Spider-Man 2: WebWing Redesign and System Mockup

Hey there, it’s been a while! 👋

If we have spoken for more than 5 minutes (or you follow me on the platform formerly known as ‘Twitter’), then you will be acutely aware of how much I like the Spider-Man games! The WebWings in Spider-Man 2 have fast become one of my favourite things - not least because they're the perfect opportunity for a redesign and some system setup!

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The Redesign

Not one to shy away from a challenge, I wanted to see how far I could get creating the wind loops using just white noise.

Phase Plant seemed like the best option for me to do this because of how many different noise generators I could have in 1 patch. Being able to route the different generators to their own effects lanes, with their own modulations, was also something that would be really useful for what I had planned.

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To start with, I wanted to make a really solid base for all of the other layers to sit on. This was pretty easy to make with just a noise generator and a bit of filtering out the top end to remove some of the harsher frequencies.

The idea of the next two layers was to make ‘gusts’ to add a bit of movement to the overall sound. I decided to make one layer focus more on the higher frequencies and the other focus more on the mids so we get a nice full frequency spectrum when all the layers play together. To do this, I loaded up a couple more of my trusty white noise generators and sent them to separate effects lanes so I could filter them differently. To get the ‘gusts’, I mapped the output of some ‘Random’ modulators to the cutoff frequencies of the filters and, in the higher gusts layer, the Q of the low pass filter. This gave me a slightly more ‘whilste-y’ sound for the higher gusts, which just helped to add a bit of variety.

Phase Plant Recording

The white noise was sounding pretty good but it just needed something to make it sound a bit less sythesis heavy. Time to get out the zoom mic and make some noise!

I recently found a video of Ben Burt creating wind sounds by dragging a punching bag across the carpet so I wanted to give that a go. In the process I learnt a couple of things about Ben Burt - 1) he has floors that are much less creaky than mine and 2) he has much more room to drag things across his floor than me, and as such, I was forced to rethink my approach.

The friction between the jacket and the floor made a really good sound so rather than drag it around, I decided to just scrape the jacket with my fingers. It achieved a similar effect with the added bonuses of a bit more control and a bit less bending over at awkward angles while running - a win-win situation if you ask me!

Recording the Jacket friction layer

After a bit of denoising and some EQ, the jacket recording was sounding closer to what I wanted but it lacked a bit of the intensity I was looking for. I loaded up one of Phase Plant’s newer features (and my synthesis soul mate) - the granular synthesiser - and played around with the parameters a bit until I had something that had a bit more 'oomf'.

Originally I wanted to have the ‘Jacket Gusts’ layer only come in when you reached top speed or had been using the Web Wings for a while but after dropping the clip into Reaper I found that this layer worked really nicely with the base layer to make the initial loop a bit more interesting and then I could fill out the mids as the speed increases. Normally I would have gone with ‘start low and get higher’ to show increases in intensity, so this was a nice change and definitely an approach I’ll use in future!

Before and after adding the jacket recordings

A detail I noticed in the original game was a subtle fabric flapping layer that played when the player started using the Web Wings. I really liked this little sweetener layer and I wanted to add something similar to my redesign. Once this was all layered up with the other loops, I think it came out sounding pretty good all in all!

Isolated Web Wing System redesign

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System Setup

For a change, I’m making this system in FMOD to see how it compares against Wwise’s RTPC curves.

I wanted the wind to pickup as Spider-Man’s speed increased so, in my mockup, I mapped the ‘Speed’ parameter to the volume of my different layers. The curves all start at 0 when the player’s speed is 0 so you don’t get any gust when you’re just looking out over the city and as you increase in speed, more layers of wind are added.

Web Wing System setup in FMOD

Add in a quick ’Thwip’, a sprinkling of environmental audio, some traffic doppler effects and a badly whistled snippet of the Spiderman theme tune and you’ve got yourself a pretty good Web Wing redesign! (Much easier than trying to record yourself gliding around New York!)

You can listen to the full redesign below! ⬇️