Spider-man 2... ...building an open world

After the release of Spider-man: The Movie Game, I was pretty much fired up to do the sequel. And things won't be the same as it was. Methods and procedures to building the environment. Understanding the tools. Knowing the shader at hand. These and a lot more constantly change on every project cycle. Not to mention that the environment will be far different from the previous project. It gets bigger.

In this project, work required that we build Spider-man's turf: New York City. Well, not in it's entirety but close enough to what represents New York. We spent weeks just getting to know NYC (without going to NYC). It's landmarks (in it's general area), the architecture, neighborhoods, the legalities of what can we use as well as can't be used (we learned this from the first SM release). Basically, I started reading anything and everything I can find online with regards to New York as well as it's current city conditions. But with such a massive environment to deal with, it was decided to cut down the size of the city that would be feasible to production schedules.

New York City master layout.

Purpose of the master layout was to organize the city production itself. After all, one person can't handle this much load. Hence it was divided into several cells (or as we used to call it "regions") in a honeycomb pattern where one terrain artist's work can be easily recognized by the next terrain artist (when it comes to bug fixing, eventually).

Divided regions of master layout.

If you'd notice a yellow box on the image above, that's pretty much what a single region is composed of. That said, the whole city was divided into more than 50 regions made up of city elements. As an example, here's a region from the master layout where a small part of Manhattan represents.

Sample of a region's WIP (Work-in-Progress) matched with Master Layout

And for a closer look, this is what a single basic region block would be like composed of buildings of various shapes, size, and design, as well as sidewalks, roads, and alleyways.

Sample of a basic region's WIP (Work-in-Progress)

The concept was pretty much similar to Lego bricks. Stacking one piece on top of another to form a building. Appearance, shape, design of a building, as well as adding a superstructure or two is pretty much the decision of the level builder and/or designer. Textures, on the other hand, were pretty much generated randomly in uniform design or mix-and-match of building materials (be it made of stone, wood, brick, glass, or any other building material). Not to mention that they also cycle to time difference (day and night).

Collection of "building bricks" used to assemble buildings.

Later on, details of sorts were added. On ground level, objects were thrown in such as lamp posts, pedestrian lanes, fire hydrants, newspaper stands, benches, bus stops, fences and sorts of barriers, trees, traffic signs, etc. On and alongside buildings from the ground floor to the rooftops, were decorated with a plethora of objects such as signs of various shapes and sizes that are either plain, simple, bright, and those with blinking with lights (similar to decorated billboards of NYC's Times Square), various store fronts with various commercial themes (ie. bookstores, drugstores, general merchandise, bakery), fire escapes, A/C units, water towers, billboards, flagpoles, etc. Other amenities are also thrown in everywhere such as window washer platforms, docks, coastline breakwater, fountains and treelines for parks (ie. Central Park), etc. All these details are pretty much seen on the game. Here are a few trailers showing the city from actual gameplay.

Overall, the project's scope was pretty much huge (well, at that time) compared to the previous Spider-man movie based game. Instead of hard loaded level per level, this was a huge chunk of city built from section per section just to come up to a close representation of New York City (minus the actual details of NYC). We also had to deal with legal issues of what NYC landmarks (mostly buildings) can be used and what can't be used. Thank goodness we were allowed to use the Statue of Liberty.

"Mesh footprint" of Empire State Building used during production.

Reception? As mentioned from Wikipedia, the home console game was released to generally positive reviews, citing the realistic, life-sized Manhattan, large variety of crimes and emergencies to stop and vivid use of Spider-Man's abilities making the player really feel like Spider-Man. The most popular aspect of the game was the web-swinging mechanic, where Spider-Man had to shoot webbing at an actual building, unlike previous games where he shot webbing up into the sky. However, parts of the game were criticized, such as the complaints of some of dullness of the side missions and the linearity of the story objectives (which many saw to be contrary to the developer's idea of creating a free-form game).

Spider-man 2 (video game) cover for Playstation 2. Also available for XBox and GameCube.

However, IGN gave the game a review of 8.8 out of 10 for the Sony Playstation 2 and Microsoft XBox version, and a 9/10 for the Nintendo GameCube version.The Official PlayStation 2 Magazine ranked the game #50 of the "Top 100 PS2 Games of All Time." In the Screwattack top ten 'Top 10 Movie-Based Games', Spider-man 2 came in eighth. In 2010, the game was included as one of the titles in the book 1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die.

Here are a few screen shots of the game.

Spider-man on top of a building over looking the city.

Spider-man scales a spire of a skyscraper (supposedly, the spire of Empire State Building)

The city's look from above. Actually, this is the view when Spider-man jumps off most skyscrapers.

The city at night while Spider-man does his swings, leaps, and bounds.

Spider-man webs up a thug.

Spider-man captures a thug with a websling and yanks him.

Spider-man deals with a thug any which way he can.