What’s up guys it’s me Jeremy.
Taliyah is a champion who began her development in June of 2015.
She was designed by Riot Zenon aka Daniel Klein, who led the champion design team who
developed her.
Her original character concept was settled on quite quickly, but her gameplay design
took a really long time to figure out, and Taliyah wasn’t always going to be how she
ended up, so join me today in taking a look back at her development, to find out What
Taliyah could have been!
And throughout this video I have to give a big big shoutout to our man Daniel Klein,
who has been a huge help for this video with all of the information and stuff, so everyone
go give him a follow on twitter @DanielZKlein and give him some love!
And if you guys enjoy this video hit that like button and if you don’t, hit that dislike!
Anyway Taliyah’s development story begins with something that the champion designers
call “Fantasy Slotting”.
The League of Legends champion production operates somewhat strictly on a cycle that
dictates what types of champions will be made.
This cycle contains every type of champion you could think of, and it exists in order
to make it so that two champions that are similar don’t end up being released at the
same time.
So for example, Riot will try to avoid working on two tanks at the same time, or two ad carries,
or so on, and if they have made a certain type of champion recently, they will not do
so again for a while.
From the need of the Fantasy Slotting Cycle to contain a traditional ap caster mage, since
it was the kind of champion they had not made for a long time, about two years or so, so
Riot Zenon began the character that had the name Tectonic Marvel during development and
started working on the potential ideas for that.
And to start they began by exploring areas of elemental magic, because that was something
that really gave off the more traditional vibe they were looking for.
They brought the idea to the art team, who gave them this piece of concept arts to choose
from as an example!
You can see in this piece we have the Stoneflower, Storm General, Tectonic Marvel, Spite Mage,
and the Thunderbird.
They gave each idea a decent amount of thought to see what the potential was.
Thunderbird was a cool concept, but the developers just weren’t that excited about the idea
since it wasn’t entirely unique because of Kennen.
The spite mage was a character that would cast curses and hexes and bad things towards
it’s opponents, and it was kind of funny idea to have this super salty champion, but
it didn’t fit the elemental theme.
Tectonic Marvel was interesting, but it was a good example of what they didn’t want
their mage to look like, to convey the personality that they had.
And the storm general had a similar problem to Thunderbird, but the stoneflower was just
awesome.
They loved the character, and that pic instantly drew the designers towards the idea, and it
worked out almost instantly.
The idea of an earth mage was one the designers liked a lot, since it was a super unique character,
and they wanted to capture the personality of like this positive and optimistic young
individual, who maybe isn’t all that experienced and still has a lot of trouble controlling
her powers.
They wanted someone who was light and upbeat, not dark and intense, and that stoneflower
concept captured that perfectly.
The writing team drafted up a sketch for her story titled “The Sunrise Stone” and from
there, they knew for sure that they wanted to move forward with the character.
After about only one week into the ideation phase, Tectonic Marvel’s character design
was pretty fleshed out, and the designers knew exactly what they wanted, it was just
a matter of bringing that character to life.
It usually takes one or two months for a champion to reach that point, but the character that
would eventually become Taliyah fell into place quite naturally.
And from there, work on the gameplay design began as the writers and artists began to
complete her story, personality, and polish.
As for her gameplay design, it began with a character known as Terrain Mage.
He was a separate entity from Tectonic Marvel, and was a previously canceled champion that
Riot had worked on for a bit, and since he used a lot of the earth magic theme in some
of his stuff, it only felt natural to try and incorporate that on Tectonic Marvel as
a starting point for the new design, and it is what they used for the first prototype.
Terrain mage had an ability that would become empowered by ripping a piece of wall out from
summoner’s rift, and throwing it at the enemy.
And this caused his gameplay to be all about finding fresh pieces of wall to rip out and
throw at opponents, but it created the problem of gameplay that was a little bit too simple.
Either you were fighting in the jungle near a bunch of walls and you were a total beast,
or you were fighting in a place with no walls and were totally useless.
But going off of that concept for Terrain Mage, Riot Zenon wanted to take a little bit
of a spin on that ability concept they had from Terrain Mage, and he knew that it was
going to be super difficult to program and code, so just for the time being so that he
could playtest the character, he submit this ability where she ripped up the ground, instead
of taking chunks out of walls, but it actually ended up being super awesome, and all of the
playtesters really loved it, as the gameplay of deciding where to use up ground and when
and how to cast the spell was something that everyone thought was super cool.
It fit really well thematically, and after polishing it up a little bit, it would go
on to almost instantly become the design for her Q.
From there, they went with that concept since the playtesters really liked it, and Riot
Zenon designed a Paper Kit for her based on the idea of Exhausted Ground, which was what
they called it at the time.
And the kit looked like this: The passive caused her to empower her next spellcast when
standing on regular ground, but would then exhaust the ground under her for a decent
period of time.
Her Q was that same Q that she still has today, her W was an area of effect skillshot that
damaged enemies hit, and would root them in place if it was on unexhausted ground, Her
E threw out a bunch of rocks in a fan shape kind of like Ashe’s Volley but a bit smaller,
and enemies hit would be damaged and slowed, and if she was on unexhausted ground, it would
leash her to her opponent, and you could reactivate the ability to push them away or pull them
towards you, but there was a set range and if the opponent got outside of that the leash
would break.
And the Ultimate was called Earthquake, and it would cause tremors in a huge radius, about
the size of a Trundle W, and it would damage, and slow people in the area, as well as knocking
them up for a split second every 1 second, and would rejuvenate all of the ground so
that you could cast the empowered spells, and for the duration of the ultimate, which
was 4 seconds, you could not exhaust the ground in the radius, and as well, enemies in the
massive radius would be damaged, slowed, and crippled, meaning that the opponents could
not use blinks or dashes while in them.
This paper kit was an interesting prototype, since it was quite well fleshed out, but it
proved to have a few problems in playtesting.
Overall, her worked ground mechanic in that kit proved to be way too much.
It was clear that the worked ground passive was something that wanted to only affect the
Q mechanic, and her ultimate in specific wasn’t going to work out because the cripple or grounded
mechanic needed to be something that was selective and possible to outplay, not just slapped
on into a ginormous area.
So they chose to move on from that design, but they would still keep the Q ability they
had made.
The next ability they worked on was her Passive.
One version that they tested out was called Stone-Casket.
After standing still for 3 seconds, she would surround herself with a layer of stone that
would regenerate health and mana rapidly, but her vision radius would be reduced to
almost nothing, and she wouldn’t even be able to see her allies.
During this Stone Casket Effect, any damage from an enemy would interrupt this ability
and stun her for 1 second.
And that passive didn’t work out, and instead as to how her passive came to be we have to
bring it back a bit.
For the preseason to season 6, Riot experiemented a bit with a bunch of different boot enchants,
in an attempt to make the boot enchants more meaningful, and more desirable as a purchase.
These boot enchants pretty much all proved to be lackluster, and eventually Riot would
decide that just straight up removing the enchants was a better idea.
The only version of the alternate boot enchants that were being developed that showed promise
was an item that was called Terrain Boots.
It never made it to live, but her eventual passive effect was just a total rip off of
that item, which would give you bonus movement speed when moving in certain types of terrain.
And perhaps the most exciting part of her design is the story of her ultimate.
SO I mentioned the first version which was from the exhausted ground prototype.
The second version of her ultimate was a super crazy ability that would allow Tectonic Marvel
to target one piece of terrain on the map, and completely destroy it for 15 seconds.
So someone could flash over a wall, and then you would just destroy the wall with her ultimate.
You could destroy entire base walls, the baron pit walls, and all sorts of stuff, and just
walk right over.
It was a super cool ability, but it didn’t entirely make sense on the rest of her kit,
since she is a control mag, she wants to lock people in and create choke points, rather
than remove them, and it was also the case where this ability needed a ton of extra effort
to actually make work.
It was predicted that the release of what would eventually be Taliyah would be delayed
for approximately 6 more months, if they decided to ship this ability in her kit.
And they were definitely willing to delay her like that, it’s just that the ability,
although being super cool, was totally out of place on her kit.
Another version of her ultimate that they tested was a version of her current ultimate
that she has now of creating this super huge wall, but instead of being able to ride it
to transport across the map, you would reactivate the ability again to actually curve it, so
you could curve the wall in a targeted direction, and it was a great ability that fit really
well thematically of her being this stoneweaver, but the problem was that it was really hard
to get the right curve when you wanted it, it almost felt like you had to wrestle with
the ability, so it didn’t feel very good at all in practice.
And the rock surfing aspect was something that was super cool, so they put that on the
ultimate instead.
And for her W, it began as an ability from an Azir prototype by Riot Gypsylord from January
2014.
The ability was called rupture toss at the time, and it was designed during the Azir
Hackathon kind of event that took place during his development.
They knew from that event that it would be a cool ability, and although it didn’t fit
on Aziz, Riot Gypsylord continued to pitch the ability to almost everyone since he thought
it was so awesome.
It was originally tested out in a more extreme version and as her ultimate, and they knew
that the ability would fit well, just that it had to be on a basic ability instead, so
they toned it down a bit, and put it on her W.
For her E, they wanted to really accomplish the feel of like weaving stone and being a
stoneweaver, so one of the abilities they tried involved stiching walls together.
It was a skillshot that was only able to fire through another wall, that would create a
wall itself, but only if the projectile touched another wall on the other side.
It was a really cool spell that created some really interesting gameplay revolving around
walls, but it was something that didn’t make sense on a mid-lane mage, but it did
have some potential on like a jungler.
And eventually they settled upon the concept of something that resembled the weave of a
piece of cloth, and incorporated that into an ability that would eventually become her
E. As for for a large portion of her development,
her auto attack was an animation that was like a trail of rocks that would get ripped
up from the ground.
This was deemed to be too visually powerful for an auto attack, and it was difficult to
follow and know when the damage would land, so they switched it to something that looked
and felt more like a needle and thread to fit alongside the weaving kind of theme.
Once all of the abilities were complete, they began the process of figuring out her in game
animations.
The biggest goal they had with her visual effects was to capture the chaotic nature
of her spellcasts, as if she barely is able to control her powers.
And they figured out how to do this by making her ultimate intentionally tuned to feel like
it was just way too fast, as if she’s not totally in control of what’s going on.
As well, they wanted to really keep the weaving part of the stoneweaving concept in her design,
as a way to bring her character to life in the gameplay.
One of the versions they attempted for that idea was giving her like a spool kind of accessory
that she would use to gather rocks and then unleash them on the enemies, and although
that fit thematically, it didn’t make sense with her gameplay, since it was something
more suited for abilities with a charge up time.
And eventually they settled upon what they have now, in a way that almost downplays her
power in a sense.
She’s just a 16 year old girl who is still learning stuff, she’s rough and messy, and
that personality is reflected well in her gameplay elements.
And from there they had just about everything fleshed out, and would go on to give her a
more sophisticated name, and complete Taliyah after some polish and tweaks.
Taliyah took about 11 months to develop from start to finish, without even counting the
development time it took to develop the stuff they stole from Azir, Terrain Boots, and the
Terrain Mage.
Overall, she has done a great job of really capturing the control mage style, and her
personality and design worked out really well.
She’s a super cool champion, and I’m excited to see what happens with her now that she’s
hit the live servers!
And it looks like that’s gonna be it from me, thanks for watching, subscribe if you
want, and I’ll see you guys next time!