Making Mauga: Dive into the development of our latest, larger-than-life tank hero with Team 4

news.blizzard.com:

Hi there, I’m Kenny Hudson and I’m a hero producer on the Overwatch team. Creating a hero is one of the most satisfying and challenging things we do in Overwatch. We hold ourselves to a high standard when it comes to making anything that goes into the game, and heroes like Mauga are no exception. In this post, I'll be outlining the journey we took to bring Mauga from a short story to the latest addition to the hero roster.

Ideas for new heroes can come from anywhere. Sometimes, we draw inspiration from a cool piece of concept art. Other times, it comes from an ability experiment that's been hiding in the background of our development data. And sometimes, as in Mauga's case, the inspiration comes from the appreciation of great lore in our universe. As the short story “WHAT YOU LEFT BEHIND” was being written, the team knew we had to get the new character Mauga into the game.

Heroes are developed in three main phases. The first phase is Prototyping, and during this stage of development, the team comes up with abilities and overall kit, bashing them together using temporary animations, sounds, and effects.

During our first pass on Mauga, we loved the abilities we were jamming on, but they didn't really suit the personality we’d imagined for Mauga. They were more telekinetic in nature, and the team was faced with an interesting choice—do we scrap these amazing ideas and start with something new for him, or do we use these to inspire someone new?

The team decided to go with the latter, and we used those telekinetic abilities to bring Sigma to life. Through the following releases and projects, we kept iterating on possible abilities until we landed on something we felt fit Mauga’s in-your-face personality. These abilities pulled