5. Animation & Audio Design
Kenny Hudson: Now, this whole time, you’ve been seeing and hearing the work of our next two panelists, and you didn’t even know it. Now you do, and you’re about to know more. Kyle and Donovan, get up here and give the people more Doctrine.
Kyle Disanjh: Hello, BlizzCon. It’s awesome to be here. I am Kyle DeSange, and I’m one of the animators on the Overwatch team.
Donovan Robinson: And I’m Donovan Robinson, audio designer.
Kyle Disanjh: We’re here representing massive teams of people who make heroes, maps, and really all of Overwatch come to life.
Donovan Robinson: When we start the sound design for any new Overwatch hero, the IO team gets a narrative brief describing their personality, traits, and backstory. We’re also given terms that define their character. For Doctrine, it was poetic, sophisticated, grim. It’s our job to create a pile of sounds that give off these vibes. But for me, it was more than that.
The sounds I created for Doctrine are more than just a list of words. They’re extensions of the things I love in my daily life. Orchestration is something I’m deeply passionate about. For a hero like Mizuki, I dipped into flutes and wind instruments. But for Doctrine, I used orchestral strings to really bring out the class and chaos in his design.
So when you’re playing, keep an ear for these dramatic sounds embedded in his tech-forward kit. Something else you hear a lot when you’re playing or running from Doctrine is his footsteps. Unique footsteps with life and character are important in Overwatch. We try to make sure you can identify the hero hunting you down even if you can’t see them.
Think of Reinhardt’s clanking armor or Genji’s soft ninja steps. Doctrine is no exception. He’s a fancy guy, but his full capture included more mundane items. I recorded footsteps, clothing sounds, and dramatic cape swishes using cloths and shoes you can find in any store, with a lot of movement on my part.
These are just the bass sounds for his footsteps, though. We integrated the sounds of his drones to really help define his movement and give you a heads-up that he’s lurking just around the corner. Kyle’s going to tell us a little bit more about these drones, too.
Kyle Disanjh: Animation and sound design work very closely together as the new Overwatch hero evolves from a concept to a playable, identifiable, and possibly slightly terrifying part of the roster. Donovan made it look easy, but both of our teams go through multiple rounds of iterations to find the best possible way to make a hero look, sound, and feel good to play.
When the animation team was first looking at Doctrine’s concept, we knew one of the biggest challenges would be animating his drones without them feeling too busy, noisy, or distracting. They always had a bat-like shape to fit his vampy vibe, and our job was to figure out how to make them look like a true colony of little assistants without veering too far into fantasy land.
So let’s take a deeper look at the animation in a video starring early in development, very low-poly Doctrine. Awesome. This is one of the first tests we did. We wanted to match the concept with that S-shaped curve that the drones made around his arm. This is pretty cool, pretty promising.
One of the things we ran into, though, especially when we zoom the camera out like this, is that it starts to fall apart a little bit. You’re starting to lose a little bit of that shape, and you might be a little unsure as to what you’re looking at.
That led us to try something a little bit different. Let’s take these drones, let’s make a group of them, and let’s hover them around his arm, is what actually controls these drones, so it feels more tied together.
We broke it up so the drones bounce in their own independent way. That way, they each feel like their own little character. This, again, was a pretty encouraging test that we did. We felt like it fit; it wasn’t too distracting, and it didn’t take away from Doctrime himself.
With this kind of new test, we wanted to go back to the first one and see if we could maybe mix the two. Is there a way to get this to feel right? SO we went back to that S-shaped curve, but we removed the cycling where it needs to go from the top of his shoulder down the arm. We tried shrinking them, doing less drones, more drones, adjusting their size. Anything at this stage to try to find what feels right for the character.
After we did those, we decided let’s try one more big grand idea. This is when we put them in a big circle shape behind him. They’re constantly circling around and it makes a pretty cool vibe for this guy, but again, like I mentioned earlier, it starts to take away from him a little bit. And we want these drones like a part of him. We don’t want them to feel like they are bigger than him. So we took that circular shape, we shrunk it down, and we got it back to his arm, since that’s what we want to feel is more tied to the drones.
Once we knew what we wanted to do, we started doing some animation tests. How much bat-like behavior can we get out of these drones? These drones are just a single joint. There’s no wings, there’s no flapping. So how much can we do with just that one bone?
We took that animation, we moved it over to his arm with multiple drones now, and we liked how this felt. It felt like they were really alive; they were really a part of him, and he can call on them whenever he wants. Still did feel a little bit distracting, though. So one of the final things we tested is what if they were attached to his arm and he can call on them anytime he needed them.
He can reorient them, adjust them, all these kinds of things. This was also a pretty cool test. But it would adjust the design on his arm because the drones now need to slot in with it. All this is to say that while none of these individual tests are what we went with, all of them are needed for us to find what feels right for the character, and we are pretty proud of where we ended up.
From Donovan, myself, and all the creative teams behind Overwatch, we hope you enjoyed this little peek into our process and that you like Doctrine just as much as we do. Thank you so much for being here, and we can’t wait for you to play Doctrine.
| BLIZZCON 2026 OVERWATCH: WHAT'S NEXT PANEL TRANSCRIPT | ||||
| 1. Intro | 2. Narrative Design | 3. Art Direction | 4. Hero Design | 5. Animation/Audio |
