When we started on this project we wanted to enable new tactics for the engineer without sacrificing important game balance. Engineers (especially ones that stay on pure defense) tend to have a lot of one on one battles usually from other characters that are well prepared and practiced for that battle. Once dispatched, their equipment quickly gets taken out. We started discussing ways that engineers could be more effective in that scenario while at the same time becoming more exposed if a group of characters decided to attack.

Our concept then became disguising a weapon to look like a sentry gun, but not function like one. We decided that transforming a fake sentry gun into something that would attack single enemies would be a good way of achieving this goal while preserving the balance. So, we took away the ranged capability of the sentry gun and replaced it with a point blank attack.

Big Lug was the first concept we worked on - taking the sentry gun apart into all of its pieces then reassembling it into something that resembled an animal. Once we'd worked out the major pieces we jumped into a concept / demo cycle. After a few iterations we ended up with the model you see in our presentation.

We decided to have some fun with the Mini Sentry replacement and created a character that we named "El Jefe" using the same process which we'd envisioned to be just a little bit... off. It shakes, it quivers and morphs like it needs an exorcism. We spent quite a bit of time coming up with Texanese type expressions to describe El Jefe, finally settling on:
"He's meaner than a canned weasel!"

The project was a blast to work on and we're already working on new items to add to the workshop queue. We're looking forward to having discussions with you about our ideas!

Hope you enjoyed the show!

The Mesocyclone Team