What’s up guys it’s me Jeremy! Although I haven’t played too much Jinx in the past,
she’s a character that I’ve always enjoyed a lot, you know that eccentric kind of like
chaotic neutral kind of person that just goes crazy and has fun, and jinx is the kind of
champion that does a really awesome job of bringing that explosive personality to life
through her gameplay elements, and she shows a lot about what is awesome in a champion
design. But it took a lot to get her to where she is now, and a lot of earlier variations
of jinx had a lot of potential and were equally just as awesome, so join me today in taking
a look at Jinx’s development cycle as we find out what jinx could have been.
And if you enjoy the video hit that like button and if you don’t please hit the dislike,
Anyways let’s get started. Jinx is a champion that had a pretty interesting
development story to her, in the sense that it shares a lot about the development process
that I think is really cool. Champions always start somewhere, someone like Braum started
with ideas for his gameplay, someone like azir started with ideas for his character,
but jinx is a champion that started with her art. Not the idea for her character, but just
a literal drawing. What the art department at Riot games does,
is they like to give their artists who work on champion as much freedom as possible to
do whatever they can, in order to allow everyone to work on something that they are truly passionate
about, so one thing that they have the art team do, is design characters through art,
without any help or influence from the champion design team. The artists just draw characters
and bring their own ideas to life. When Riot Gypsylord was first hired at riot and brought
to the champion design team, one thing Riot did to help him with his champion ideas and
picking a champion to develop, was they brought him this huge wall of just art, all of these
different random drawings and sketches and designs the art team had developed, to see
if there were any that gypsylord maybe liked and wanted to pursue. And from that wall of
character concepts he was shown, he picked out this drawing, and was drawn to it for
a few reasons. This character was titled psycho arsenal and
was made by Riot Tea Time. Gypsylord really loved two things about this piece. First off,
this piece is just awesome and the amount of personality that you can see from just
the look on her face shows so much about her, and that idea of a character who is just super
crazy and hyper and excited and energetic and manic all wrapped up into one awesome
girl. And that personality you know like the crazy face, huge pigtails and everything just
really clicked with gypsylord and he fell in love with the concept instantly.
The second thing he really loved was this idea of having a whole bunch of different
kind of guns, and this idea of using all sorts of different guns in the vision that he had
for what psycho arsenal could be when developed further. So after finishing Vi, he got to
work on this character, who was called psycho arsenal for the majority of her development.
They started by developing her art and model a little bit further. Although the team that
worked on Jinx loved the concept art piece from Riot Tea Time, it had some problems in
the sense that it was extremely similar to a lot of other characters in League of Legends.
She had the same body type as like Miss Fortune, Janna, Katarina, and she didn’t really feel
that unique with just dual pistols and a shock rifle. And one thing Riot Gypsylord mentioned
a lot when he talked about Jinx’s development on a panel in Pax East 2015, was that the
most important part of the champion design process was figuring out like the best things
about that character and working from those and building the champion around those, rather
than worrying about every other detail. And they loved the idea of having different weapons
and of having this crazy fun loving girl, and they decided to amp those to the max,
and put the body type to match. Eventually they settled on the idea of making Psycho
Arsenal as a character be super super small and tiny, while carrying around these massive
guns that she has no right to be able to carry around, and that kind of model fit in line
with her personality perfectly. Riot Tea Time developed this character model, and everything
just clicked, and Psycho Arsenal had her personality and character design set in stone. She went
from being this typical female body type with pistols and a rifle to using a minigun and
a rocket launcher and being super tiny to create this awesome personality of this hyper
crazy girl running around having a blast, literally.
Now Psycho Arsenal’s gameplay kit went through a little bit more complications, but had a
lot of interesting elements. Going off of that idea of having a bunch of different guns
and stuff, the idea that Riot Gypsylord wanted to bring to life was essentially a character
that he described as being ranged udyr, where when you pressed Q you equipped a rocket launcher
that had some cool effect, when you pressed w you equipped your shock pistol that had
a cool attack, with the e being like a bow and arrow that you equipped and the ultimate
being like a super weapon or something, essentially the same way udyr has all of these different
stances and melee attacks, but instead with it being ranged and using ranged attacks.
This was the original gameplay design for Psycho Arsenal, and it was the vision Riot
Gypsylord wanted to bring to life, no matter how imbalanced that concept might be, there’s
no denying that holy batman that is cool as heck.
They worked on that concept a lot, and tested out loads of different weapons involving it.
They didn’t have perfect breathing room since they wanted Psycho Arsenal to have unique
weapons, which limited a lot of things considering there were already quite a few characters
in the game that used guns. They tested out things like using a hextech submachine gun,
a tazer crossbow, different versions of a flamethrowers, you name it. The weapons they
decided they likes the most was eventually the rocket launcher, minigun, tazer pistol,
and grenades, and they really liked all four of those weapons a lot because those weapons
are very intuitive for a champion. Intuitive meaning that they are really easy to read
and understand what they are going to do, so it makes the character really fluid and
feel natural and just fun. Like it’s obvious to the player that a rocket launcher is going
to do splash damage, it’s obvious that a minigun will attack fast, whereas things like
the hextech submachine gun might be a little weird to understand for someone who doesn’t
know what the ability does. And they started drafting up this ranged udyr-esque
kit, but after playtesting it a lot, they found that it didn’t really feel that good
to play with. Sure she got to switch weapons, and the weapons themselves were awesome, and
switching between the different weapons was cool too, but she really didn’t have that
explosive gameplay, that crazy feel and those epic moments that she really needed to fit
in with her personality. The idea of a ranged udyr was awesome and it worked well, it just
didn’t fit on psycho arsenal, and didn’t make sense with the personality of her character,
which was the big selling point of psycho arsenal’s design at that point. Because
she was ranged udyr, you couldn’t really put that much power on ability activations
and on individual weapons either, because well she’s ranged udyr, as cool as that
concept is, there’s no denying that it is a seriously theme powerful to work with, and
is at huge risk of being overpowered. That idea of a ranged udyr though is super awesome,
and I wouldn’t be surprised, in fact I’d honestly straight up expect to see it sometime
in the future on a different champion that has a personality or theme that fits in line
with it a lot more. So after realizing that Psycho Arsenal just
could not be ranged udyr. But they liked the feeling of having different guns and basic
attacks, so they kept that and it became what her Q is today, and by putting two weapons
into one ability they opened up new spaces for new weapons and spells on the rest of
her kit. Zap and flame chompers kind of just fell into place since they liked the weapons,
maybe they went through a few iterations on what the idea of the shock blast and grenades
did, but I don’t have too much information on them specifically, however her ultimate
went through about 3 or 4 different versions, each equally as crazy as the next.
One version of her ultimate was called “Circle of Cats”. In this version of her ultimate
she would shoot out a missile that caused a donut of magical smoke to appear that turned
everyone hit by it into cats, similar to what lulu’s polymorph does. Now this ability
would certainly be whacky, but it doesn’t really go along with the whole guns and explosions
thing so it was scrapped. Another version was called “Carpet Bomb”.
This ultimate would should out a global missile that dropped literally hundreds of bombs around
the map as it flew. Think of each individual bomb as like a ziggs Q, now this ultimate
is pretty insane just on the sheer magnitude of it, but I’m not sure how much it makes
sense for her, it seems potentially a bit too big maybe, or just not really fitting
her style of like a solo character, it seems like something more fit from like a soldier
who would call in an air strike or something. And my favorite version of one of her ultimates
in development was called “bring down the hammer”. In this version she would designate
a location on the map, and then 4 seconds later a huge lazer beam would shoot out from
the sky and annihilate anyone standing in the area. This version actually had a lot
of potential, but a big giant rocket proved to fit her style a lot more than a big giant
lazer beam, so from this ultimate they switched to her shooting out a massive rocket.
Originally, her ultimate of super mega death rocket had a max range of 3000 units, and
instead she was able to detonate the area of effect radius at any time after launching
out the rocket by reactivating the ability, causing shrapnel to rain down from the battlefield.
It was a cool effect, but was deemed to not really be that crazy and fit in a bit more
with like a sniper or something. Eventually they came to the current version of super
mega death rocket to be the best thing that fits everything of what they want and all
that good stuff. And once they had the kit of q w e and r,
it was a good kit, good character, you know things fell into place for the most part,
but there was one element that was still lacking after the fact in terms of making her kit
fit in with her personality, and that was really that after making the kit she really
didn’t feel all that crazy. Sure the weapons were exciting, she had powerful moments of
gameplay, but not much about her was truly insane in the fun loving way that they wanted
her to be, and she kind of just felt like a sniper with all of these long range guns
and stuff. And then they took a look at the passive. Previously her passive was that she
gained 20 movement speed every time she killed a minion, but they decided that passive was
just kind of boring, and decided to take it to the total extreme and give something like
1000% movement speed on champion kills for a super short amount of time. In playtesting
that new passive had this moment where the player got a kill, and then dove past the
enemy ad carry and killed them too, and then lost control of themselves and ran straight
into a tower and died instantly, and that was the moment where everything clicked and
all the ideas finally came together. She accomplished the idea of switching guns, and brought the
feeling of being this hyper crazy ridiculous character that blows everything up. They had
to tone down the passive a tiny bit, but it worked out great when it came to really accomplishing
that explosive feeling that they really wanted jinx to have.
And at that point jinx was pretty much finished, and would go on to get polished a bit here
and there, and eventually released as the loose cannon. She’s definitely one of the
characters in League of legends that just has so much personality surrounding her, and
her kit did an incredible job of capturing that personality and making you feel like
you are playing this hyper, excited girl that blows everything up, and I can honestly say
that jinx ended up being an awesome champion, although I’m looking forward to ranged udyr
coming out one day. Hope you guys enjoyed the look into jinx!
If you liked the video subscribe if you want, thanks for watching, and I’ll see you guys
next time!