Spider-Man 3

The Setting

From Summer of 2006 until Summer of 2007, I worked at Activision's Vicarious Visions studio in Albany, NY. I was hired as a "scripter co-op", where a co-op is something like a paid internship or, to the medical folks out there, an externship. My major program, the Software Engineering program at the Rochester Institute of Technology, requires one cumulative year of co-op for certain high-level courses which are required for graduation. I learned about the job through a faculty connection, and applied with my resume. A month or so later, I heard back, and two days later I provided the answers to the programming and game design tests I'd been given. Soon afterwards, I was interviewed by phone and, though I feel I talked too much, it must have impressed them enough to hire me.

Hard at Work

For the first few months, I worked mainly under Jason Bentley and Gabe So, the only two permanent employees in the group designated to perform mission scripting for the PSP, PS2, and Wii versions of Spider-Man 3. There, I trained incoming co-ops on the all-new toolset being developed for this game, and I also acted as a liaison between the scripting group and the engineering group, learning about and giving requirements for new technologies. Once development came into full swing, I worked on a boss fight(with Doc Connors) and a couple of small in-game cutscenes. Soon, however, I would be placed on a task I was really passionate about: dynamic content.

DMS, the Dynamic Dynamo!

Spider-Man 3's open city gameplay revolves around two sets of random occurrences: the REM, or Random Event Missions such as stopping muggings, helping victims of car accidents, and so on; and the Crime Wave game, where the terrain of New York is a backdrop for a turn-based gang warfare between five factions, including the police. This system runs constantly, even when the player is just running around or doing plot missions. The player can interact with the Crime Wave by performing Crime Patrols at specially marked tokens. These Crime Patrols are series of up to six missions pulled from the Dynamic Mission System, which is a sort of "mad libs" for short plot sequences. Each DMS mission segues into the next by a topical voiceover, and each mission varies in content depending on which gang is in charge in that area. The stage was set for a really interesting bunch of content, and many of the designers on staff, including the concept's original designer, Dax Gazaway, voiced the desire to play a game made entirely of DMS. I was in charge of making the DMS (as the whole system was affectionately known) dream a reality.

I handled object taxonomies, mission templates, placement guidelines, and other aspects of the DMS development. I was the only scripter on DMS for about three months, and was then joined by Wesley Paugh for one or two more. The way, however, that DMS had been sold to the higher-ups was that it would generate 70% of the gameplay time with 20% of the development effort, or some similarly high and low number. This meant that I had one first-year engineer(Jason Batchkoff, who I had to share with cameras) and, after the initial batch of resources, very little art support. But, with the extensive help of design team lead Tim Stellmach, who was responsible for bringing the DMS together, and the assistance of an excellent QA team who handled everything from token placement to exhaustive DMS testing, we were able to complete the system just in the nick of time.

I had a high measure of creative control in this assignment, up to designing the missions and metagame themselves with Tim Stellmach. It was especially high considering that it was my first project in the industry and my first foray into dynamically generated content like this. The frustrations I encountered while working on it fed into my desire to write Herodotus, since I felt the simple mad-lib approach of DMS was not fine-grained enough, and the support for creating a new DMS mission was basically a template into which the new stuff could be copied and pasted. The base mission and trigger systems had never been written with DMS in mind, so my job (and that of my engineer) was as much hacking around system restraints in time to ship as it was actually generating content and features. The 70/20 split of DMS was a double-edged sword. We were vitally important only while we were inexpensive, and there were a couple of times we were concerned about the whole system being cut.

Without lingering too long on the 80+ hour weeks required for the last six or so months of the project, I think that Spider-Man 3's dynamic mission system was an ambitious effort and a great learning experience, in the midst of an entire project of ambitious efforts, new technology, and learning experiences for Vicarious Visions. Regardless of how well it was reviewed, it proved popular with players, and I think the extra variation it offered over Spider-Man 2's wrench-wielding hordes and "save the balloon" missions justified it.