The story is written:

We did one more thing that is worth calling out: we doubled down on the fantasy of a personal bond to an animal. We added lots of small flavor animations and voice lines where the player character and mount reacts and responds to the contexts around them. Players have received this very well.

We want the player to ask themselves "what more can I smash?", "what places can I launch myself to?". Especially "Launch" is especially a skill that allows player expression. You can do cool stuff like, launch yourself in air, shoot a helicopter and land on the ikran again.

We crafted a world for flying. The world team created a vertical mountain canyon region... It is essentially Manhattan with tall spire mountains instead of skyscrapers, canyon rivers instead of roads. You can still go all the way up and above things, but often flying around stuff is more efficient.

The team that worked on the mount on the main game still had done a really great job of selling the fantasy, but it poses an interesting question when starting on an aerial focused dlc: where do we improve without completely ripping things apart? So here is what we did:

Flying in Avatar sometimes struggles in all these areas. Flying has a wing flap mechanic that boosts speed and drains stamina, but that is about it. No way to master it, no way to make it yours. While flying above the skies is exciting, it becomes hard to add any mid-level navigation or distractions

On top of this, aerial movement in Spider-Man offers a lot of small micro decisions. Should I intervene in combat? Should I go pick up loot? You are existing in the same space as all these opportunities, and you can fluidly shift in an out of activities and types of play, while traveling from A to B

In order to describe what I feel we were missing, let's look at an open world game that really nailed "flight": Spider-Man by Insomniac. The moment to moment aerial traversal mechanics feel great and expressive. Your movement can be efficient, creative, or cool.

Secrets of the Spires is a fully "aerial focused" dlc, which was a bit of a gamble. We felt there was a huge untapped potential in aerial gameplay, but we hadn't really proved we could make flying -really- fun in the main game.

Am I the only one who still defaults to the Xbox 360 controller?

et's talk about my favorite #gamedev topic of controls and input: When inputs and outputs blend together.
The Dualsense controller is part of Astro Bot's fictional world! Think about how wild that is! (1/?)

Like: who would give the best massage of these cute fellas?

One of my responsibilities on Avatar was to develop the "mimetic harvesting minigame". A natural way of interacting with harvestables in the world of lots of different shapes and sizes. Under the hood, kind of a classic lockpicking game, but much more tactile and embodied.

Introduction: currently working as a lead game designer at Massive Entertainment. Worked on Avatar Frontiers of pandora since 2020 mostly owning systems design, but towards the end also as a lead on the stellar 3Cs team.