mixture of excellence and um really taking care of the team the well-being of the team that's something that we really are priding ourselves on and and actually making up making a positive statement in the world that that our mission to make a positive lasting impact to me that that's that's a reason to want to make video games is to say something important so um yeah i've been very fortunate to to sort of grow from an artist to a lead artist to an art director and eventually into game direction and creative direction and that's been a a gradual experience uh i guess speaking of jumps from one thing to another uh playstation 4 to playstation 5 for marvel spiderman versus miles morales um gonna do grab a couple of questions on that quick but we'll start off with brian's here uh he says hey brian can you talk about insomniac's engine engine evolution from ps4 to ps5 and what you were able to achieve with the new console tech yeah um we have an amazing core team who works on our engine um abdul one of our uh senior programmers

created our ray trace reflections for uh for the playstation five and that was one of our huge innovations uh and we what that really means is to make sure that every you know if you think of new york city it's a city of skyscrapers made out of glass right so if every single surface can reflect correctly and you can see the characters and the world reflecting the the world just becomes that much more rich and um realistic looking uh the other area we focused on is allowing options of how you play so you can either play at uh 60 frames per second at a near 4k or you can play at a hybrid 60 frames per second at a lower resolution that's upscaled or you can play at 30 frames per second um with full ray trace uh full ray tracing so we had all these different options to give the player more choice on how they played the game but any mode that you play on the playstation 5 is is definitely the most superior spider-man experience you could have it it truly is

amazing to play around play the game in 60 frames per second with ray tracing in our hybrid mode um so it's a it's it's been a really amazing uh progress you know to see our technology grow from the playstation 4 which already looked amazing into the playstation 5 um on launch day that was a huge accomplishment and kudos to to our tech team uh so of course miles morales is available on both playstation 4 and playstation 5. can you talk a little bit about um kind of developing for these two different kinds of technology with different capabilities and making those experiences like good on both sides of the fence because it'd be easy to go forward and be like well here's all these cool playstation 5 features and have the playstation 4 version left out but it seems like you guys achieved a balance yeah we wanted to make sure the playstation 4 consumer is going to get a spider-man experience that they were accustomed to so the same level of fidelity of art and storytelling and characterization all of all of that all the gorgeous graphics all of that that we saw on the playstation 4

is is represented but we wanted to make sure we had this upside this idea when you did go to the playstation 5 these other ingredients would really help contribute to the overall experience and in addition to the visuals you know we really did enhance the um the 3d audio in the game we we wanted to make sure that the haptic controller was getting maximum use so when you do play with haptics it really does add another level of immersion so i think that's the big difference is the the tremendous pieces of hardware like like the the controller the 3d audio in addition to the capabilities to run at 60 and uh with ray tracing those those are the big differences i think like miles morales was the first game i played that had the adapter trigger functionality in it so like that was like my first woman moment was like swinging and being like oh my gosh this is so cool it was a great way to showcase that tech um we're not here to talk about what i care about i don't know i think that's great thanks for playing the game by the way that's great i'm bad at it but it's incredible um ellen and chad wants to ask if he

asks if you can talk a bit about the animation challenges your team faced to show how miles is more inexperienced with web slinging in combat compared to peter sure i'm just going to give a big shout out to james hamm um he did a lot of the principle animation and traversal that it gave the personality of miles morales versus peter parker as soon as you play that first moment where you web swing as miles morales you can feel that it's a different character and a lot of that came down to um james putting himself into the idea he he sort of amateur parkour and he loves movement and he's a big fan of the character and he wanted to bring a different personality to to miles morales so that was a big part of it he's like how do we get his web slinging feeling unique and you're going to see a little bit more of out of control but also a little bit more style we put a lot of effort into additional manual tricks so he's going to have fun he's like a younger new spider-man we wanted the player to have this sense of joy when they swung through the city

and augmenting that with more performable tricks so that was a huge part and then when it came to the combat we wanted a little bit more desperation and you know clumsiness but also this tremendous power when you see him performing all the different bioelectric moves and then the other thing that's really exciting is the fact that miles has this optical camouflage he can now scare people by you know going invisible and and redirecting into different places so that that also informed a lot of the way he moves to the world so uh and then i would be remiss not to see naji jeter who has done such a great job bringing life to the character and every cinematic and all the vo you hear that that informs a lot of who the character is as well there's a second part to ellen's question that i accidentally did not read uh they're curious about while you're going through those animations to make them kind of distinctly miles and a little bit more unexperienced um was were there ever concerns about it becoming unclear what the player was doing or kind of like um i don't experience on mile's side making

the player feel like they might be doing something wrong yeah we wanted to balance um the flare and like him like like sort of like arms you know in the air or legs the bicycling that might happen with his legs all of that is flare but not necessarily to make you feel out of control so anytime you wanted to go up to a place it still had the same accuracy of spider-man but what we wanted to do is on those in between things provide a level of animation that that just gave him a different personality so we didn't want to mess up a lot of what made spider-man great which was that accurate um and fluid traversal from the first game uh you got me scrolling questions here there was one that was very good about um i'm so sorry i'm gonna paraphrase because i can't find it in this growing list of questions um talking about kind of getting that cinematic experience you talked about before um can you talk a bit about maybe the technical kind of like tricks that you guys use your experiences from past games that you've drawn on to kind of make this like seamless movie like experience

where the player still feels involved in it yeah i would say the bridge sequence was one of our big places of innovation in addition to going in and out of interiors which was one thing but as far as like on the sticks we wanted to have these micro cinematic moments that led into interactivity and every time you did what we called exotic move um abilities let's say like webbing up a bus you're still using all of your buttons that you would use in game play we just make sure we frame the camera in a way that looked more cinematic so whenever we could we'd make these little micro cinematic moments that led into an interactive moment and we try to keep the qte amount down by making you feel like anything that might have been considered a qt was not abstract it felt connected to the buttons and inputs that you would be used to uh in the game so so the bridge sequence is probably the best expression of that i found the questions that was paraphrasing that uh was half something lyanna asked and has something thomas asked in chat here so credit where credit is due um just to build on thomas is a bit more and kind

of what you just talked about uh what was the key to delivering chasing experience excuse me chasing and escaping experiences so successfully can the same concept ideas be applied for less cinematic and more player controlled experiences yeah absolutely we're always trying to put as much control in the players hands whenever we possibly can so then it just comes down to how can we bring more cinematography into gameplay itself so i think that's a big push for us going forward is continuing to evolve that so we never lose control and try to put all actions in the players hands but still try to find opportunities where we can play with the camera um you're gonna have to stop me if you're i don't know how much you can talk about this one it's always a great way to start off a question um i guess working with an established ip can you talk a bit about kind of being creative in that space when you're working with a character that has so much like history and established lore yeah what's wonderful about miles is he has a little under 10 years of lore right so there was a lot of room for us to grow but as a franchise spider-man has over

60 right it has much larger uh history but i think what's great about marvel games is they're so willing to work with us as partners to build on the established norms so um you'll see a lot of things that we did in the first game and things we did in the second game that deviate from the comic books but that's all built on trust and conversations that we have to say does this still feel in keeping with the character and that's what we always have to ask ourselves when we make a change like the tinkerer for instance being female and uh and younger and you know a friend of miles morales that was something that we innovated for uh for this game and kind of building off of those story beats you can subvert expectations in a fun exciting way as well which is always that's the hope right oh we have 24 seconds here and there's so many more questions in chat sorry it's the nature of time it's unforgiving um so i guess if anyone wants to reach out to you about more kind of like spider-man development questions can they hit you up on twitter or email yeah you know hit me up and i'll be happy to

answer as many questions as i possibly can awesome uh thank you to everyone in chat for all your wonderful questions um thank you for making spiderman morales with the rest of your wonderful spiderman miles morales with the rest of your wonderful team and have a great rest of your showcase everyone you