AWildLeopard

Any suggestions for ways to stand out from the crowd when trying to apply for software/technical internships or jobs at Blizzard, in particular relating to Overwatch?

u/BillWarnecke

Some thoughts from me:

A passion for games (and Overwatch, in our example) is obviously a huge plus.

Experience is great, whether you gain that through your job or through hobby work outside of your job. That can apply to engineering as well as to experience working in a team. If someone has demos of their work, that goes a long way towards standing out.

For us, familiarity with C, C++, C# is big as is familiarity with some of our content creation packages (like Maya, Photoshop, etc).

And we're always looking for individuals that bring a different viewpoint to our team. We find the best ideas/solutions tend to come from a diverse team working together to solve a challenge or implement a feature.

ChineseFountain

How closely do the engine team and content team collaborate? How does that process work?

Like with Echo’s ability, was that something that the engine team needed to build support at the engine level for first, then the content team can get to work customizing the feature that was built?

All parts of the team collaborate in the creation of the heroes. Heroes are usually available to play in team playtests months before they will come out. So we all get a look into them in an extremely early state.

The game engine is a good bit more flexible in development than it is in retail, so often the designers have what they need to make something work; we just need to make a pass to control the performance and efficiency of the heroes so that they will function well on all our supported hardware. On occasion, like with Echo, we need to do more significant rewrites of systems so that we can get things within a shipping budget.