Mike Huang Interview
-
Category: News ArchiveHits: 1025
Q: What games were you involved with in Blizzard Entertainment, and what was your role in each game?
A: One of the great things about how Blizzard worked is that everyone was involved in every game at some point of the process between conception to completion -- they did a very good job of asking for input and discussing problems and solutions for each game.
I guess you could say that I've been involved with every Blizzard product since Starcraft, including Brood War, D2, Warcraft Adventures, Warcraft 3, D2 Expansion, Starcraft: Ghost and World of Warcraft, along with some other products that didn't make it, but that's true of just about every employee at Blizzard who wanted to involve themselves in the
Blizzard product line.
I remember one of my first contributions to a Blizzard game was on Starcraft. At the time, the Pylons on the Protoss side were just farms. I had just finished playing C&C: Red Alert a few months back, and suggested to a Starcraft programmer that the Pylons should power the buildings for the Protoss, and that taking out the Pylons should render the buildings inoperative. The programmer brought it up at the next meeting, and I was glad to see the improvement made in the next build we received at Blizzard North.
For Diablo II, I was the Technical Producer, which had a lot of different responsibilities in a variety of areas, and gave me a great deal of insight and experience on the entire process of taking a game from begining to end from the developer side.