Diablo

I was the Chief Designer at Blizzard while Condor (Eventually called Blizzard North) was working on Diablo. They had originally pitched it as a turn based rpg that was a rogue like. After we had been working on so many Real Time Strategy games like WarCraft and StarCraft I felt that Diablo also needed to be real time. I was responsible for pushing the project to this format. I also helped add a number of key design elements such as item durability, the hotbar, the click and hold to move mechanic, mouse over area searching for items, monster grouping with a leader and more. The weapon durability idea came from an old Dragon Magazine article called - these are the breaks. The hotbar idea came from playing Quake between builds of StarCraft and Diablo. It suddenly felt missing to switch items.