Process

Building it all in 3 days

I knew the timeline was tight, but I had ambitious plans for the hackathon. The process began in Figma, where I mocked up the general flow of the experience. From there, I ideated on an entry point to the Blizzverse; why not make portals on Blizzard's Battle.net launcher that could take you to new virtual experiences?

I used Figma to create theentry flow to the Blizzverse by integrating lore pages on the Battle.net launcher, which would allow users to read about in-game universes and thei favorite characters in a single place.

While lore pages in the launcher were cool, I really wanted to prototype a new browser-based exprience that could allow players to interact in new and fun ways outside of their usual games. With inspiration from platforms like Gather.town, I created a Unity prototype for a 2.5D sidescrolling social gaming platform that would allow players to create their own characters, learn more about Blizzard games, and interact in new ways. I included a QR code here that could act to onboard desktop users to the mobile equivalent of the Blizzverse.

That's right; with only a day left in the hackathon, we decided to make mobile Blizzverse experiences too.

These demos were created using a kitbash of Figma, Blender, and Lens Studio. I textured and animated the character models using Blender and Mixamo and exported the renders to Figma to incorporate in the mocks. For the live AR app, I used Lens Studio to anchor animated characters in the environment.

With the mobile equivalent of the Blizzverse sporting both AR and non-AR capabilities, we felt pretty satisfid with the state of our project. However, having used Lens Studio to get the AR demo working, I felt there was still potential for interactive expriences that could augment our players' reality, so I created a set of AR Snapchat filters inspired by characters from Overwatch 2.