![]() ![]() Development tools and the engine need to support new advances in hardware for Overwatch, and fresh gameplay experiences in Overwatch 2.Īt BlizzCon 2019, the team showcased the first playable build of an Overwatch 2 map-Rio-shared widely outside of Blizzard. New tests abound every day, some of them daunting in scope. Work on the features that make Overwatch possible isn’t just a process of refining and updating. “Whatever try,” Hamilton says, “they know we won’t let them break the game, and it’s easy for them to undo work, go back, and take a different approach.” TED’s visualization helps developers see how Overwatch’s 3 million assets and terabytes of source data fit together, enabling them to quickly pull from existing Overwatch components to riff on something familiar… or prototype completely new ideas. It includes unique processes for modifying content as specific as hero selection or Play of the Game generation, along with representations of Overwatch-specific concepts like skins and team colors.īut TED’s not just for making Overwatch as we know it today it’s also flexible enough to support creative experimentation around Overwatch’s tomorrows. To that end, TED is tailored to the experiences of the developers making Overwatch, built on the lessons the team’s learned over the years. “The more you enjoy making your game,” Hamilton says, “the better a game you’re likely to make.” Rowan’s guiding principle for the tools team is fitting and succinct: anybody making changes to Overwatch’s gameplay should be able to play through their changes, quickly and often. He describes it as “a Diablo clone” and, not coincidentally, blames at least one failed exam on the time he spent playing both Diablo and StarCraft. Lead Software Engineer Rowan Hamilton, who worked on the Killzone series (and, like Phil, Project Titan prior to Overwatch), made his first game in college. Can we make that easier and more enjoyable? ![]() Where are other members of the team spending most of their time making the game?Ģ. The charge of the Overwatch tools team is “TED,” the game’s editor, a visual interface where artists, designers, and other engineers can arrange and fine-tune those engine building blocks: crafting levels, writing scripts for heroes, adjusting cooldowns, creating the animations and sounds that bring those things to life, and linking it all together. Of course, new building blocks still need to be presented to designers, artists and other engineers on the Overwatch team in a usable and efficient way to produce a playable and fun game. For example, artists who want to make characters’ skin more realistic, or add new ways to simulate the movement of clothes, work with the engine team to alter those fundamental building blocks without needing to rearchitect the game from the ground up. Like nearly all work on the Overwatch team, this is a thoroughly collaborative effort Phil notes he “can’t think of any problem where we don’t get together as a group and try to find the way forward.”Īnother of the engine team’s responsibilities is tracking and improving performance statistics, memory consumption, patch sizes, and load times, not only for their own sake but also to make room for new features. Their work on the code complexities of each piece of hardware lets other Overwatch engineers focus more on development of game features than the engineering implications of various platforms. Phil and the rest of the engine team enable Overwatch to run on different platforms (like PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch) at the best framerate possible. Teschner racked up what he says were “way too many hours” in his journey to play every single Blizzard title before his background in multi-platform and graphics development led him to accept a job here in 2012, working on a new MMO with the codename “Project Titan.” Though Titan was ultimately cancelled, he’s since helped recombine some of its building blocks to ensure that its DNA lives on in Overwatch. ![]() Lead Software Engineer Phil Teschner, who worked on the Halo series and Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning before joining Blizzard, is the engine team’s chief block wrangler. Overwatch’s engine team builds the technical infrastructure of the game’s many systems, among them graphics, visual effects, gameplay physics, and audio-the “building blocks” that enable development. The Architechs on Overwatch’s engine and tools teams are the keepers of that legacy, and there’s no game without their work. Over 2.7 million lines of evolving code power the tools that support Overwatch today. But they need code in far greater quantities. And digital heroes need quite a lot to exist: dramatic motivations, iconic aesthetics, deep designs. The world needs heroes now more than ever, it seems. ![]()
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