The log from our visit to Blizzard Entertainment's headquarters continues with a tour of the Diablo III development studio, lunch with the developers, the StarCraft II demo, and more. Check out the photo gallery too.
The events of the day included:
Diablo III Demo
Development Studio Tour
Lunch with Developers
Gift Giveaway
StarCraft II Demo
Blizzard's Twitter Orientation
In part one, we noted details from the arrival at Blizzard HQ through the Diablo III demo.
Following the Diablo III demo, Bashiok led us through some back hallways behind the Blizzard theater and gave us a special tour of the new sound stages where the company records and edits all the sound and music from its games. The one exception would be when they record an entire orchestra, of course, as they've been known to do in the past.
Joey Lawrence, the Lead Sound Designer at Blizzard Entertainment and for Diablo III who was once part of the now defunct Blizzard North studio responsible for the Diablo series, showed us around the Voiceover, Mixing, and Studio/Foley rooms and even showed us the server racks in the back. Blizzard Entertainment used to farm out its sound production to Hollywood facilities, but at its new campus using these new facilities it now does all this work in-house. He gave us a special demo of the announcement trailer for Diablo III in the mixing studio, where we were lucky enough to get the acoustic sweet spot.
Next we moved onto the Diablo III development team's building, across the a painfully sunny courtyard and through the keycard-secured doors. As we walked by the conference room, offices, and roomy cubicles we noticed the labels were still marked "Project Hydra" elsewise known as the codename for the project. The office still certainly had the feel of newness to it, and quite roomy indeed. A few bikes were stored in a spare cube, and in practically every occupied one there were stacks or shelves of games and collectibles, novels, development and design books, and all sorts of random items. A leisure and game room with historic and modern console systems alike gave an amusing surprise.
Unfortunately during most of our day at Blizzard Entertainment's headquarters, photography and recording were not permitted so we couldn't take shots of this area.
We tried to catch a glimpse of the interesting-looking concepts taped up on the conference room's walls but that was a miss; we did, however, walk directly by the forbidden wall of unfinished monsters looking for something juicy. Though karma and legalese prevent us from reporting what we saw, it's safe to say there wasn't anything particularly shocking on display.
In fact, it was much more thrilling to meet gurus like Diablo III's Senior Producer Steve Parker and Victor Lee, the Lead Concept Artist who does some stunning work.
Alas we couldn't spend all day with the developers and so moved on to the legendary Blizzard Entertainment Library, home to a huge collection of games crossing platforms and decades, as well as books and periodicals all about gaming and development. The large, framed print of the current Sanctuary world map mounted on the wall above the reading table proved more intriguging than Principles of Distributed Database Systems.
We met Lead Level Designer Dave Adams and Nate Bowden, Environmental Artist on the exteriors team at the lunch with developers over in the campus cafeteria. Dave came from Swinging Ape Studios, the company that worked on StarCraft: Ghost acquired by Blizzard Entertainment; when the project was shut down he moved on to the Diablo III team. Nate, who would be on the Artwork Panel at BlizzCon, came from Electronic Arts.
The two developers talked mostly about life at Blizzard, explaining that unlike the horror stories one reads about long hours and low pay at Electronic Arts, they work pretty average hours and the company really promotes a balanced work life and personal life. Once or so a quarter, teams will go for excursions like the "sea voyage" they mentioned to blow off steam as a less conventional team-building exercise.
Nate & Dave
Karune & Bashiok
As one might expect, Nate uses tools like Maya and 3DS along with proprietary plug-ins for design work, building external environments like the Borderlands desert areas from start to finish. In short, the artists create a paper layout of the environment, make revisions, design it in Maya, make revisions, and export it in a simple form to the game to test with basic textures and sample monsters. They then playtest the area and revise it based on their own input as well as feedback from people across the whole development team.
Saying goodbye to the developers, we returned to the Blizzard Theater for the gift giveaway. Everyone in attendance was treated to a framed, signed print of the BlizzCon 2009 key art that decorates the front page of the event's web site. It's got a killer shot of the Barbarian, a Ghost from StarCraft II, and Sindragosa from World of Warcraft:Wrath of the Lich King.
Karune next took the stage and demoed a StarCraft II match for us, which was excellent. Unfortunately we can't talk about it just yet. Does that tell you anything?
The event wrapped up with an overview of the Community Team's new Twitter initiative, drawing fans to discuss Warcraft, StarCraft, and Diablo and participate in a variety of on-the-spot contests they'll be running. It's a great way for Blizzard to get more direct contact with fans and prime them for their ideas and opinions on what they're doing with games and Battle.net. Find them at @Diablo, @Warcraft, and @StarCraft, which they appear to be managing them using a cotweet account.
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