Heroes of the Storm
Blizzard Entertainment
Brawls: Fast, Focused, and Fun
As part of the Heroes team, I helped lead the design and implementation of Brawls. Brawls are an all new game-mode focused on delivering bite-sized gameplay focused on rapid, concentrated fun. Our design mantra was simple: get to the good stuff quickly, don’t overstay your welcome, and keep players smiling the entire way through.
We drew heavy inspiration from across Blizzard’s game catalog, while channeling the spirit of experimental, high-energy gameplay. Whether it was Mineral Madness (with Diablo-inspired gameplay on a Starcraft set world.), Escape from Braxis (a cooperative top-down PVE survival run), or Lunar Rocket Racing (Wait you can do go-karts in a MOBA?!), each Brawl was a chance to break the rules and try something new.
I was responsible for end-to-end implementation of several Brawls — from scripting mechanics, managing encounter flow and spawning, to tuning difficulty curves and building AI. These modes gave us a platform to test ideas, celebrate seasonal events, and give players a change of pace. As a developer they allowed me to hone my skills in rapid iteration, cross-disciplinary coordination, and creative constraint solving.
Cho’Gall, Heroes, and Gameplay Systems
One of my proudest contributions to Heroes of the Storm was the implementation of Cho’Gall, a truly genre-defying hero controlled by two players simultaneously. This wild experiment pushed the boundaries of what a MOBA could be, introducing brand-new gameplay and technical challenges. I was responsible for the complete implementation, solving input routing, camera behavior, sync issues, ability ownership, and ensuring both players felt empowered and engaged.
Cho’Gall was a significant systems challenge, a UX challenge, and a design risk. Bringing it to life required close collaboration across engineering, design, animation, and QA, as well as extensive iteration and internal testing. Not to mention a lot of out of the box thinking.
After Cho’Gall, I became a subject matter expert on hero and technical implementation. I also implemented many other technically complex heroes like Varian (a multi-role, stance-switching warrior with an unprecedented animation pipeline) and D.Va (whose mech-to-pilot transformation demanded a full rework of the StarCraft II cargo system).
Working on Heroes was a dream come true. It afforded me endless exposure and growth as a developer! I developing internal tools, created heroes, battlegrounds, and AI. I learned the importance of documentation, and got to developing onboarding curriculum for new designers. I served as a design and implementation mentor for new team members, and got to spend a lot of time with some really amazing and wonderful people.