What’s up guys, it’s me Jeremy.
The new champion Taliyah is coming out soon, probably in the next two weeks or so, and
she’s a really awesome character that I’m super excited for, but with this release of
a new champion, I thought it might be a great time to take a look at how a league of legends
champion gets made.
Champions are a massive part about what makes league of legends awesome.
But the amount of work, effort, and just heart and soul that goes into every single champion
project, especially the champions in the last two years, is something that goes quite underappreciated.
Regardless of what your opinion of any given champion might be it took a massive team of
people about a year, sometimes even more to create that work of art and add that masterpiece
to league of legends.
So today, instead of looking at the development process of an individual champion, we’re
going to be looking at the entire champion design process as a whole, so join me today
in finding out how a league of legends champion gets made.
Let’s get started.
Now every head champion designer at riot is different, and they all have their own unique
style, but every single one of them directs a team that works with them to create a champion.
The champion begins with the head designer working together with the narrative and art
designer to find an idea or a design fantasy that they want to accomplish.
Sometimes, they already know what they want to make, but sometimes finding the initial
idea to go off of is a bit more difficult, in which case they might get help from the
art team and look at characters, or discuss among the other head designers.
Each team begins with 4 people, the lead champion designer, a narrative or story director, and
the head art designer, who sit down in a room with a producer to talk about the idea for
the champion that they want to make.
Now this initial idea is usually very, very simple, it’s something as small as a single
ability, or a gameplay element, or maybe a character art piece or a personality that
they want a character to have.
And starting off of that very small and simple idea, they enter a process that Daniel Klein,
who is one of the head champion designers at Riot Games, described as “Ideation”.
During this process of ideation they take the super simple and small concept that they
have, and develop it and brainstorm it a bit more amongst their team, until they have it
drilled down to one meaningful, concrete, super awesome concept, while also making sure
that it will be unique and add an element of new design into league of legends, and
making sure that it isn’t too similar to any recent characters.
For example if a tank character was released recently, they probably won’t want to make
another tank for at least half a year, if not a full year.
This process of ideation involves a ton of character sketches, mood boards, story drafts,
rough ideas for their gameplay kits, and a very rough in game prototype that is pieced
together from existing files, in order to begin the long and drawn out process of playtesting.
And, most importantly, a whole lot of playtesting and iterations of the champion’s kit.
They brainstorm ideas and write out some paper kits, implement them in game and just start
playtesting and reiterating the heck out of that character.
Playtesting for new champions is a lot more complex than you might think, as it starts
as one of the most early steps that happen in the process and continues all the way up
until a champion is finally released.
Throughout the design they add in more playtesters and bring on a large playtesting team as the
design develops, and the playtesting process is very sophisticated.
There are two playtests for a character just about every single day.
The gameplay designers start with one playtest in the morning, with a focus on collecting
feedback about how the character plays, how they feel, and how they interact with the
other champions.
After collecting feedback they make some changes, sometimes minor sometimes major, but they
make the changes and playtest again at 5pm, once again collecting feedback, and then preparing
for the playtest the next day and finally going home.
Playtests typically consist of a few games that each of the playtesters play.
This ideation process is a big part of where the initial ideas come to life, especially
through the playtesting and it takes a champion design team about a month if they are lucky,
but often times takes around two months to complete.
The gameplay design for a character is always fleshed out before the art production is,
so a big part of the early conception involves playtesting loads of crazy and random ideas
for abilities and seeing what works out and the direction they want the champion to take.
Once they figure out the general theme and direction they want to take with that character,
they enter what they call the pre-production phase of design.
At this point they add a few more designers and artists, as well as a lore team onto their
team to help out, since this is the point that they see a lot of potential in the character.
Most champions that get cancelled fall apart at the ideation phase and we never hear about
them.
But at this point they start to make a rough 3D model prototype with some very rough designs
and animations of what they think the character might look like.
Everyone works together in the same room, so that the creative process of the champion
can develop as a whole with all of the parts together.
The gameplay designers often get ability ideas from the lore team designing story sketches
and reference characters.
This way the gameplay design of a character does a nice job of falling into place with
the story and personality of a character as well.
Meanwhile, the gameplay designers
continue to playtest twice a day and make changes to the in game character, and the
playtests become much more meaningful at this point now that the character has a more dedicated
team to playtest for them.
This is when they develop the general idea for what the playstyle of a champion might
be, and how they are going to play in game.
They develop the champion a lot more through playtesting, and they typically have 3 out
of 5 if not more abilities finalized by the time they finish pre-production.
After that, the champion enters the phase that is called full production.
The team now reaches its peak threshold of members.
What began with a gameplay designer, a narrative designer and an artist, now becomes a team
of producers, development managers, animators, 3D artists, texture artists, visual effect
artists, sound engineers, riggers, quality assurance, live designers, dedicated playtesters,
and a promo team to make the cinematics and champion spotlights and stuff.
When a champion reaches this phase it becomes a sure thing and there is no longer any doubt
that the champion will not make the cut.
And at this point, the work on the champion becomes a lot less creative and a lot more
technical bug fixing, polishing, and tweaking abilities intricately, instead of testing
out a bunch of crazy random concepts and seeing if they might work.
While during this stage we see the cinematics develop, the lore finalized, and all of the
other out-of-game aspects of the champion mostly completed, while the twice daily playtesting
reaches a massive scale for bug fixing and tweaking and balancing attempts.
Every individual continues their part of the team as the champion develops further and
have the design flaws tweaked out of them.
Once the champion prototypes are ironed out and the champion is fully developed by the
massive team, and all of the assets for that champion have been created and polished, that
champion goes into the post-production phase.
This is where they try and rush out all of the last minute things, tweak some numbers,
fix as many bugs as the playtesters can find, and do last minute ability adjustments.
During this time, the champion goes live on the PBE and gets announced, so even up until
the very day it is released a champion continues to be developed and worked on until it finally
goes live.
Once it enters the post production phase, the lead designer immediately begins work
on another project, as the other team members continue to develop and fix parts of the champion
that may have been missed during post-production, and eventually it moves on and becomes a project
for the balance team to handle.
The entire process of creating a champion takes about 9 months total from the very start
to the day the champion goes live on all servers.
9-10 months is the most common time, but on a lot of champions it can take much, much
longer, as long as 12 months, 14 months, or even a year and a half to two years to fully
complete the champion, as a lot of characters run into problems that are difficult to iron
out.
Most champion concepts that get cancelled fall into some sort of massive overwhelming
problem at the ideation phase, or take too much time and effort to get out of the ideation
phase that the project is deemed not worth the time, in which case it is often shelved
rather than entirely cancelled.
And that is the entire champion design process.
I hope you guys enjoyed this inside look at what goes in to making a league of legends
champion.
If you enjoyed the video hit that like button and if you didn’t hit that dislike, thanks
for watching, and I’ll see you guys next time!