Creating League of Legends Champions: Our Production Framework Revealed

[Music] my name is Jeremy I'm a development manager at Riot Games I'm part of the champion team on League of Legends now League is a multiplayer competitive game where players select a champion and then Duke it out 5v5 today what I'm going to share with you is how we create those champions the kinds of challenges that we face as a team as well as some of the learnings that we've had along the way and I just want to acknowledge right at the start 30 minutes is a super short amount of time to accomplish that so I'm gonna I'm gonna move pretty fast but I'm gonna do my best to save some time for Q&A at the end and I also want to propose that this can be the start of this conversation I'll leave my contact and flow up at the end if you guys want to keep talking I'm more than happy to after this presentation all right so like I said I'm a member of the champion team here's a recent photograph of us and when I

look at this photo I think two things immediately one I'm a terrible photographer who like can't get everybody into the frame and everyone's blinded by the Sun that they're looking at but I kid you not this was literally the best photo that I had out of like dozens to review so that's uh that's as good as I got the second one is it really just sort of strikes me how lucky I am to be able to present this information that I'm about to share with you I'm really honored to be the one to give this presentation because this is not my work alone this is a work of many people so I just want to acknowledge that I think you know what we lack in our photogenic ability as a team we make up for in other ways and one way in particular is our dedication to our mission on champion team our mission is to engage in excite players with champions that deliver innovative and resonant experiences anything innovative

is pretty explanatory but I'm going to spend a minute or two talking about what we mean by resonant champions in just a moment you know this mission has chain changed over the years that we haven't had this forever the needs of players have evolved the needs of our organization have evolved and so our mission has as well but something that stayed very consistent at riot is our desire to have empowered teams empowered not just from a creative perspective but that's super important also empowered from a process perspective basically we believe that the best people to figure out how to achieve this mission is the team itself so that's what I'm going to focus on today how does our production process sort of support us and getting to this mission I'm not really gonna get into our creative process much or our design thinking I want to let you know if that's something that you're interested in there's a talk tomorrow

morning for with Greg Street I think it's in North Hall 10 a.m. definitely check that out he's design lead on League of Legends if that's something you're interested in go see his talk on League right now we have a hundred and thirty four champions and four players of League you know investing time on one of these champions is really meaningful it's a competitive game you're playing to win and so we really want to make sure that when players are committing their time and resources into a champion that we're giving them a really resonant experience back and that means from the first game that they play on a champion to their three hundredth we want that champion to have a deep and meaningful and fun and interesting experience for you and unfortunately there's just no formula to creating innovative and resonant champions I wish I wish that was this presentation where I could be like and here's the formula presentation over unfortunately not the case here's a

few champions that really resonate with me and I personally really like but we have found that even though there's no formula you know there are some things that really do help support us in achieving our mission that's what I'm gonna talk about first I'm gonna share some of the challenges that we have as a team and I think that you know these are challenges that are pretty universal to our industry and really to any creative team so as I go through these ask yourself if you've heard these before the first challenge is are we there yet this sort of question on a team that's that bubbles up from time to time of do we have what we need in order to move forward do we know what done really looks like how long should we be brainstorming how long should we be in production and what this illustrated for us was that we were lacking some clearly defined deliverables as a team and the second challenge that we face is that'll never work so there are times when you

do want to hear that on a team maybe you're trying to implement a new technical feature and so that's like a great conversation to have if it's gonna work or not there are times you don't want to have that conversation maybe you're in a brainstorming or like in a really rnd mindset and what this Illustrated to us is that as a team we really wanted to be able to have a shared mindset because one of our biggest challenges is moving from an RD mindset into a production or execution mindset we're doing that constantly on champion team there are times when we have six champions in development at once in different phases and so aligning on what we should be thinking about what kinds of conversations we should have was really important to us and a challenge that we wanted to solve and finally let's not do that again no matter how awesome a champion development process we've had there's always I would say a dozen times at least where we do something we're like man could we not do that again we

all sit down and say yeah we're not gonna do that again and inevitably we would do it again and so what this Illustrated to us is that we lacked a sort of system that helped us capture our current learnings for our champions that would help us for future champions really make sure that we weren't making the same mistakes again we realize that you know these aren't the worst challenges to have as a team right but all together they were sort of sucking up some creative energy on the team and that brings me to the first learning that I want to share with you today which is as a team we discovered it's that structure empowers creativity we are pretty area of process on champion team and I think with good reason we don't want things to get in the way of our creative process and being innovative but when the lack of structure starts sucking away some of our energy from being creative and into sort of like the process stuff that's where we sort of draw a line and so the question for us

and this is where that asterisk comes in it's really like how much structure and what kind because what we found ultimately has worked best for us as a team is defining a very basic framework top rate from and this gives us like a foundation to stand on so that we can focus our creative energy on innovating on top of it so we realized we needed a framework and so we started to create one and here's how we did that as a team we talked about what are the natural moments in a Champions development lifecycle there was some pretty natural sort of like beats that we would go to and we we called these phases and then we asked ourselves what are the right goals to have during each of those phases and we wanted to create goals that felt crisp and clear enough that we could say are we able to achieve this in order to move forward finally we created a list of all the components all the deliverables all the

things that we're gonna go into achieving that goal and this is essentially our framework and if it looks simple I'm glad it is super simple and that was that was one of our goals we wanted to make something that was easy to create easy to understand and easy to update but as simple as it is it's given us a ton of benefit and so I want to sort of highlight what those benefits are the first for us is clarity we don't ask anymore as a team are we there yet because we know where we're at and we know what deliverables we still need to achieve and we know what our goals are the second benefit we've gotten from this is scalability as a team we're now able to quickly align on what mindset we're in and what phase of production we're in no matter which champion we're talking about and it's also helped us with our partner teams outside of champion and all I'll give you an example of what that looks like in just a few minutes finally flexibility so because this is

sort of a simple framework we're able to quickly update it add deliverables remove deliverables when we're making a champion so that helps us for our future champions it's really the combination of all of these benefits that's helped us become more creatively empowered as a team but it's also helped us become more autonomous which i think is like a nice side benefit you know we're really able to hold ourselves accountable to hitting these goals into completing these deliverables because we define them so here's what our framework looks like this is the champion framework and it's essentially a big list of everything we need when we need it and why and I'm gonna take you through a case study of one of our recent champions that sort of walks us through how we how we really use this framework and I have some examples of the deliverables that we we go after in each phase I'm not gonna

talk about all the specifics and some of our phases there are over 50 deliverables and it would just be - it would just be too much detail and really dry and take forever so before we get into that case study I do want to take you through the basics of how we think about champions the sort of core of every champion each champion has what we call DNA which is the design the gameplay narrative the lore or personality and the art the audio-visual experience and - the combination of all three of these elements that create strong resonant champions and when these are really really unified when these elements really support each other we call that formatic cohesion and thematic cohesion is a really important ingredient in achieving a champion that resonates with people everything just sort of feels right from their gameplay from their story from their art and I'm

I said I wasn't going to talk too much about our creative process but I do want to mention briefly that on our team good ideas can come from any one of these angles we've had some great champion concepts start with a gameplay mechanic pitch but we've also just as often have started from an awesome sketch from an artist that illustrates a champion we've never seen before or from a short story from a writer that takes us to a place in our universe we've never been it's that kind of creative versatility that's really important to us and so we needed a framework that had flexibility as a core benefit all right so I'd like to introduce to you the key study that I'm gonna take you through this creepy gorgeous fellow is Jin the virtuoso he's one of our recent champions and I wanted to talk about Jin today because he's a great example of being thematically cohesive and he's also resonant with players but also the

framework that we built in that you just saw a lot of that was developed and informed during Jin's development before Jin was known as Jin he had a codename internally and that code name was Deadeye so let's go all the way back to the beginning of our first phase that every champion goes through and we call this phase discovery here's some early sketches of what Deadeye look like right at the beginning and our goal in discovery is to create a pitch that's clear and concise and gets the team really excited about making this champion and the first thing we do in every champions development our very first deliverable is called the opportunity space we found that it helps us creatively to have some like guide rails up as we're searching for that new innovative champion DNA having a specific place to start looking is really helpful and so the opportunity space we defined for Deadeye was we knew we wanted to make a marksman champion

this is a gameplay role we knew we wanted to deliver on a gameplay mechanic this fantasy of long-range sniper sharpshooter gameplay we have some champions that do this in league already but none that really excelled at it and so that felt like a good opportunity for us to go after and third and finally from a narrative perspective we wanted to make a champion with a dark and sinister personality that's not something we had done in quite a while so we're excited about that and so through the discovery process the team is iterating and we're creating new ideas and throwing out ideas and here's an example of you know one of the sketches that we sort of aligned at at the end of the discovery phase and I want to share with you the first pitch that we had as a team our pitch for dead I was he's a mysterious robotic bounty hunting sniper cowboy guy and I totally at retrospect see how this is not a particularly clear nor concise pitch but

our framework really helped us out here because it allowed us to say hey we all are on the same page here in terms of our mindset and what our goal is we know that we don't have to like overwork this concept right now we're all a line that this is just our first draft and it did get us excited so we were able to move into our next phase of development which we call ideation now our goal and ideation is to take that concept refine it but then also back it up with an in-game prototype and we create these in-game prototypes by sort of frankensteining together old models and abilities from previous champions and visual effects and sound effects and cobble them together and we try to squint and create a gameplay experience that we can say yes this is fun this is new this is interesting we found there's just no substitute for an in-game experience one of the ways that we really validate and hold ourselves accountable to proving that is that we

have a deliverable in ideation that we call pattern lock this is a design deliverable and pattern lock has a bunch of things in it but one of them that's really key is this idea of identifying the strategic identity of the champion essentially why would you bring Deadeye to a game versus 133 other champions we have to prove that out we also want to lock and understand deeply three out of the five core abilities on that champion so we set a pretty high bar at this early stage for making sure that we really understand from design perspective what's gonna make this champion fun interesting a lot of our champions never make it out of ideation but Deadeye did and so we moved into our next phase which we call pre-production pre-production is I think the hardest phase for us as a team and it's hard because we're sort of straddling two different mindsets at the same time we're still in sort of an R&D phase in a lot of ways for example you

can see this in this blue proxy model this is a quick model that we create and put in the game based on concept art that helps us get a sense of the silhouette and overall shape and we're making him taller and shorter and changing all sorts of things to get the right feel but we're also in kind of a production and execution point of view as well and you can see that in the middle concept image where we're really trying to refine explicit details on the costuming and really lock down some decisions there and our goal here is to come out of pre-production with a really clear pitch and plan for how we're gonna build this character in our next phase which is production and because this phase is so difficult for us we have a lot of interim deliverables that we've created along the way as a way of sort of helping and this helps us keep moving forward making sure we're on the right track and before we get into production that I want to share with you our final

pitch for Deadeye this I literally copied this out of an old PowerPoint that I found we have a log line which is Deadeye is a mysterious ionian drifter I've got a mission statement we've got these things that we call pillars three pillars these are creative touch stones that we use as on the team to help us sort of understand what's in and what's out on the champion the three pillars that we had for Deadeye are artists and killer so this is the sense that like he sees beauty and death that's a core part of his character deliberate action Deadeye is super precise and explicit and specific with what he wants to do and we wanted to really sell that and make sure that came through in his gameplay finally the lie this helped us understand his motivation and what kind of personality he has why does he wear a mask what's underneath that mask and it's the combination of all of these

deliverables together that helps the team align on what we're trying to make I think ultimately what we ended up making for Deadeye or for gin was a character that really excelled at this idea of a deliberate artisan killer but we couldn't get to that level of specificity right away we have to build alignment and understanding and to do that that takes a lot of work there's these deliverables here but there's many others as well and that brings me to the second learning that we've had that I want to share with you now which is that for us our hardest work is before production and in a way we have our framework ironically to like blame for this you know we've our front loaded more and more of our work and more of our deliverables before we get into production over the years we've learned that the later we make changes and the later we do some things the costlier and more painful it becomes especially when we start building final assets and so

because those change has become exponentially harder we've decided as a team that we want to invest in tackling these things early our average champion production schedule is nine months and that's just on average and so for a lot of our champions before we ever make a final asset it can be five months in previous phases and we found that that actually has a lot of value for us all right so let's get into production production is not easy I know that I said our hardest work was before this and champion their production is an exciting time everyone's working on different assets we're integrating them all together we're seeing how they feel and inevitably there's some changes that we want to make but because we've done some due diligence before this we can usually roll with those changes without impacting our overall schedule and ultimately our goal for production is to get the champion in a Content complete state with enough

that we can start video taping and and for creating video content to show players and we do this because we want to engage and excite our players with new champion content but we also want to you know release this content before the champion comes out so that players can get an understanding of what's coming of what are the abilities here I want to share with you one of the new features that we needed to build forge in we needed to create a new UI HUD element a core part of Jin's gameplay is that he has four shots and then he needs to take a pause and reload and we needed to be able to communicate this mechanic to players in a really clear way unfortunately we don't have any interface designers on the champion team or anyone that looks like really that skill set and so we have to partner with another team and this is where that scalability thing comes into play that I was talking about earlier our framework really helped create an easy partnership with our other team because we were able to say hey here's where we're at with

Jen here are the goals that we have here are the deliverables that we need along the way how can we partner with you and add your deliverables into this process and it's awesome that this helps us work in a line with other teams as well and as a result our newer champions have more new features than ever before so we've moved into our next stage from production which is post-production this is when we released the champion and I think in order to really explain how this works I should tell you a little bit about how League of Legends delivers new content to players so we try to release a new patch of content every two weeks worldwide but before that patch goes wide we upload it to our PvE or public beta server and players can play the PBE server and give us feedback and so for us on champion team you know releasing a champion isn't like a singular moment in time it's actually the process of many weeks and we're you know taking feedback and one of our biggest goals is to release the champion

in the healthy awesome state and definitely in a balanced state and so I apologize let's let's get up some this content so we've created what we call a balanced mitigation plan this plan has a bunch of different balanced outcomes and scenarios that could come to pass and all of the things that we're gonna do to address those now those balanced concerns really often never come but we found that it has helped us do that exercise that if it does if something does happen we're able to able to quickly react to it and if you play league you may challenge me on Jin's balance currently and I encourage you to give that feedback directly to Gregg Street tomorrow if you go to this talk so after post-production we're in our final phase this is called sustain and this is where Jin currently is and all 134 of our champions live and we have some clear deliverables at this phase you know we archive all of our

development assets we set up some partnerships with our other teams and League of Legends and how we're going to support Jin in the future and we hold project retrospectives with the team but overall we're really still trying to figure out a good goal and good deliverables here and that leads me to the final learning that I want to share with you all today and that's our frameworks never done and it always needs improvement and if you create something like this I'm betting yours will also be in this situation but ultimately that's okay this framework is cheap to iterate on cheap to create and it encourages that constant iteration and what we found as a team is that the more that we work on this the more we get benefits like scalability and clarity and it gives us a stronger and stronger foundation of which to stand on as a team which in turn has given us

more and more of creative energy to focus on delivering innovative and resonant champions to League of Legends players I want to thank you all so so much for coming to this talk and for your time [Applause] yeah that's my Twitter if you want to send me tips on how to take better team photos or give me feedback or continue talking about this please feel free and I think we've got five minutes for Q&A so I Padre I can't really see you but I know hi so I have a question about your framework you mentioned the different phases and I wanted to know if they are time boxed like you have a specific time to reach these phases or it's more like you iterate until you are default to go to the next phase that's a good question so the question was do we have a time box on each of these phases and the answer is kind of we have some best

practices that we found over the years of like it should take us about this amount of time in Discovery and about this amount of time in ideation and so forth but these are just guidelines we've had I would say all of our champions have broken some some of those guidelines at some point and we just use that as a way of kind of got checking ourselves where we're at thank you question um what's your rate of atrophy between these different phases like you sort of said some a lot of type champions don't make it to the next step how much you're getting lost along the way at each of those steps roughly yeah a lot so it's it's kind of hard to keep track of that data specifically I will say that we cycle and turn through stuff in Discovery pretty frequently and we have this concept that we call ice boxing so if a champion isn't kind of moving forward and not getting traction we put it in the ice box which means we've got a kind of backlog collection of concepts that we can pull from in the future what are you losing them later

steps also or you once they reach a certain point do they always go all the way through it's pretty unusual that we sort of lose a champion after ideation and the main reason for that is because we have some really hard core design deliverables in there like pattern lock Thanks yeah thank you hi there thank you I just wanted to ask you regarding champion reworks do you happen to find yourself starting at earlier points in the process or do you tend to get a little bit of a head start due to that oh great okay so the the question was about champion reworks and do we use the same framework so it was that the question more or less yes okay so champion updates is actually a sister team a partner team two champion and they use a similar process but not exactly this framework you know there are a lot of similarities for how we work on the teams but I don't want to and want to try to give specifics on on their process okay thank you yeah he might have already answered my cut

or you might have already just answered my question but so you guys don't handle the maintaining of the champion that's another team that does that so the question is do we handle maintaining the champions or not it depends on your definition of maintaining so we have a responsibility in a commitment to players into our organization that we will continuously take care of our champions and so when bugs come up or certain issues the champion team is accountable for making sure they're resolved there's a there are other teams within the League of Legends sort of organization that look at things like visual game updates or sort of their large-scale reworks and as well as sort of specific balance passes or we do things like roster updates essentially there's a lot of teams working on champions and we're just one of them okay and how do you handle scaling out so obviously the more champions you have the harder it gets to actually handle all these different things so how do you get scaling out your team's uses to grow exponentially the more champions you have okay so the question is how do we

scale or sort of what are the challenges around scaling as the more champions that we have I think that that kind of gets at the heart of the challenges that we have around our current sustain phase the more champions that we have the more we need to just double down on our commitment to maintaining them we are still trying to figure that out okay thank you yeah I think yeah I've noticed that some champions come out with these really elaborate videos you know comics and all that kind of things and other champions kind of just come out is that considered as part of the design process to say you know this person this champion needs this video kind of explain their lore so you understand them or is that kind of added later in the process the question was you know how do how does the sort of like supplementary and then sort of promotional content work for releasing new champions it's a my response is I

feel like gonna be long-winded but I'm gonna try to just cut to the chase which is there's another partner team that we have champion publishing that partners really early with us on like how can we best tell players the story of who this champion is and is the most effective tool to do that a comic or is it a video or is it an interactive website or Easter eggs or stories we're always like trying to innovate and think of new things to do there so the process starts really early and we we partner with another team on that all the way okay all right thank you thanks all right I think we're at time thank you guys so much for coming today and please hit me up if you have any other questions thank you