Although much of the game's development is a collaborative process, it's probably no more evident than when it comes to designing the heroes. The great thing about our process for designing heroes is that there is no formal process for designing heroes. Anyone on the team can provide a hero idea with as little or as much information as they want, and they all get added to our collective pool of hero ideas. Sometimes it will start with a sketch on a napkin. Sometimes it will start with a list of skills that sound cool. When we decide that it's time to start prototyping new ones, we go through all these, pick out the ones that resonate with us most (sometimes it's a combination of several different ideas) and begin the prototyping.

One of the things we try to do with all aspects of the game but especially heroes is get them into the game as soon as possible. We are able to take something from concept to playable character very quickly, sometimes within a couple of days.

Usually when we first put a new hero in the game it will be a Frankenstein-like monster where we grab pieces from various other characters and mash them together to try to represent the gameplay we're going for. At this stage it's all temporary art, animation, effects, audio and it so we must distill the character down to that feeling you get when you play them. Are the skills working? Does it feel like it's missing something? If not, we'll go back and make some changes. Once we're happy with them from a high level, we'll start adding upgrades to round out the character and make it so they can still play well with all the other heroes.

From this point on it's a constant iterative process where we're looking to make improvements wherever we can. For example, it's highly unlikely that any of the heroes we have now won't undergo several changes to their skills/upgrades before we release the game.