Time to take a break from all the serious news for a while, so let's just chill with GodsWar Online game designer Ethan Pan as he takes us through the creation of one of the game's star villains, the mythical Medusa.

"Recreating a mythical creature of her status was difficult to be sure," he wrote. "Medusa is not some no-name deity, she's about as famous as you can get." With this, Pan and the dev team faced two big challenges: how to incorporate the serpent-haired villain into GodsWar Online and how to make sure that she lives up to player expectations.

First step: they gathered as many images of Medusa they could find online for inspiration. One of these is the image on the right, taken from the net.

So the next step is to take that inspiration and make sure it sits well with the rest of the GodsWar Online world. "We weren't quite sure to go all out and make her a full-fledged monster, or make her more like the sirens from the Odyssey - beautiful and deadly," Pan said. "In the interest of aesthetics and her apparent vanity, we went with beautiful and deadly." Good call.

Throught the development process, they realized that they were leaning more to the beautiful than the deadly part. She was too much of a beauty, and there's not enough "monster." So they added some big monster hands to fix that problem. "We also added the always appealing bikini top for purely selfish reasons, and in a nod to Medusa's vain side, we even gave her painted claws."

The last step was the body. Going for the half monster, half beauty queen hybrid, they went with the corrupted mermaid design, and thus, the image of Medusa was completed.

With the model complete, it was time to turn to her powers. Both clever and cruel, Medusa would expect her enemies to come at her with magic. That's why Pan and company gave her magic resistance that would protect her against some spells. "Teamwork and proper tactics, not brute force, would be needed to defeat her. A dull and disorganized team would never win," Pan noted.

For future plans, the developers at IGG are gearing Medusa's Island for more advanced players, definitely not a newbie-friendly instance. For the low-level players, Pan and crew will have some special places for these guys to explore, where teamwork will play a crucial role, and where lots of treasure and exp can be harvested.

For more info, you can check out the official GodsWar website.

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Previous GodsWar Online dev diary:

• GodsWar Online Dev Journal #1: Pet System