What’s up guys it’s me Jeremy!
Riot’s latest champion Kayn was released in Patch 7.14, and had been in development
since August 2016 after Riot had decided to create a new aggressive melee jungler.
There are quite a few well known junglers of this style—Kha’Zix and Jarvan for example—but
it had been a long time since Riot had created a new one.
Instead, they had been opting for other jungle niches like Kindred, the marksman jungler,
and Ivern the pacifist.
Often when we delve into the development period for a new champion we find some pretty varied
concepts, but this wasn’t really the case with Kayn since they had a pretty good idea
what kind of archetype was open to them.
That made Kayn’s development more about finding the ideal character to fit the playstyle.
Narrowing down the ideal character was a relatively painless process—the design team looked
at the archetypes of characters that had recently been released or were in the pipeline, and
they found that a lot of the releases were non-human (such as Ivern, Kled and Aurelion
Sol).
That pushed them towards some kind of human release, whether that be pure human or what
they call ‘human plus,’ which is essentially just a twist on the human archetype.
One of the best examples of ‘human plus’ is Varus, a human corrupted by the Darkin,
and this led Riot Scruffy to pitch a Darkin transformation as being a key component of
the gameplay.
This apparently went down really well with Riot, likely because there’s been a lot
of questions about a new ‘transforming’ champion from the community, and so the development
for Kayn—or Nemesis as he was known at the time—began.
The original direction for Nemesis was for him to be in direct conflict against Xayah
and Rakan, but this put his internal conflict with the Darkin on the back foot.
Eventually Riot decided that this internal conflict was more interesting, especially
considering how key it is to his gameplay, so the link with Xayah and Rakan was dropped
from the process.
Riot tried a few different personalities with Nemesis, such as having him be more of the
calm and confident type, but eventually moved towards a more confident, if not arrogant
version because it better suited the conflict that was going in inside him.
The problem with having a stoic character is that they are always trying to stay focused,
as was the case with Kayn whose early lines were all about maintaining composure.
Since he has this turmoil going on inside him, it made more sense to have him be more
like a prodigy that becomes cocky about his own abilities.
After all, a calm character would probably never elect to pick up the Scythe, knowing
that it has a powerful and dangerous being inside it.
It made the conflict between Kayn and Rhaast more interesting too—an arrogant character
like Kayn is more likely to clash with the Darkin’s corruption.
Since Riot are pretty serious about making sure gameplay and character themes line up
in their newer releases, Kayn needed his kit to fill two particular criteria.
He had to have elements of his kit tie into his background as a member of the Order of
Shadows, as well as something to represent the Darkin corruption.
One of the first glimpses of Kayn’s early kit was shared by Daniel Z Klein, and it shows
that the scythe weapon was picked up pretty early on in development considering this kit
is from November 8th last year.
This became the third piece to the puzzle, since Kayn’s abilities would need to emulate
the sweeping, AoE devastation that a scythe should bring to the battlefield.
The early kit also used Q as the main damage tool, featuring Kayn using his scythe to slice
up enemies in an area around him.
Interestingly, his W on this build is very similar to Kayn’s Ultimate—you jump into
an enemy and become untargetable for a few seconds before leaving in your chosen direction.
This would then go on to replace the earlier iterations of his Ultimate, which gave the
players a choice—embrace the Darkin aspect of Kayn and give yourself some pretty big
buffs for melee combat, or stick with Kayn’s traditional assassin background and use an
Assassin’s Mark that would let you blink back to an enemy to deal damage.
This would likely have made Kayn play a lot more similarly to Zed, although without as
much mindgame potential.
Nemesis’s W was replaced by a line skillshot that works in a similar way to Aatrox’s
skillshot, likely to showcase a little bit of the Darkin that is corrupting him.
This was a good way to ensure that he would have all of the important boxes ticked on
his kit; he’d have a good balance between Darkin, shadow assassin and scythe abilities.
The only ability that didn’t really change much from this early iteration of his kit
is Shadow Step, or ‘Swiggity Swooty’ as it was referred to during development.
Interestingly, this ability was actually originally created for Ao Shin, and may have never happened
if it weren’t for a bit of ingenuity on the part of Fan Fang, the Rioter responsible
for Ao Shin’s development back in 2013.
The story goes that Fan Fang had been coming up with crazy ideas for his dragon champion,
before one day deciding that dragons should be able to fly.
He named the ability ‘True Flight,’ which would allow Ao Shin to soar above terrain.
Daniel Z Klein talked about how confused he was that Fan Fang managed to make it work,
before discovering Fan Fang’s solution by looking up the code for True Flight.
Making terrain not behave like terrain is a pretty daunting task, but Fan Fang came
up with an elegant solution—take every movement command, stop it from registering, and replace
it with a dash to the target location.
Since dash abilities are already able to bypass terrain, True Flight essentially made it so
Ao Shin was always dashing, therefore able to ignore terrain entirely.
Before the implementation of True Flight on Kayn’s kit, Swiggity Swooty was simply a
movement speed buff that resulted in bonus damage on his next attack, but Daniel was
having difficulty finding a good ‘second form’ for the spell, since it needed both
a Darkin and Assassin variant.
Eventually he realised that the assassin form could use True Flight as an active ability
with a time limit, generating the necessary balancing levers to make sure that it didn’t
get out of hand.
It ended up being so fun and exciting to use that it turned into the standard E, with a
bonus when you choose the Assassin transformation.
Thus, Kayn’s Swiggity Swooty became Shadow Step, and Ao Shin’s True Flight became a
legitimate part of the game.
One ability that never made it’s way into the release kit was a kind of astral projection.
Daniel explained that Kayn could leave his real body behind, sending out a projection
of his astral form that would fight for him.
Even if you killed that astral form, Kayn would just snap back into his real body and
carry on—but if the enemies found your real body, they’d kill him and take down the
astral form with him.
It’s a pretty crazy sounding ability, and was apparently recycled from a very early
Ekko kit.
Daniel mentioned that there is the potential for the ability to return one day if Riot
finds the perfect fit for it, so even if it didn’t make it onto Kayn’s kit, it might
still find it’s way into the game eventually.