“It’s really the limits of your imagination,” Day says. “You can look at fire and go, ‘OK, I know what fire’s supposed to look like,’ but I don’t have to replicate it. I can make the feeling of fire and everybody knows what it is, it just doesn’t have to look exactly like real life. It’s boundless.”

“I don’t think anything we’ve done has been super innovative,” she adds. “We have a very stylized, hand-painted, basic kind of effects system that we use. But we can really get creative with what we do.”

As Overwatch continues to expand, the team also has to keep an eye on performance. “If our games aren’t playing snappy, then they aren’t fun,” Day says. “So we have to make sure that we’re keeping an eye on things and making them beautiful and impactful and also playing well at the same time.”

With Diablo and Overwatch, Day has had her hands in two incredibly popular franchises, but there is still one area she feels she should have studied more.

“Having stumbled into this, and not had school training on it, I wish I had paid attention to my animation classes a little bit more,” Day says. “Learning timing is such an instinctual thing. I think it’s important to understand the fundamentals of animation and the basics to understand effects. The same principles apply to effects as well as animation.”

Looking ahead, Day said she sees more sims being used in real time VFX, where developers are taking simulations from Houdini, stylizing them and bringing them into the game. She doesn’t think the process has been fully honed, but she’s excited at the prospect.

Day says the part of her job she enjoys most is talking to the whole team. “I’m talking to character artists one day and gameplay engineers the next day, designers after that. I really feel like I have my hand in just about every aspect of making a game, so it’s a fantastic vantage point in the process to be a developer of a great game.”