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Jamie Fristrom (Chief Scientist, Happion Laboratories, LLC)
Location: Room 2001, West Hall
Date: Wednesday, March 20
Time: 9:00 am - 10:00 am
Pass Type: All Access, GDC Conference + Summits, GDC Conference - Get your pass now!
Topic: Design
Format: Session
Tutorials: N/A
Vault Recording: Video
Audience Level: All
This unique format of a Classic Postmortem features a design 'deep dive' from Jamie Fristrom, technical director and designer on Treyarch's 2004 game 'Spider-Man 2', into its widely acclaimed web-swinging mechanics. He'll talk about the trade-offs the team made while developing the locomotion of 'Spider-Man 2', the lessons they learned the hard way, and compare them to other swinging games such as 'Bionic Commando Rearmed' and Insomniac's 2018 version of 'Spider-Man'. Swinging mechanics are an interesting beast in that they tend to err on the side of *too* challenging, knocking players right out of a "flow" state, and developing 'Spider-Man 2' was mostly a process of finding ways to make a very difficult challenge accessible. Physics, the controls, flow, ease of use, cosmetics, tutorializing and more will be discussed.
The Spidey 2 team's experiences can act as a lens for attendees to look at their own game designs, and hopefully gain new insights!
Attendees will ideally have some game design knowledge or experience.