Adapting to Fundamental Changes
When your game's core problem fundamentally changes, you need a fundamental change in your solutions. This may sound obvious, but it's harder than it seems.
In the case of Marvel's Spider-Man, Insomniac Games had to pivot from making shooters to creating a character action game. This shift affected various aspects of the game's development, including:
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Behavior Authoring: As discussed in the Behavior Authoring section, the team transitioned from using complex behavior trees to adopting data-driven hierarchical finite state machines. This was necessary to handle the large number of AI classes and unique behaviors required for a character action game.
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Positioning: The Combat Iteration section highlighted how the team had to rethink enemy positioning and movement to create engaging combat encounters without making the player feel overwhelmed or mobbed.
The team developed a gradient descent hill climber algorithm to find optimal positions for enemies to stand, considering factors like Spider-Man's position, navigation mesh boundaries, and personal space reservations.
- Combat Management: As mentioned in the Melee Combat Management and Ranged Combat Management sections, the combat managers had to be significantly iterated upon to address issues like cheap hits, off-screen attacks, and player frustration.
Step 1
Implement simple combat managers for melee and ranged enemies based on shooter game principles.
Step 2
Iterate on the managers, introducing concepts like job stealing, proximity attacks, intensity meters, on-screen prioritization, and varying timing values based on player actions and melee enemy presence.
Step 3
Develop the Beat to the Punch System to ensure fair interactions when Spider-Man and enemies attack simultaneously.
The key lesson here is that when the core problem changes, the solutions must fundamentally adapt as well. The team recognized that their existing shooter-focused systems were not sufficient for a character action game and made the necessary architectural and design shifts to address the new challenges.
[Diagram to be made of the iterative process of adapting combat managers from shooter principles to character action principles]
This iterative process of adaptation was essential in creating a combat system that felt engaging, fair, and true to the Spider-Man experience. By being willing to rethink their approaches and solutions, the team was able to overcome the challenges posed by the fundamental shift in game genre.