Fans of Insomniac’s Marvel’s Spider-Man can now get a glimpse of what it is like to write a video game, courtesy of a new script book that is set to be released this Tuesday. Lead scribe Jon Paquette spoke about the book yesterday morning, expressing hope that players and aspiring game writers can learn from reading the screenplay of the hit 2018 superhero title.

Insomniac’s Marvel’s Spider-Man earned high sales numbers and rave reviews from players and critics when it hit the PS4 in the fall of 2018, both for its fun web-swinging gameplay across an open-world New York City and its witty, engaging writing. The game blended elements of multiple iterations of Marvel’s iconic web-slinger to tell a classic Spider-Man story of power, responsibility and the duality of both aspects of Peter Parker’s life as a superhero, and fans have praised it as one of the best Marvel games in years.

As Paquette told Vice in an interview yesterday, the writing team for Marvel’s Spider-Man needed to collaborate with the game’s developers, and the script featured multiple rewrites as gameplay elements were tossed out and introduced over the course of the title’s four-year development cycle. “…Part [of making the script] is writing the [game] experience,” he said. “This is the part that not a lot of people really understand. It’s very collaborative. We work for the designers in this capacity, because the designers come up with the gameplay and we help them structure the experience.” He then went on to say the writers even helped to play-test the game. “We actually do a lot of usability testing … and we ask them specific questions like, ‘Do you know what your objective is here? Do you understand why you’re doing this one thing?’ and when they say ‘No, I have no idea but it’s super fun.’ Then, I’m the one that failed there. So then I need to go back and say ‘Okay, how can we help the player understand exactly what it is that they need to do?’”

A longtime member of Insomniac Games for nearly 10 years, Paquette started out in quality assurance and play-testing for titles like 1998’s Jurassic Park: Trespasser at DreamWorks Interactive before making the jump to Insomniac as a writer for 2011’s Resistance 3. He’s also a longtime Spider-Man fan and has gone one the record stating that working on a game featuring the character was a dream come true.

This upcoming book, as well as Paquette’s comments, should provide a fascinating look into the world of creating a video game narrative and how writers have to unite their work with the mechanics and interactivity of the game itself to tell their story. Video games like Insomniac’s Marvel’s Spider-Man allow players to engage with their plot in ways that simply watching a movie or reading a comic aren’t able to due to this interactivity, so it’s interesting to see how the different voices of the developers and writers come together to create a single vision. Fans will be able to take a look into this process when the Marvel’s Spider-Man: Script Book hits stores on Tuesday, February, 11th.

More: Marvel’s Spider-Man: Every Spidey Suit & How To Unlock Them

Source: Vice