Conquering the Creative Challenges in Marvel's Spider-Man

[Music] my name is Brian Andujar I'm the creative director at insomniac games and I'm so happy to be here today it's kind of fitting to be here with you because it was 11 years ago at GDC of 2008 that I actually got the call that I had gotten the job at insomniac I was literally having lunch two blocks down the road second a mission when the call came in now making the move from journalism to game development was extremely daunting but it was hands-down the best decision I've ever made in my professional career I've been insomniac from just 11 years now which is crazy I started out in the community team that I quickly transitioned into production and then for the last four and a half years I've been a creative director I didn't saw MEAC now I can't tell you how thankful I am then Tomic was the first job I had in the studio before company insomniac as a journalist I had done a bunch of stories on them and knew what a great place they had you know after they want a bunch of awards but I can tell

you it's even better once you're inside those doors now before digging to the crib challenges what we faced a marble spider-man I want to give you a bit of history in the project and probably answer the question I get asked more than anything else how in the hell did it zomick's start working on spider-man game so was the fall of 2014 saw Mac was finishing up our the title that we were working on it was sunset overdrive for the Xbox one I was the director of project management on it and during well we did the final days some of our longtime Sony producers were in the office visiting our president CEO Ted Pryce and during that conversation they asked Ted so what would you think about working in a Marvel game so just coincidentally I happen to be in Ted's office shortly thereafter I think I was actually giving him the update if we were gonna make our gold date or not based on how many bugs we had and he actually related the conversation Ted is a very open individual about the because he has and so I decided to say you know I'm just gonna answer the question for him hell yes we want to make a Marvel

game and I actually to this day this is what I said to him I go I would give my right arm to work on a Marvel game and that's a kind of what I did see this is actually my arm that the character rig rigging team they scanned for development of our muscle blend shapes on Peter so when Peter flexes his forearm the game that's me so depending how you look at it I did give my own work in the game or you could say I'm spider-man now one of the great things about working in salmiakki and having a leader like ted is that he never wants to us to work on something we're not passionate about so the next company meeting which was a few weeks later ted was giving us an update on what was gonna be life after sunset like and whatever what we were some of our possible projects working on and I'll never forget what happened next simply Ted simply put up that red brick Marvel logo that iconic logo and you could literally hear the whole room gasp even though in some that could never

worked on a licensed IP and that's then 20 year history as some of you know now working or celebrating 25 years this year it was the right project at the right time for starters we were extremely excited to be working with Sony again and our longtime producers Connie booth Grady hunt and mark Cerny who had been instrumental in the success of both the ratchet and resistance franchises we also hit off right away for the new marvels games team which was led by Jay on who are a super passionate bunch and wanted our help and bring me a new era to the brand and lastly insomniac is full of diehard Marvel fans we felt confident we create something truly memorable the Marvel game we always wanted now early on we talked about this game being the biggest Marvel game they had ever made the first of many Marvel Marvel memorable marvel gaming experiences from this new group expectations were going to be high that's exactly Wanda here we weren't talking about just making the best spider-man game we literally from day one we were talking about we want to be a Game of the Year contender so we had

the publisher support the IP support and the internal support to move ahead now early on we had those discussions about which Marvel characters we were passionate about we talked about a variety of them and now I can't tell you which ones we were talking about but even in that first conversation with Ted I said to him we gotta do spider-man as Bill Rose men who I'm gonna mention a couple times presentation he's the Marvel games VP crave director told me spider-man is the Mickey Mouse of Marvel no Marvel character is as popular spider-man no Marvel character has impacted as many fans as the friendly neighborhood wall-crawler more importantly this character fit our studio so well if you think about it spider-man stories feature so much heart and humor just like our ratchet titles more recently Spiderman puts a huge emphasis on traversal gadgets and fun and magic of characters so did sunset overdrive I remember one review calling us out saying man it'd be great if they made a

spider-man game well the guy was right and lastly spider-man is an underdog and being one of the last independant studio still making Triple A console titles we consider ourselves having saw make underdogs as well so soon thereafter we made it official and it told the team we were making a spider-man game now in all my time insomniac I've never been as excited to work on a project I'll ratchet resistance were the reason I came to insomniac I had a very personal connection with Spidey I'm sure some of you did as well see see I was the kid who grew up in front of the watchin TV in my Spiderman underoos yes I actually had them and watching spider-man cartoons I was the kid who my mom was trying to get some shopping done the only way she could do it was she would give me my spider-man action figure that actual action figure that tell you how old I am and I would actually pretend to swing him from clothes rack to clothes rack while she was getting some shopping done and then later I would think about it night like could you really use a web line and swing through New York City as I got older I started reading the comics

and to this day I still anxiously await every new spider-man film so not only was our studio bringing my favorite Marvel character who just happens to be one of the most iconic characters in all of pop culture to the PlayStation 4 we were also aiming to deliver at a quality bar of all the other Sony first title titles and as you know from their pedigree that quality bar is amazingly high and one more thing I was going to be the creative director I first-time creative director I think our Peter Parker said it the best in our first trailer for the game no pressure right now the good news is that four years later and some Marvel's spider-man proved to be a extremely successful game for all parties for insomniac Sony and Marvel it's already the best-selling insomniac title in the 25-year history it's the fastest selling playstation title of all time just like 3.3 million copies in three days this first three days and I'm really probably it guarding the critical success we were looking for words an 87 Metacritic and when I made this slide 140 nominations

and 90 year and awards and while that's all that great the sales numbers the the critical success is great what's there's nothing more gratifying and seen the impact it's had in our fans for example we were stunned and overwhelmed and didn't ever expect the fantastic images that would come out of players using photo mode we were both amazed and somewhat shocked by the cosplay the game inspired thank you shirtless spider-man but this was the best we found at one of our fans after playing the game I started volunteering at his aunts homeless shelter just like Pete does for his Aunt May when your game encourages players to be better people that's truly special now here's another spoiler for you mark making this game was hands-down the most difficult and tense and emotional experience I've ever been through in my professional career even though the game being a huge success we faced our fair share of creative challenges along the way so today what I want to do with discuss those challenges across three separate journeys first we're gonna dig

into the character journey which we look at the crave challenges that that we face working such an iconic character it's been around for more than a half a century next up we'll talk about the game journey which will detail the critic rape challenges we face specifically with the narrative and last I'll discuss my journey which will dig into the crave challenges of being a first time creative director what I hope you walk away from today's talk with is through our experiences on spider-man you dinner stand the challenges we faced how why we initially failed we failed a lot and the skills and approaches we use to eventually conquer them ultimately I hope you can walk away from today with a better understanding how you can apply those lessons to your own game whether it's a licensed IP like spider-man a new IP or I'll follow up to existing IP so let's kick things off with the character journey as as many of you know the friendly neighborhood spider-man has been around for a very long time across so many different mediums there's been

55 years of comics so you can imagine the challenges we had in the story side six standalone live action movies and another one who on the way in July 9 animated TV series and just since 2012 console games so with the character it's been done so many times across so many different mediums the challenge we had in front of us was finding that right balance of giving players something new but also not angering them and like I said it did take long to fill their eyes the crave director assumed everyone it was introduced new spider-man just like me they went through these phases started out from the TV and your underoos watching the car seasons you move on to the comics when you start reading and eventually you may hit the movies I mean in my opinion this is the best Hooper here of all time and of course everybody loves superheroes right this is just the way it's supposed to be but I quickly learned I was being completely naive what I learned is that some as a kid started watching the cartoons and simply stop right there others got into the comics and eventually gave him up but I

think what was the biggest surprise to me was learning that some people's knowledge of the character began and ended with that first spider-man movie trilogy by Sam Raimi and this wasn't just true for the people outside of our building it was actually true for insomniacs as well an early development this led to disagreement amongst a team and some folks not buying into the game I want to make and what I began to realize is that what people wanted was a spider-man that they had in their own head the version that they had built up over the years and you better not mess with that and as Twitter shows if he best with the wrong way they're gonna let you know about it so what did we do we simply dug into and find the DNA of a character we asked ourselves what were the common characteristics of spider-man regardless of the media and people medium people consumed and like I said we spent a lot of time with Bill Roseman Marvel games this VP and creative director I talked about the character and any you asked to talk to Bill he know spider-man better than anyone and I would say he probably knows whole better than anyone and for our

first exercise mrs. group activity where we literally broke down the duality of the character what you see here is the result of that exercise on the spider-man side he's known for that iconic costume which bill says is the best costume of all time his spider powers his ability for web swinging and crafting gadgets and of course his sense of humor now on the flip side you have Peter who's just as important this constant battle of power responsibilities his love of science his relationships and especially early on this kind of idea of like he's somewhat of a loser who becomes a superhero now funny story about this exercise so if you've ever met bill or seen him do an interview he's really passionate he gets amped up and he was so excited about this topic he literally started drawing this in one of our conference rooms but what bill didn't realized was that wasn't a whiteboard he was literally writing on the wall so we and one thing is he was so amped up we didn't have the heart to tell him it wasn't a whiteboard and so we actually just ended up painting over it and that's bill and that's why we love him from there we

further solidified the DNA of the character to help ourselves fully understand and how to portray them in the game when it comes to Peter he's very relatable vulnerable and somewhat awkward in that key way when it comes to spider-man he's confident resilient and uses his humor the deal with stress but it wasn't til it's something I remembered my very first conversation with Bill that things really fell into place so I my first conversation was Bill was on the phone it was roughly an hour I swear to you I took about 10 to 11 pages of notes and he provided such great insight on the character and why did this day spider-man remains so special and during that call he'll say something I'll never forget something that literally would provide the critical nation for everything we did in the game and I remember actually circling this in my notebook the best stories are when peers world and spider-man's worlds collide look at any of those mediums that I talked about that statement holds true if you only deliver the superhero fantasy you aren't doing the character justice Peter the human story is just as

important and his relationships across both parts of his life make for the best drama there's probably hold true for spider-man and Peter more than any other superhero be huh see so relatable he's not a billionaire like Tony Stark he's not a God like Thor we all kind of can see ourselves as being Peter and this clarity really helped the team get all on the same page it also helped us be much more confident in the creative risks we want to take with the franchise and what I want to do today is to share with you three examples of how this stuff helped us define the spider-man with an insomniac twist let's start with Peters age now when most people think of Peter Parker they think of him as the 15-year high school student but not in this game we actually made him a little bit older first of all we knew the high school version had been done a lot and coincidentally we found out later when Marvel got their hands back on spider-man they were gonna do a younger spider-man so it's good we could district herself and we knew right away from reviewing doing reviews people were tired of awards and stories so we

decided to make him 23 years old which we felt was a great sweet spot first off allowed us to explore a time in Peters life that wasn't as familiar to people personally personally this was a very impactful time in my life around the same time I just graduated college I was living my own for the first time paying my own bills trying to start a career as a journalist and I feel like others who played the game could really relate to that it also let us touch upon mature themes like mentorship and partnership they helped make the story much more emotional while also raising the stakes of the world and he lastly he wasn't so old like married with kids that fans couldn't identify with him next is Peters job again if you ask a lot of people they probably think of Peters just that photographer for the Daily Bugle continually getting yelled at by his boss changing the Jameson however we decide to go the Scientist route for starters it was a much more modern take in the character it plays much more than

the character strengths remember as I mentioned in that chart Peters a really smart guy he loved science but more importantly it tied very heavily into our goals delivering a very human story within the worlds colliding concept in the game Peter worked for his mentor dr. Otto Octavius who he inadvertently helps make is the city's newest super villain and his toughest threat ever those mechanical arms that's because a pea and what's great about this what really was nice was that because we did be dug into the DNA we understood the character this was a storyline that is completely unique and you cannot find Peter working for Otto in any of the comics any of the movies last up is the game supporting cast well while many peers core relationships stayed the same we wanted to put some of them in new unfamiliar roles to help support this coming-of-age story Peters journey becoming a young adults mayor Jim Watson mainly she's mainly known as the model but the actress the club owner but in our universe she's actually a reporter for The Daily Bugle Norman

Osborn he's typically known as the head of Oscorp and also another famous spider-man role but since that since Oscorp he's moved on to be the mayor of New York City and this time around aimer isn't sitting in Queens waiting for Pete to come home and make him wheat cakes she's actually in the city helping run the feast homeless shelters and again this is a great example of how we could deliver the world's caught in concept because the fee shelter is owned by Martin Lee Martin Lee happens to be mr. negative if you played the game he's one of the biggest threats in the city so you have Peter Martin Lee spider-man mr. negative again worlds colliding and last week Miles Morales now the last time we saw miles I think he was winning an Oscar for engine spider-verse but you know before that before we knew that model is going to blow up like that comic book fans really knew him as that spider-man from another universe and what we thought was our game was like again how can we make our universe feel unique what happens if Peter and Miles actually lived in the same city what if miles was the 15 year old what

if he was the spider-man fan and he actually didn't have spider-man powers in the very beginning and if you played the game you know what happens at the end so what are the takeaways here whether you're building a new character from scratch working with a well-established one like spider-man it's good to remember the following define your characters DNA as soon as possible not only will this help critic solid creative foundation early on but have a fried clarity for your team and increased buy-in for your creative vision it's also going to help your entire team and even yourself as creative director when it comes to my time to make decisions throughout development this includes setting priorities for example does this particular mission feature mechanic help support the pillars of your character it'll also help you in determining game features especially when it comes times to choose which ones to elevate as it would all had to do which ones the cut and I also I promise it's gonna make your team much more autonomous they won't be coming to you consulting the crave director or even your writer about

every single choice they're gonna make because they're gonna the character as well as you do and solidifying the DNA of your character will also act as your compass for all big risks you can take you'll know how to answer questions like how much can you change this character without what from what someone already knows can you put this character in this particular scenario and when they're in this scenario can what how will the character act and what decision will they make as I've detailed today and especially if you know what we did one character at the end of Spider Man you know we had to answer those questions and remember at the end of the day you're never gonna please everyone and that's totally okay for example I had i throughout development had a number of people on twitter message me saying that we ruined MJ by not making her an actress or model or club owner and i can tell you this can be really hard to hear because when you're as passionate about the franchise as the person on the other side of the tweet criticizing you it can hurt but again at the same time I felt very confident that based on the

homework we did the core of the character was still in place and the change in her profession was the right move for the story we want to tell of course it didn't hurt that many people also mentioned to be saying hey they really loved what we did with MJ but I think it's really important remember that everything you do especially the character so well known or well established franchise there's just no way to please everyone now it's one thing to understand the DNA of the character but it's another thing to actually take that knowledge and put it into the game when it comes to the game journey the second journey I'm talking about today it's fair to say that every single Department on this project face that struggle at times from programming animation we knew getting traversal for your life feel right was one of the most important things if not the most important element of any spider-man experience on the design side we really want to push this idea when it came to combat the Spider Man was more of this acrobatic improviser not just a mother muscle brown-brown brawler and

when it came to the UI with Peters natural tendencies to create his own tech we in Marvel art director Tim saying wanted this idea more of that homebrew feel to come through in the UI and the good news is there's a several talks at GDC this year that cover a lot of these areas and many more I really recommend checking them out but what I want to do today specifically is talk about the challenges we faced on the narrative side of things now the first challenge was big because we knew it tied so much to the characters DNA how do you balance spider-man's sense of humor through wanting a very emotional story with high stakes as any spider-man fan will tell you a big part of what they love about this character is his sense of humor but as all we're all creative people especially writers they know humor is extremely difficult another complication was the medium this was not a 30 minute TV show or two-hour film just to complete this was an open-world spider-man game and just to complete the main story it took 20 hours that's a lot of jokes no so we not only did we need to find our tone but officer our cadence and obviously spider-man is

not unique in this regard every game needs to do this when it came to vo early milestones had him quipping a four and during after every fight I figured hey this is what spider-man does this is what people are gonna expect we need to do this but it became painfully obvious that there was no way we could write enough vo lines where it didn't end up feeling repetitive and the frequency led to even the good vo lines just become annoying over time now here's a footage from a very early milestone and that shows a quick happy spider-man so I can tell you right now that bad guy corner pocket line that played pretty much every single time he threw something in the game and it's like kind

of burned into my brain now the cinematic front we also struggled at times to find that right sense of humor our goal was to make spider-man very likable but early on he could come across as either a wiseass or even a jerk now the scene I want to show you he's very early on not to Peters on the trying to track down mr. negative he actually goes over to MJ's house she's gonna help him out so he's cooking dinner and this is a moment where MJ really opens up to Peter confesses that she wants a bigger role and trying to take down mr. negative even wants to be his partner and right before he answers something's going on with the food he runs in the kitchen and this is how the rest of the scene plays out originally now I want to warn you this is very early version and there is no facial animation and the lighting is very temp so just remember that not again hey it's your crime system thingy looks like a residential break-in Charles Standish it sounds familiar

Oh Oscorp CFO wait you don't think this has anything to do with we do you I guess he does so for me we have the strong emotional moment between MJ and Peter she's opening up she's confessing something to him my students getting his information he just bails and to me this just came across as he's a little bit of a jerk in this scenario and it really wasn't until we got off the page and really test our testing that everything in the game that we that we understood what players were experiencing and what we were trying to achieve did we really find our clarity and our tone of voice this is how we discovered that constant quips during every random combat sequence working a work but more importantly this is where we discovered that situational humor humor written for a very specific moment was the right approach for our game for example early in the game we have a mission that's basically their tutorial for the crime system but thanks to our writer Ben Arfa Minh he took this you

know rather dry moment in the game and was able to craft something pretty memorable and with that spider cop was born from his elevated position spider cop spies his destination a second surveillance tower what no of course not she never did understand spider cap Johnny was a loose cannon so wow that's so good so one more note about that mission I was actually talking to Ben last week and I asked him I go Ben how many tell me his Crypt versions of the script that you work on before he got the spider copy goes 15 15 scripts so now you're gonna hear me say this lot today and we're gonna heard a lot of GDC iteration makes all the difference now here's another one at the end of the Grand Central Terminal mission spider-man's trying to slow down a runaway train his web snap listen to how he reacts

that totally worked last time so not only was this me home I written specifically for that situation but we also recognized that we could give it a little wink and a nod to a very memorable spider-man 2 movie sequence that was somewhat awesome about the training and remember that scene I showed you earlier about MJ's apartment or he kind of kind of bailed to her like a jerk well the good news is that we were able to go back to that scene and the writers and animators said you know we could just tweak the very end part of it and really increases likability with some classic spider-man humor and this is how that played out hey it's your crime system thingy looks like a residential break-in Charles Standish sounds familiar Oh scripts EF oh wait you don't think this has anything to do with Lee do you sorry to cook and run did did you just

leave your clothes on the kitchen floor but where do you want me to work a couch is fine Slayer yeah so another thing about that scene I just remember the whole walking backwards thing that was just our actor Yuri Lowenthal just doing it on set wasn't written and another thing is just let your actors have fun on stage and they're gonna make it better than ever you wrote it now what we do with that apartment scene ties into our next crepe challenge on the game journey character and story comprehension and cohesion so you spent all this time of your writers your developers your producers and your partners working on script everyone is bought in and you're feeling really good but now you're in the middle development and you're spending thousands of dollars on performance capture processing mocap data and not to mention getting your internal cinematic team ready to make

these scenes look and sound beautiful but then you start playing and seeing everything the game in boom there's big problems worse the schedule is already packed to get the rest of the game done our failure was not playing enough for change and I feel like a lot of this falls on me because of the first time creative director which I'm gonna talk about more in the next section I became so obsessed with nailing everything on the page that was I underestimated how much would eventually change once we got in the game I didn't anticipate this many issues arising and I didn't plan for needing this many edits and reshoots here just some of the narrative issues that we found both early on as laid-up 9 to 12 months before ship act 2 had large gaps with no humor the Miles Morales character wasn't as likable as we were hoping for he came across as more of an angry Kid I was turned into a villain wasn't as believable as we hoped and we weren't selling Otto's master plan has plan to get back at Norman Osborn well enough players couldn't go back and think about and go oh that that's how that all adds up now so what did we do

we asked for help we asked for a lot of help first off we had to go to our publisher Sony and ask for a lot more performance capture days in order to complete a bunch of reshoots and now they could have easily said to us sorry you got a specific budget and you got to make do with what you have I know that happens a lot but luckily for us it was the exact opposite this the support we received from our Sony producers to go ahead and make those story changes was unbelievable and I can't thank them enough in addition to our publisher a huge amount of help as much to came from an internal team all insomniac from literally every single department but it was writing animation design everywhere we're looking at our existing scenes saying how could we strategically edit or maybe add something to the very end or the very front and this is I really feel like when it's on next truly at its best so here's an example after that train sequence spider-man spoiler takes down mr. negative and he has this short scene with MJ where he's just texting her back and forth and originally it was just we had a budget

for it it was going to be short and sweet to the point and luckily during this time and we're trying to fix some of the humour issues and kind of more that human story the writers the animator said you know we already have this budget for this scene what if we just extended a little bit rewrite some a dialogue to sound more like how people really text and then have him doing spider-man things while he's texting because that's what spider-man will do and this is a and L so hopefully this will help dress some of the lack of humor criticism and this is how the scene eventually turned out this is Mary Jane Watson please leave a detailed message and I'll get back to you as soon as I can uh hey it's me let me know when you want to talk texting isn't talking no no no not that kind of over [Music]

[Music] please say no please say no ha okay okay and not okay what is there to figure out oh you think great and that this that seemed was never supposed to be like that it wasn't supposed to be about a ten second scene and now that's probably one of my

favorite scenes we ever worked on and that's what I say by something I'll talk about later once you hand over a problem to your team imagine they can make is just spectacular it's one of the best parts of game development so when it comes to takeaways I believe these hold true for a new IP an existing one go beyond the script and get off the get off the page as soon as possible it's unrealistic and quite unwise to think that you can script out the whole game and just go ahead with shoot and record it continuous iteration in place testing is how you'll discover the correct tone for your game the right cadence for humor and see if the overall story is clicking for players this is going to sound obvious but have as many people play the game as much as possible play test internally externally if you have available usability labs use a research take advantage of them and also don't be afraid to get story feedback when you have really early builds when it's your two own developers record a scratch video it's when you're using you know your Maya play blast as cinematic

stand-ins you can find it a lot but even when you don't have all the bells and whistles of a shippable polished game and something I believe holds true for not just spider-man for any game situation of humor is more effective than jokes a little of the latter can make a big difference and lastly something you know I talked about was a schedule and plan for change we were really really fortunate to have that support from Sony but we know that's not realistic in every situation some games have very tight budgets and that's what they have to deal with so something I kind of thought about and like as a post-mortem for this game was things that you can do from approach inside to help deal with change early on block out unknowns from the schedule I know the instinct is to plan out everything to last hour in the last resource especially when you have someone like me as a creative director who's going we're gonna it's gonna fit right it's gonna fit it's gonna fit it's gonna fit you know they're you know we're gonna get this story done right but in reality no one can predict even a former producer and now creative director how much stuff you're going to need to address

how much stuff you have to change so really had your bets and more importantly and this is officially for the producers in the crowd hold on to those unknowns for dear life don't start filling them in while said when the scope of the game gets bigger more often than not as I mentioned things aren't going to go as planned and something will slip or something the story will change do whatever you can to not eat into unknown block and while your CD may be irritated at first and you may have some tough discussions about scope I can promise you that they will thank you down the road and I just have to remember that in my next project and if things are going wrong own up to it as soon as possible one of the worst things you can do is let your production partners be the ones pointing out the problem bring them into the fold as early as possible to help you write the ship delay now that that inevitable conversation will only make things worse now the last part of this journey I want to discuss today specifically my journey the journey of being a first-time creative director I'm sure you've all heard this famous but famous sputter

limb line before with great power there must also come great responsibility in some ways I feel like that really captures what it's like to be a creative director when I became a corrector in spider-man I knew this would be like no other game I ever worked on and the expectations would be amazingly high from day one our goal was to make the best spider-man game we've all been waiting for you would just hear that from our fans but also from her own team and again we weren't talking about just making a great spider-man game from day one we're talking about could this be a Game of the Year contender this is also insomniacs forced foray into making a licensed game and once people thought about our previous titles in the quality of those titles there's gonna be a lot of built-in trust that we would get it right we didn't want to mess with that and the insomniac We Trust was actually something fans created and created hash tag which every time I saw would make me sweat there was this is also an unprecedent collaboration between insomniac Sony and Marvel in one way or another each one was taking a risk so while I understood the responsibilities of be to make a great game I either underestimated or quite frankly didn't know the other responsibilities that

came with becoming a creative director and while I was unbelievably excited about this opportunity I was also unbelievably petrified early on I was asking myself questions like so I came from a production background with the team believed I could be a creative director right off the bat we were talking about this being the biggest and most important game in insomniac 25-year history should someone who's never been a CD be the one leading the project and this is something I seriously asked myself and even talked to my wife about was what if I go down as the person who screwed up spider-man well I even have a career after this so I said if I was to be working with one of my childhood heroes I was also petrified and worried that people would figure out that I wasn't the right person for the job I'm sure you've also heard the phrase fake it to make it that did not work for me at all and this happened it started really early in development I remember one of our first project meetings with Sony we're just we were just really high level talks and that for some reason I was off that next day and I called Ted price our president and I said hey Ted how do you think it went and he goes could have gotten better and

I was like oh well could you tell me more and he started mentioning all these things that happen like I was interrupting pretty frequently I wasn't open to ideas especially we were very early in the brainstorming phase and other things and this really really blew me away and I cuz I don't think of myself as a very rude or close-minded person I hope that otherwise I don't think so and I remember I was driving home the Pacific Coast Highway my sister was actually in town I was visiting her and I met I started to realize that after talking to Ted was I was trying to show Sony that I was confident in my ability to do the job actually came across as cockiness I'm whatever know-it-all and this really shook me and what happened next in some ways was even worse during the next few meetings of Sony I actually became very hesitant and was constantly concerned that what I was going to say next result I was so worried about offending someone whether it was Sony or even a fellow insomniac that didn't come across as a leader with a strong vision again I wasn't in a very good place now on this game I was very fortunate to have mark

Cerny and one of my Sony producers mark is an industry veteran who has been involved in several previous insomniac hills and aside from his producer duties mark pretty much became my mentor I remember one day early in the project he asked he asked me to go out to lunch it was almost like he gets sent someone was off and during that conversation we talked a lot about the industry the role of being a creative director other CDs he worked with and he's worked with some really talented people and he emphasized to me that I had to find and develop my own approach to leading this project so I thought a lot about what Mark said and when I began to realize was that my fear I had this fear of this overwhelming feeling that I had to have everything figured out about the game before anyone ever asked the question again because I doubted myself and now sure all creative directors need that strong visionary game which I believe I did but he also need people around you to help cultivate that vision perfect that vision thus giving you confidence to sell to a larger group what I needed to find was my leadership team and that's exactly what I did I began leaning out folks like Ryan Smith our

game director who's pretty much been my partner in crime for the last decade and I joke but it's true and he hates I say this but I might say too anyway he pretty much taught me how video games were made along with Doug Sheehan just in to chew our art director who I had the utmost confidence could help define our visual style for our world and characters John Paquette our lead writer who's probably the most patient person I've ever worked with and one of the best collaborators any creative director could ask for and then there's Bobby Coddington our animation director who no challenge is too big for Bobby and what I loved about it with him was that he would push me as hard as he would push his own team to make something incredible and then there's Scott mahalik our lead project manager and I've known Scott since he was a teenager we worked together a Gamestop and to tell you how old I am it was called software etc back then and what was great was he was always looking at the game from two perspectives of course what we need to get done the ship the game on time but because he was such a big gamer and I've al you´d his opinion as a gamer he was also helping provide guidance on decisions that would make the game qualitatively better these people and

several others who became part of my leadership team like Doug she and our league programmer and camera christian harley designer or who i leaned on helped perfect this vision and make me feel much more confident and the creative direction of the game now the next grave challenge my journey was collaborating with multiple stakeholders most projects have to your developer and your publisher but us we had a third Marvel games now in the positive side all three groups were extremely collaborative and shared a common goal to make the best game possible and as you might expect we received a lot of feedback from the game month from Sony and Marvel and sometimes there were different opinions and that's not unusual if you come to insomniac and you put three people in a room I can guarantee you they're gonna disagree on things and that's normal that's that's what eventually makes things better that's game development but here's where I failed and I failed miserably hands down the biggest failure I had on this project when issues were brought up by our executive team Sony and Marvel I

had routinely would go in a room either by myself for one or two or one or two people and try to solve the problem I would rarely bring it to larger team in my mind I was protecting them like I said we were talking about this being the biggest game and sonic ever made they already had so much work there he had a lot of stress I didn't want to burden him with something else but I quickly learned I was actually doing the complete opposite I was actually alienating myself from a team they would make jokes like you're you know oh my god it's been like a months and you've been at back here desk and I learned quite frankly I was pissing them off so during development of spider-man we actually had an off-site leadership meeting where all the execs the leads and directors came together and during that meeting we talked a lot of different things but actually at one point actually it turned into how I could be doing a better job of the creative director and after two hours and taking a lot of pages of notes it kind of felt like this [Music] now they kept saying hey we want to be

more involved come to us with the problem we're gonna help you solve it and I also learned in this meeting that actually the same habit of when I had my own feedback on on the on the game I would go right into solution mode rather than saying the problem as this clip illustrate at the very end it was a real eye-opener I open her for me and truth be told this was probably the most the toughest meeting I've ever sat through anatomic but it's probably the most informative so the answer this challenge was full transparency with the team and letting them be the owners of solution after that meeting any time we got feedback from Sony and Marvel we sent out Amelie to the team if I had my own issues of the game I would talk to her directly to the lead and the team about my concerns I tried really hard to to just state the problem not the solution and what I found this was actually really free I had much more time to actually play the game look at it from a much higher level big big reverse perspective and when the team did need me to jump in on something I actually had the time to do it and I feel like a good example of this was our combat system as we enter the final

phase of development there are still some things we want to work on in combat and I quickly recognized based on that feedback I'd received her in leadership meeting they did not need another cook in the kitchen on a daily basis so what I basically did was I gave them some high-level thoughts and what I thought about combat and I said hey anytime he wants someone to play the game he gave you some outside perspective I'm your guy so that's pretty much what I did every Friday afternoon I would install build I might on my def kit I would take it home and play a game and I pretty much just write up my pressure on zon anything new and send that feedback to our game director Ryan hourly designer Cameron an early combat programmer Adam again I tried to focus my feedback on my oppressions and the changes I was having not giving them solutions so this gave the combat team complete ownership at the task at hand and I and I got to say they did an amazing job and it sounds like really easy right now but I still struggle with this every single day state the problem not the solution and of all three journeys we talked

about today this is probably easily the most painful to look back on but I hope this is a section that all aspire and creative directors can keep in mind and learn from my mistakes and remember even as a creative director it's okay to have fears doubts and insecurities but don't look don't let them overwhelm you okay assume you find people to help you improve and be more confident your vision even if that equates into some tough love be transparent with your team don't try to be a superhero and over protect them it will most likely backfire and lead to a very uninspired team so share feedback from your production partners whenever you receive it and then hand over the problem to your team get them invested in coming up with a solution I will bet you more often than not what they deliver it will be better than anything you can imagine that's one of the magical parts of game development now I know there's someone saw mix in the crowd today and they know I like to end my my presentations with one more thing so I figured I'd keep that trend going today I want to tell you guys a story about a final in the final moments of development we were about six weeks away from gold it was it

was after e3 and I was in a room reviewing the final boss fight in the game Pete versus Otto now this was hands down the boss fight that went through the most iteration a lot of restarts from both narrative side to side side but I remember in that moment even with little bugs and little bugs here and there some lighting issues some sound effect issues I remember like sitting in the middle of the room people like flanked around me I had this giant smile on my face I even think someone said like why are you smiling and because in that moment I said to myself this was the perfect collision of spider-man and Peter's worlds colliding in that moment I saw everything finally coming together the writing the music the animation all were elevating the stakes and the emotion of that moment in that moment I saw the team had not only great created a great super adventure but also a memorable human story something we were pushing from day one and in that moment I started realized maybe for the first time that the team had faced and overcome our creative challenges as I mentioned earlier this was a coming-of-age story for Peter but

honestly it was one for me as a creative director like Pete this game presented me with a number of challenges I suffered a lot of failures as I say but eventually thanks to a number of people insomniac Sony and Marvel we developed different strategies on how to conquer them in the end it's just like Peter relying on MJ miles and Aunt May to help him fully realize his potential as you return to your own studios to over to continue work on your current projects I hope my talk today it can help you overcome some of the challenges you're either currently facing or will face in the months and years ahead thank you so much for coming in today I hope you enjoy your estimate I practiced that about I practice at about 45 45 times I finally hit like the exact number I wanted so good all right and I everybody has questions feel free to fire away hi hi so I have to ask with

the release of into the spider-verse when you watched it was there anything that you were like Daniel I mean I think I mean I think just over I mean it's just more admiration for what they did from the art style to the the the banter between the two all the characters I think they just took some big creative risks I know I you know thinking about how many playable characters we had and all the different Spiderman I when I heard about they were doing the idea of spider-verse I was like how are they going to juggle and make sense of that because it's a kind of a complicated story line especially read the comics but I think what was amazing is they took that complex situation and made it very very simple to understand and again I think what's great about that story is again you have that great superhero action but any day it's a very humid story about miles and learning to be a superhero alright thanks welcome oh I'm gonna go that way alright so we've heard a lot about the heroes of the game today but I'd like to talk a little bit about the villains what were some of the biggest

grave challenges introducing the sinister six a lot I would say oh I probably would say one thing I didn't talk about in this talk but we probably spent as much time if not more on getting the villains right something we talked about if we wanted them to be the heroes of their own story and that's why we spent so much time with with OTO you know you see him absolutely the first time you see him a lot of Mario fans will say hey but he's gonna become doc ock and then what we did was we purposely humanized him a lot to the point where I wanted people to say was he going to become the villain or not almost like hoping he doesn't and now so he turns so we spent a lot of time and then we realized how do we elevate the stakes how do we show a more mature spider-man who's been a more experienced spider-man who's been doing this for eight years let's give him this biggest threat ever six villains at the same time I always say the same thing I'm mr. negative we spent a lot of time how do we humanize how do we make him much more relatable not just a mustache twirling villain because he wants to destroy the city for whatever reason right so yeah I think we were on something any game if you can make

your villain as interesting as your hero it's a win-win awesome ah thanks for sharing your experiences it's really cool to hear all that stuff could you elaborate a little bit more on the game design or gameplay side like some somatic air easier to focus on or core pillars of design sure I mean well I think the first minute we knew we're making spider-man game we had to say those webs they're attached to buildings I mean I think the other thing is we want to make sure that we didn't want to make a hardcore game it wasn't it was about spider-man everybody started me such well-known over the world we want to make the game as accessible as possible obviously have a level of skill but we beat in our brains over and over again make this game so any everybody could feel like a hero and with more skill they feel like a writer superhero over time so we really from a combat traversal to our boss fights we really want to keep that across the board and then it's just you know balancing the superhero nature of the character but then also how can we make someone like Peter or miles or MJ playable so again not only thematically saying we want to make a human story but

also delivering that in gameplay as well so from Peter working at helping on may a feast who actually working in the lab to being MJ in the Grand Central Terminal two miles being chased down by Rhino we want to make sure all those elements were in there awesome thank you very much welcome thank you very much for the talk was excellent appreciate it thank you so I'm curious you mentioned earlier some of the deliberate kind of new stakes so you put in the ground for this version of spider-man on May running the homeless shelter and reporter Mary Jane and so on did you have challenges working with Marvel as the IP holders and making those those changes so you just ask the second most question I've ever gotten asked about Marvel no I mean actually that was the thing that probably surprised me because I probably like a lot of people were thinking like oh they're the license holder they're gonna put all these restrictions on us and they quite frankly didn't they are actually more pushing us to try new things more than anything because the worst thing I didn't want I think we all didn't want people to say like oh I read that story

I've read that story already or I seen that in a movie so they were actually pushing us to to go try different things become the thing we talked about a lot was respect the DNA the franchise but not be afraid to mix things up for example you know what we if you played the end of the game you know what happens to a certain character right that was a that was a big deal I actually thought there's no way in hell that they're gonna go for it and we actually went back and forth about whether that person was gonna have that fate and I remember we went on holiday break and come coming back so originally she wasn't that was gonna happen to her trying to you guys probably on the lattice but and so originally we were gonna she was going to be saved and then I came back and I sat down with Bill and Eric our ally producer on Marvel I said hey I had some people who new to the studio play it they feel this way I haven't slept all vacation because I think that this needs to happen what do you guys think and they said we're actually having the same thoughts over break let's go for it

and because they want to make sure did we earn it it was more about earning the things we wanted to do and having reasons for it rather than just like we do you want anything to be out of shock value so once we understood that and we were laying the track for things that were gonna happen they were very they were very comfortable with some of the risks we want to take so they were great partners and I also think for us it helped that they're only 15 minutes down the road from our offices so like any time we would go one or two more emails we're a lot of like key just come over and we would just come talk about it in person and we would solve it pretty quickly so they're great partners and we loved working with them thank you thank you question yes so you mentioned planning for unknowns and keeping a set amount of time scheduled for whatever you need it for was there a point in production like near the end when you're going hold that you found some unknown time left over you're like oh can we start using this to add to the game or like how do you deal with that because you know any developers don't want to make the game as best as possible yeah how do you deal with you know like we have expect your time we can't use it so what I talked about is something I

wish we did more of reaction I don't think we planned enough for unknowns like I think that it it's funny I when I was a producer I never on sunset overdrive I actually had unknown blocks but what happens is this the game kind of just grows naturally and you're like I'll just start filling in those unknown time and then what happens you you're you're filling in for scope rather than filling in for things that are actually going not work so I think that you it's just this constant battle working and not battle but this conversation you have to have with your team to say like I know you want more but you're you're gonna want rework rather than more and I that's something like I'm part of me putting in the presentation was to like force myself to remember that's going forward of like more doesn't always equal better iteration and rework actually leads to a better experience so I just think it's something like you gotta you gotta do it before you can actually achieve it I guess like you

just gotta be like you know any I I can imagine like I can mention Scott I could totally imagine me going your Creek just fill them but just to do it do it just add it to that schedule I hope he pushes back on me going forward okay thank you you're welcome question cool Brian thank you so much just for working on the game you're really cool do it and thanks I got to say like spider-man brought me to tears okay in the game so my question is um your characters are all very emotional and I was just wondering do you in your studio get just as emotional working on it I've cried in meetings yeah yeah I definitely have teared up and when I've seen certain scenes I've also probably cried to say can we please do this um but no I mean hopefully you guys can tell him pretty much an open book and I wear my emotions on my sleeve and our goal was to make it a very Meriam a very emotional story like we wanted the highs of like the humor but we also wanted that very relatable human story so us having you know moments where that were pretty tough to watch I mean what was really well I knew when

the game was that some story of things were clicking is like that final scene that you see in the game one of our actors who was actually not in that scene sheykh she ran offstage because she couldn't watch the actual keycap and I was like all right well we did something we're doing something right here it's probably when the reasons why I fought to keep that scene but yeah I mean it's we're in a very very collaborative we're a very emotional studio I think that's what you can see in our games and I wouldn't want to go on this journey with any other people so yeah it's what you see is insomniac version of spider-man definitely thrown through that's awesome thank you very much forever thanks to the question hi you somewhat referred to this a little bit earlier in your talk but I wanted to ask about when you're working on a product that is something that you have a lot of experience with in your past you're super passionate about you and not just you but literally everybody on the team is the same way yeah how do you help focus that energy to stop

people from going off in many different directions because everybody has super excited and wants to contribute their own ideas and things but it can easily get out of hand have you helped focus that in a productive way I think two ways one is the pillars of your game establish the pillars of the game really early like you know we talked a lot about this game being a grown up Peter Parker so a 23 year old more experienced spider-man this idea of a human story we talked about a superior spider-man we're really leveraging the idea of acrobatic improvisation they're swinging being very accessible if when people start to fan out and come up bring it back to the pillars if it's supporting the pillars go for it the other thing again is mentioning the DNA of the character is it is it's important once you define that DNA the character like you said if it's someone like spider-man who's like you said so many different ways you can come to this character bring it back to is across any medium are those attributes still there and if they don't just say hey no this isn't the DNA of the character we're

talking about I know you're passionate about it but this is the way that we're thinking about it it's a really fine line because you want you don't want to discourage somebody right from coming up with a great idea but just I my advice is bring it back to the pillars of the game bring it back to the DNA of the character and more often than not I think the conversation will go in a positive direction but you know it's one of those things you it's a struggle like I said it's it's the spider-man or the character they have in their head it's hard to to you don't want to upset that so I think you go back to those pillars in the DNA and you'll you'll be in good shape all right I have one chance all right how do you get people aligned behind those pillars and the DNA that you've established because you know you stand in front of a microphone and you go this is the way we're making it no I mean I think you just I think if they see how passionate you are and they understand that you you you believe in the character and your passion about doing it right that they will they will follow and then also like I said gaming him because you're as you might pitch the

game originally right like there are so many things I didn't know what wasn't happening so making them invested in coming up with how we can solve it how we can bring this character of life through the story through the missions through the world and once you give them ownership of it they're much more invested to be part of that a part of that team so I just can't bring them into the fold as much as possible to solve those problems that you will eventually face thank you yep okay hi so you've talked about creative and character pillars a lot and how it's really important to stick them and stick to them and evangelize them through the project were there any pillars that you had to make major pivots on or change or abandon as you went yeah I think one of the pillars at the end of the game the beginning was a city with a mind of its own we wanted to push more of some of the world systems that we had and we just at any day had to make choice on priorities and scope and we knew right away that we you know we wanted to make a superhero that felt really good from a combat rehearsal standpoint we wanted this very human story we just said hey

this is we're going to put our emphasis right now and some of the world elements may not be part of that original vision so you know we still put a lot of time and we are really proud of the things we did put in our world but we do probably didn't achieve the first thought I had in my head and maybe it wasn't the maybe I was over scoping from the start so that's probably where kind of we had to make some I mean I've mentioned the idea about features and priorities that's like one of the choices we had to make Thanks yeah okay Hey hey you I saw you yesterday why hello good good to see you again thanks so much for doing this talk but uh one thing that really stood out to me about everything you just said and I thought was really interesting is you talked a lot about your personal journey kind of as you were as a person and creative director going through this process and you mentioned a lot of things that you had to learn and thinks that you're currently learning so based on that as someone who's a writer an producer and also trying to make sure I learned things and hold myself to account too do you have like any particular

strategies in your head that you go to when you're like well I want to make sure I keep doing this so this is what I should do to hold myself accountable actually sometimes I lean on other people like other people my team actually remind me like like Ryan Smith he's the game director that I work with he will like sometimes I'll get in the habit of like I'm gonna go solve this he's like no what if we do the brainstorm and he's I'm like oh yeah like let's get the team together and then like we just I just did that last week and it totally worked and it what were what came out of that brainstorm totally helped on something we're working on so I again I think it's you know sometimes asking other people say like hey if I start doing this remind me that I'm screwing up and get me back on track so that's that's that's what I started doing thank you yep quite oh we're dying to see you again all right oh I can I can I can that you can ask a question after it is I'm for sure all right well thank you everyone's thank you so much for coming [Applause]