I’m happy to answer this fun design question that can apply more generally to other games and genres. I’m definitely going to cut down on detail for this as it could be a VERY long response, but here are the primary steps. I’ll use Skadi as a constant example for each step.



1. Future Planning/Lore Research

The first step of designing a god is to identify them and schedule them. I’m listing these 2 concepts as one step because they often go hand in hand. Its pretty hard to schedule a god without learning about it first. We have a large doc filled with interesting gods and brief lore descriptions that we constantly update. We plan out many gods in advance to get a good rotation of pantheon, class, art style, gameplay style, and personality. Gods that make it on the schedule usually have 1 clear defining feature at this point. The defining feature can be either visual, gameplay or both. For example: Skadi was specifically added because we wanted to do a pet class.

2. Conducting brainstorming sessions

The next step is to get some rough ideas for how the god would act, look, or fight. We have sessions with lots of different SMITE employees where designers present some historical images and lore and we collect feedback about the god. Artists help us narrow down their important visual characteristics or personality, programmers, designers, and QA can help us narrow down gameplay mechanics. Skadi’s design allowed for many different ways to control a pet in SMITE, so we explored lots of these options at this point. This is also when the esports team helped us create the new type of CC used in her “permafrost” ability.

3. Giving feedback on art, theme, and tone

As soon as brainstorming begins the concept art team begins to design the character visually. We usually do many iterations of art work for one god that designers give constant feedback on. We advise them of the possible gameplay and what visuals would help tie into that. We describe the personality and themes and make sure the visuals reflect that. The concept art team is responsible for the details and unique choices that make our gods SMITE gods and not just lore copies. Designers just provide information to help guide them until we reach an iteration everyone agrees on. Here we solidified Skadi’s visuals that represent winter and hunting, and decided how Kaldr would look and why he existed. He is actually an ice elemental who takes the shape of a wolf in our lore! We also decided on her personality. Although she is technically a Jotun (ice giant) we wanted her to be more warm and caring. This fits with her animal caretaker style and her lore as a goddess that protects and guides you through winter.

4. Designing the ability kit

We have now wrapped up the brainstorming and have a nearly finalized visual concept of the god, so it’s time to do some REAL gameplay design. Designers take all of the information and feedback from the previous phases and rough out a few kits (set of 3 abilities + 1 ultimate + 1 passive). Each god has about three complete kits proposed on average, each with completely different abilities. Sometimes 1 kit jumps right out at us, sometimes we mix and match our favorite abilities from each kit. The important thing is that we focus on the key visual and gameplay themes of the kit. All of Skadis kits involved icy abilities and ones that included Kaldr. We also determined early that her damage would be high because of Kaldr and thus mobility would need to be limited.

5. Assigning tasks to other departments

Before we get really started on producing the god, the designer will create and allocate the tasks to artists and programmers. This mostly includes the gameplay programming team and the FX art team. FX art handles all of our projectiles and particles. They are the most important art team in early prototyping. At the same time the Concept team will mark the god as complete and hand it off to modeling, then rigging, and then finally animation. Animation and Tech Art teams will provide us with temp models and animations until the final ones are completed. Skadi required an exceptional amount of code work to get Kaldr moving naturally and pathing around the map. There was also increased art costs because the design included 2 characters. We used the Fenrir model to start on this early and paired it with Athena’s model to be the temp for Skadi.

6. Iterating with gameplay programmers to prototype and implement the kit

This is when the designer and programmer start working together daily to create the kit. We want to get early feedback on how viable the kit is so we test it as soon as we can with placeholder art. We borrow projectiles and FX from other gods and combine them to create entirely new gods. This involves designers spending a lot of time in our database as they set up all the abilities. We do a lot of manually entering numbers, checking boxes, and selecting in drop downs to get the god working. Designers also spend a lot of time here determining balance numbers. We do a lot of math, spreadsheets, and comparisons to other gods to estimate reasonable damage, scaling, mana costs, and cooldown numbers. We learn a lot about the kit before any at work is done. Re-doing art work is VERY difficult so we want the design to be solid before art gets too far in the process. Skadi’s first kit involved Kaldr having a unique function with every ability she used. This was extremely clunky and difficult to control, so he was changed to be controlled by a single ability with some limited interactions in others.

7. Polish and Balance

After we test the kit and make necessary changes and tweaks, we start to put all the pieces together. Designers serve as the midpoint between artists, programming, UI, and other teams. We make sure that all of the necessary parts and pieces of a god get into the game and work as intended. Designers write the voice packs, audition actors, and direct them in the voice sessions to make sure we fulfill our vision of the god’s personality. At this point the model and animations will start streaming in. Designers will review these and make sure they fit the goals of the god and clearly communicate what is going on in battle. The final visual FX for all of their abilities will be finalized and tested also for clarity and uniqueness. Designers will also be making balance level changes to the kit by tweaking numbers slightly to get the god feeling good. A lot of Kaldr’s damage and hit points rules were tweaked here.

8. Maintaining and update the god after launch

In a game like SMITE the launch is only the beginning. We take careful steps to monitor and adjust the gods performance over time to make sure the god finds a healthy balance state. Designers look at stats and community feedback and have lots of discussions with the balance team. We also take bug reports and follow up on those to make sure things are working as intended. Skadi launched with extremely strong stats, although the community took a long time before they agreed about how strong she was. Kaldr had some pathing bugs and was frustrating to fight against, so most of Skadi’s balance changes focused on reducing that frustration.



Thanks for reading!