Heroes Production Director: "We are delivering constantly and it is unrelenting"



Alan Dabiri (left) and Kaeo Milker (right) have a lot of Heroes stories to tell. Since the earliest stage of Heroes of the Storm development, these two have been responsible for two different departments with similar problems. How do you lead a group of developers in creating a one-of-a-kind game that challenges genre archetypes, technical boundaries of Hero design, and Blizzard's usual way of doing things?

I had the chance to sit down with Kaeo and Alan, and after the mandatory swapping of nerd talk, we talked about the progression of Heroes of the Storm.



A New style



One of the most common problems in Heroes development comes from the way it's delivered. Historically, Blizzard has made mainly boxed games, but Heroes of the Storm is the first Blizzard game that requires constant delivery and the team had to adapt to meet expectations.

I think we're just starting to get good at it now and we're three years into it in this game. - Kaeo Milker

While it was a challenge to create a brand new MOBA it was also very exciting for the team. Because Blizzard does not have another MOBA, they had to change the way everything was structured and how they validated their ideas, and bring them to Blizzard standards

What pushes technological advancement?



Heroes of the Storm started as a custom game within StarCraft II that was shown off at BlizzCon until the team decided "Hey, this is really fun. Let's take this to the next level and put some serious resources behind it".



They tell us it has basically been the Blizzard design process since the beginning.

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We've always been such huge game players, usually we will go into some space and say 'OK, we love this kind of game, let's do our take on it. Let's take all the things we enjoy from all these games and do a twist on it' and that's really what Heroes is- Kaeo Milker

Death Recap is their perfect example of always being aware of what else is going on in a game's space in terms of the genre but while still considering what makes sense for Heroes. People would get blown up and they would say "I don't know what just killed me. I would love to understand why that happened." And now they can.



Another example is a change to the floating combat text. Blizzard didn't know they wanted, or needed it in the game but the designers and UI developers got together and worked on it and it turned out being really cool. This change came originally from Li-Ming because the team wanted it to be visible when they got the max-range orb hits.



The Heroes team has grown. When you go back to when we originally started this, it was first 2, then 5, now 150 +. It's delivering constantly and it is unrelenting.



Changes "Under the Hood"



Blizzard stresses importance on adding new features to the game, such as the addition of bans in Hero League. At the same time though, Blizzard is working on improving on delivering this content rapidly, which requires many changes that might not be immediately apparent to players.

We're doing it faster than we've ever done before at Blizzard, which is something I'm impressed with considering we've been notoriously known for being a little bit slow. - Alan Dabiri

Before the game's release, the patching mechanism took a long time to release a patch and now the team aims to release a patch every week. This is the type of major "under the hood" changes that are happening that players might not necessarily notice.



Engine improvements have been necessary to support new heroes. As a 5v5 game, HotS requires a lot of micro and the team wants the game to be as responsive as possible, with high framerates.



All of this is done to support Blizzard's vision to release content quickly.

Community Feedback



The team is very active within the community and is listening to feedback, but can't possibly make every change everyone suggests. If they did that the game would be going in way too many directions.



Blizzard needs to drive the direction that the game goes, but with the help of community feedback.



A lot of Blizzard's experience comes from being thoughtful about changes and not being too reactionary.

How the PTR Helps



The team gets a lot of meaningful bug reports and hero changes from the PTR. Many issues are caught through the team, but having assistance from community is huge.



Even releasing the patch notes early sparks a very meaningful conversation.



In an hour on PTR more testing is done than the team could ever do alone.



Trivia



Cho'Gall wasn't initially two heroes. It started as a warlock but the team got into a mode of trying to break the game. So they decided "Hey, we've got this two headed ogre, let's throw two people in there and see what happens." - Dabiri



Same thing with Murky, the team decided "let's just make a hero that keeps dying" and it ended up becoming fun.



Sgt. Hammer was originally Horace Warfield.

Follow us on Twitter @GosuGamersHotS for more Heroes of the Storm news and coverage from around the world.



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