Marvel's Spider-Man Miles Morales: The Creative Journey

[Music] hello my name is brian horton creative director at insomniac games it's an honor to be at gdc to talk about marvel spider-man miles morales the creative journey before we jump into the presentation let me start with a quick overview of my career and the events that led up to the creation of our game in november of 1994 i graduated from the savannah college of art design and landed my first job in the game industry throughout my 26-year career i've worked at seven studios on 20-plus games as an artist lead artist art director game director and most recently the creative director of marvel spider-man miles morales a launch title for the playstation 5. it was a career highlight to be at insomniac games collaborating with playstation studios and marvel games on this amazing franchise spider-man is very special to me because my love for the web slinger runs deep as a young kid in the 1970s my mom made me a hand-stitched spidey

costume for halloween i played with numerous spider-man action figures i was obsessed with the reruns of the classic 60s spider-man cartoon and i lovingly read and re-read the pages of my silver age spidey comics but years later i would rediscover my love for spider-man in miles morales brian michael bendis and sarah picelli's work 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 important to make his video game origin story a special experience starting with our first game marvel spider-man we introduced miles morales an afro-latino teen born and raised in brooklyn with a passion for science playing ball mixing beats and his favorite hero spider-man in our story peter is older and more experienced this provided us a unique opportunity for a new take on the spider-man 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 of being a hero so this brings us to marvel spider-man miles morales and i'm excited to share my perspective on the creative journey this presentation is a chronological overview of the development from pre-production to release my hope is you walk away with a better understanding of our process and benefit from some of our best practices and lessons we learned along the way the topics include crafting the vision building the dream iterating to quality road to release and takeaways so let's discuss the first topic crafting the vision insomniac games is a collaborative company everyone pours their ideas talent and passion into every title we make and miles morales was no exception at the beginning of pre-production our team was small and i worked closely with the following people to create the creative vision for miles morales jess reed is our lead pm

cameron christian our game director ben arfman lead writer evan narcissus writer and consultant mary kenny advanced writer james cooper lead designer gavin goulden and jason hickey are co-art directors pre-production began in august of 2018 and ended in december of 2018. this first milestone included documentation for the creative vision story animatic mission macro art bible and production plan we also created a vertical slice a mission that would represent our goals for gameplay and art so the following is an abridged version of the creative vision powerpoint i presented to sony and marvel at the end of pre-production in december of 2018. my goal was to communicate the theme pillars design art direction and story outline because we were so early in development most of the images in this presentation are illustrations from the miles morales comics and some early concept art

but be warned there are massive spoilers ahead so miles morales learns to master his new powers and discover his true identity in a coming-of-age superhero adventure our theme be yourself to become a hero miles must embrace his true identity miles wants to be just like his mentor peter parker to save his new home but he needs to embrace his unique power to become his own spider-man our game was built on three pillars the first become an explosive new spider-man miles will play differently from peter with new combat traversal gadgets that embraces unique powers bioelectricity and optical camouflage these powers will improve throughout the game as miles in the player become more experienced or second protect your home from two warring factions harlem is ground zero of a two-sided war between roxanne and the underground miles must defeat these threats to protect his family friends and citizens of east harlem

and finally play a seamless cinematic experience an uninterrupted journey from the beginning to end by eliminating loading screens and maintaining systemic control during our epic marvel set pieces the art directors also had three goals the first make a noticeable difference to the city by setting our game in the winter season the second embrace strong color with the neon noir aesthetic and third represent the culture of east harlem with authenticity the design was driven by our theme and gameplay pillars beginning with our hero you play as miles morales a teen with amazing powers that you will discover and improve throughout the story mile's wardrobe will evolve as he embraces his identity in act 1 miles starts in his homemade suit and after the first mission miles wears pete's gift suit in act 2 miles and genki will create the iconic black and red suit and in act 3 the player can earn up to

20 custom suits from doing open world activities miles has two unique powers camouflage which is ideal for stealth gameplay and bioelectricity is an organic energy source used for powerful attacks and puzzles for progression miles unique abilities and gadgets are unlocked in the campaign upgrades help miles defeat new enemies and solve environmental puzzles traversal animations will be all new to reflect miles personality and abilities miles is inexperienced he isn't as controlled as peter so he'll flail his arms and legs when he catches air but he's stylish miles is young and enthusiastic so we'll give the player additional manual tricks for more expression while swinging and finally he's dynamic transitions will be seamless between cinematics and gameplay to make marvel sized set pieces even more epic but a hero is only as good as the villains they face our main antagonist is the tinkerer a

brilliant inventor of programmable matter a metal that can transform into weapons and armor the tinkerer recruits a high-tech criminal army called the underground the young mafia of new york they wage war with roxanne with plans to destroy their new form reactor in harlem roxon is an energy corporation who deploy paramilitary security to reclaim their experimental energy source new form with exoskeletons and next-gen weapons designed to combat the underground and miles the prowler miles uncle aaron davis is an ally and antagonist for our hero his efforts to protect miles from roxanne and the underground backfires resulting in a battle between miles and his uncle so we visualized our story in a 20-minute animatic we called story time we used this to help us test narrative comprehension and mile's journey to rise to the challenge to become his own spider-man

these storyboards were drawn by my good friend paul lee and narrated by our lead writer ben arfman this movie would be shown to players to test our story and allowed us to iterate very quickly the most important function on story time was tracking miles arc throughout the game like when miles saves peter and defeats rhino with his new bioelectric powers or when he manifests invisibility when roxanne threatens his life at the breathaway bridge and at the end of the game in his final heroic act when he's willing to sacrifice his life to absorb the energy from the new form reactor to save harlem the most important deliverable for pre-production was our vertical slice designed by brian matheson to demonstrate our gameplay pillars and make miles feel unique from peter parker as a way to prove out our third pillar play a seamless cinematic experience we created a start screen that seamlessly transitioned into gameplay without loading ultimately the ps4 version would have loading screens for reloading and fast

travel but other than that the entire game was seamless from start to finish james hamm is the animator responsible for miles unique swinging and the tricks that you see here and even at this early stage you can see the differences from peter parker we chose the opera house mission from our second act our story because it featured traversal stealth puzzles and combat in addition this mission showcased the winter season the neon war art direction and the unique powers of the underground faction another initiative we had was to make environmental puzzles designed to be solved with spider-man's unique abilities like this simple web-based challenge miles camouflage allowed the player to re-establish stealth from combat and perform takedowns without being seen and finally we wanted to feature miles bioelectric powers to make a unique combat experience andrew garber and james hamm worked together to create miles in the underground's motion and after pre-production we would add

dynamic cinematography and slo-mo to enhance the impact of bioelectric punches jumps and dashes the team and executives in insomniac games and our partners at sony and marvel were excited about the vision story vertical slice and game macro which included 10 golden path missions and our open world content our pre-production provided a strong foundation for the game and we entered production in january of 2019 with confidence so this brings us to our second topic building the dream we utilized a new model we call slice production where we created fifty percent of the game's content in five months including missions quests activities bases training and collectibles missions were constructed in four phases we did documentation for a week block out for three weeks first playable for eight weeks which was basically finding the fun then we had art post and polish for the last eight weeks all this content was

brought to what we call representative quality which demonstrates the experiential intent of the game so we could playtest it for fun factor and overall story comprehension our first task in production was to create miles new home in east harlem and it was essential to represent the neighborhood people and culture authentically our team was immediately drawn to the vibrant murals painted on the walls celebrating the life and culture in the neighborhood miles lived his entire life in brooklyn but in our story he and his mother rio moved to east harlem her childhood home miles was unsure if he could keep up with the changes in his personal life and his hero life and he was searching for a way to connect to his new home so our lead designer james cooper had an idea for a new mechanic that would allow miles to meet and help the people of his new neighborhood the friendly neighborhood spider-man app or fnsm for short in this story mile's friend genki lee

created this app to allow citizens to report crimes and post requests to spider-man directly during our brainstorming process for quests evan narcissus suggested we feature east harlem's local spots places like a mom and pop restaurant the local barber shop and the corner bodega this idea was perfect it allowed miles in the player to learn about the neighborhood in an organic way and fall in love with the people who lived there teos bodega kicked off our harlem quest chain inspired by a three by five on an idea board called save the cat this simple idea resulted in one of the most memorable characters in the game the mission designed by shane mccloskey written by ben arfman required miles to locate criminals who busted up teos bodega and stole his cat which then named spider-man the team rallied around our new favorite mascot to create something truly special so what's more adorable than a cat in a backpack

well a custom spidey suit with a cat and a backpack so gavin goulden commissioned a new suit that we would earn by completing this quest and soon after one of our animators bula robelo created spider-man the cat finishers and andrew garber made custom poses for photo mode the reaction from our fans and press was overwhelmingly positive and this only happened because our team worked together to bring spider-man the cat to life but these harlem quests just kept giving hayley cooper is a skilled street artist and community organizer created by mary kenny for the final harlem quest mission designed by charlie carusi mary pitched this wonderful idea what if miles and haley spoke asl american sign language i loved this idea my son took asl in high school and it made sense to me that miles could have as well so we cast deaf actors and consultants to ensure the conversations were 100 percent authentic from left to right we have joshua

castile our asl consultant natasha opheli as haley and tj fortson who perform miles asl naji jira performed the verbal lines miles was saying on the side while tj was signing our animators in the mocap crew were excited by the challenge to innovate our finger capture technology and the results in the game look incredible the fnsm quests and activities were so well liked but we didn't have a reward for completing them all so the team brainstormed again what if the citizens of harlem gifted spider-man a special suit for those that completed all the quests thus the black and gold uptown pride suit was the result and the incredible mural designed by natasha lee hooker from our qa team was featured in the background the team driving ideas like this are an organic process and it's woven into the fabric of culture of insomniac games it's a reinforcement of our mantra that great ideas come from everywhere

throughout the 10-month production phase we did frequent usability testing providing our team valuable feedback to help us iterate to quality one of my favorite golden path missions was designed by timmy jordan written by ben arfman with art by ernesto gonzalez rio morales invites miles good friends genki lee and finn mason for christmas eve dinner to help miles feel more at home our team did exhaustive research to ensure the morales apartment was believable and with some help from our friends at sony research we had this unique opportunity to show this mission to a selection of individuals and families from east harlem we received so many valuable insights that helped us to make everything feel even more authentic my favorite details included the traditional dishes rio prepared reflected in this concept above the apartment was warm with holiday decorations and had a strong family feel but it also had a lot of narrative revelations and three new characters to introduce

so we started this mission in our first production slice and it was also the first mission to shoot mocap for our cinematics i work closely with the writers actors animators and amazing stage crew at sony to create these cinematics so let me introduce some of our talented actors and crew naji jita reprised his role as miles morales jacqueline pinol returned as rio morales griffin powatu voiced genki lee jasmine savoy brown played finn mason and the tinkerer ike amadi voiced aaron davis and the prowler and troy baker played simon krieger our incredible cinematics team is led by carla schwamm the cinematics pm jason regatz narrative coordinator ben arfman lead writer mary kenny advance writer and we had brian weiser mike yosh and chris zimmerman as our talented and amazing cinematics directors so let's look at some of the first cinematics we created for this mission

here's the original scene for genki's introduction in mile's apartment [Music] you gotta show me that electric thing oh no no suit in the house right miles is that you this next scene was designed to convey miles and finn's close friendship and that she's a brilliant inventor and also the tragic death of her brother rick what is that something i've been tinkering with carbon grid rigged as cellular automata

programmable matter are you serious no people have been working on that for years finn you know you could pay for college 20 times over if you just sold that to oscorp or even roxon yeah not gonna do that for real wait dude doesn't your brother work for roxanne yeah this is like thomas edison in the light bulb call rick miles rick's dead he's dead i wasn't gonna it's christmas i didn't want to ruin the night how what happened if you don't want to talk about it i understand no

it's all right there was an accident at the rocks on campus last summer they said it was a gas leak but i know they're lying i'm not roxanne's biggest fan [Music] finn i'm sorry [Music] you know last year my dad your mom told me miles i'm so sorry me too and this final scene i want to show is some stage footage from a cinematic that happens after dinner in this version we had a lot of conflict finn was pleading for the morales family to move and miles wasn't too happy about moving from brooklyn to harlem so let's take a look campaigning against them is like wrestling a bulldozer

that's something i wanted to talk about you and miles need to move back to brooklyn further if you can are you serious my brother was on the new form project that stuff scared him i'm not sure why but it's not safe finn i am so sorry about rick but that's all the more reason to stay and fight get new form out of here protesting won't work i've tried everything roxanne's too powerful i mean she's not wrong mom you think we should just leave the rock song's like 10 times bigger than oscorp why fight a losing battle because this is our home

your home so the quality of the writing and the act in these scenes was absolutely stellar but when we installed them in the game we identified some issues that we had to solve first we had too many character introductions genki rio finn each had introductions in this mission and it was a bit overwhelming and crowded we had inconsistent tone we pivoted from lighthearted moments to serious moments resulting in too much conflict overall and finn's motivations finn's pain and motivations to become the tinkerer were presented a little too early in the story so we needed to make some significant changes to fix these issues including moving genki's intro to earlier in the story just after peter gives miles his new suit we remove conflict to focus on the celebration between family and friends after all this is the heart of our story so it had to represent what miles would fight to protect we moved the time capsule introduction to later the next day teasing out finn's

problem without revealing the true source of her pain we introduced three flashbacks with rick so the player could see how important he was to finn and to miles and we allowed miles and the player to witness rick's death in a video finn recorded this scene was critical to understand why finn would become the tinkerer spacing out these story revelations helped to reinforce miles and finn's friendship before the tragic turn of them becoming enemies making this many changes after production would have endangered the release date but we were able to accomplish these fixes because we budgeted for one additional production milestone we call pre-alpha or reckoning an additional five-month production milestone designed to address problems with gameplay and story to use this time effectively we've built a strategy to prioritize our efforts so first we focused on the first 90 minutes of the game restructuring missions to improve pacing we wrote new cinematics to spread out

our character introductions improve character motivations and story comprehension and each one of our boss fights were expanded and improved so remember when i said we planned 10 golden path missions from pre-production well by the time we were at the end of pre-alpha we restructured act 1 added missions open world activities and many of our cinematics were redone or heavily modified to make this achievement even more impressive most of this work was accomplished at home because of the coveted lockdown so i want to give an extra special thanks to our narrative cinematic and post teams they truly pulled off a miracle and i can't thank them enough so this leads us to the road release as we entered alpha we switched our focus from production to polish and we had a few key areas to focus on which included next-gen features music and audio and marketing materials it was such an honor to launch a title for the playstation 5 and our core tech and tools team led by mike fitzgerald

created new features to take full advantage of the power of the playstation 5 including including updated skin shaders spline based hair that moved and rendered more realistically ray chase refr ray trace reflections for glass skyscrapers wet streets cars and other reflective surfaces throughout the game eventually the tech team created a performance rt mode which supported 60 frames per second and ray trace reflections we capitalized on the speed of the playstation 5's ssd allowing us to stream high quality assets on the fly and perform near instant respawn and fast travel supporting the dual sense controller to create a new layer of immersion to the spider-man experience haptics connected your actions to miles power so for instance you experience the crackle of electricity flowing from one side of the controller to the other when performing a bioelectric punch we leveraged the resistance triggers so the players could feel the web shot and tension through the swing of the ark

and the tempest 3d audio tech engine facilitates full 3d ambisonic sound allowing the player to hear traffic under you when you swing and a much better sense of enemy positioning from all directions and new accessibility features ensured as many players as possible could play our game as we added a number of options that made the game even more inclusive these features like low vision mode seen in the screenshot above were a passion for our lead programmer roster mcintosh lead ui artist gil doran lead effects artist brianna lindsey and our entire user research team led by brian allgeier all of these features came together with the incredible music and audio john pizzano returned as the composer and created a new score that felt unique to miles while maintaining the original spirit we added the talents of boywonda to create beats and produce two original songs with lecrae where i where we come from and this is my time we licensed on my own by jaden for the

reveal trailer and an original track i'm ready for the launch trailer and end credits the new score provided the emotional core for our game and it was a fusion of epic orchestral themes cutting edge beats original and licensed tracks and this hybrid approach created a sonic tapestry we dubbed orchestral synthop the picture above was our audio team at studio a in nashville tennessee right before the covid lockdown and here's just a small sample of the orchestra in action [Music]

our game was nearing completion and we were ready to reveal it to the world before we started our reveal trailer we created three goals to steer the direction the first was a new hero and a new season we wanted to focus on miles morales the young man and the new spider-man his unique swinging and new powers bioelectricity and visibility and then harlem bringing it light to life in the winter season we wanted next-gen fidelity that facial animation and hair really coming to life cutting edge ray trace reflections and film quality simulation and effects and we wanted this trailer to be memorable and unexpected to create a mysterious introduction and an explosive montage of action and to set it to an iconic piece of music by jaden the work of our entire team is featured in this finished product but we assembled a strike team to focus on the trailer including ryan schneider who's our chief brand officer cory hoover who's our senior marketing producer and the editor of the

trailer ben arfman lead writer gavin goulden art director mike yosh cinematics lead james hans senior animator brianna lindsey lead effects artist matthew bennett senior effects artist jenna ruth advanced effects artist and ed ruiz senior lighter the slow motion reveal of miles morales was the brainchild of ryan schneider inspired by this concept by nicholas shoemaker which represented the moment miles was willing to sacrifice his life to save harlem the announcement trailer was a well-kept secret and it paid off because no one knew what this game was our team watched the fan reactions evolved from confusion to guessing what the game was to elation when miles face was finally revealed creating this announcement trailer was a labor of love with incredible editing film quality simulation effects lighting animation and sound design by the time of this presentation the reveal has 19 million views and generated a lot of buzz for our game

but we had one other major asset to create our follow-up would be a mission that showcased our pillars and would prove miles was his very own spider-man we selected another one of my favorite missions from the game that we called time to rally an exciting action set piece designed by neil walker with art by ernesto becerra with feat that features everything that makes miles morales a unique spider-man it begins with miles and genki walking through a holiday street fair to rio's election rally that's showcasing the rich culture of east harlem and the new ps5 tech features like raytrace reflections here's a sample of this section from the demo subway card check you got the house key yeah i got it [Music] come on we're gonna be late [Music] hey dude i am so filling your suit with snow

are you still wearing your suit yeah you know just in case it's gonna be fine see this is my favorite part of living in harlem pop-up street fair best food in the city awesome music man this would be great for the last speed i was working on i should get back into mixing the next section we see miles become an explosive new spider-man with his new bio-electricity and camouflage powers i have to stop this [Music] [Music]

people are trapped over there i have to push past these guys [Music] where is he and our final pillar play a seamless cinematic experience is showcased as miles scrambles to save civilians from the crumbling bridge in an epic marvel-sized set piece [Music] the bush [Music] everybody get out [Music]

and finally our launch trailer created in partnership with sony marketing and akqa and blur studios we wanted to show how miles rises to the challenge to become his own spider-man [Music] remember miles [Music] okay [Music] so i'm proud to say that in the challenging year of 2020 with a global pandemic massive social unrest the entire team working from home we shipped a playstation 5 launch game on time at 85 metacritic with numerous nominations and awards

our team was honored by the reception from press and especially our fans we can't thank you enough for your continued support so are some key takeaways from our experience that making of making marvel spiderman miles morales our successes which include driving vision with theme and pillars strong pre-production ideas from the team [Music] embracing cultural authenticity representation and accessibility next-gen features iteration to quality but we have some learnings from the future we plan to develop full scripts before shooting mocap our story time was great for structure but it wasn't enough to fully test our story so in the future we plan to write full scripts and perform table reads before entering into production and iterate when it's cheaper with storyboards and reduce the need for costly reshoots we want to balance excellence and well-being

we iterated a lot in pre-alpha but these challenges bled into alpha and beta while we made improvements it took a toll on our team we'll continue to refine our process to achieve excellence and well-being for all insomniacs i want to thank all of our fantastic partners at sony playstation and marvel games the executive team at insomniac games and especially brian into our ryan smith john paquette and bobby coddington for your massive contributions and support during pre-alpha but the last but not least i want to thank every developer the talented actors and our families that support us and insomniac games we strive to make a positive and lasting impact on people's lives and i feel so honored to be a part of this incredible team it's been wonderful discussing marvel spider-man miles morales the creative journey once again my name is brian horton creative director at insomniac games and please feel free to follow and contact

me through twitter at brian horton art thanks so much and have a wonderful gdc [Music]