Illustrating Fantasy in League of Legends

[Music] all right cool people came to my talk it's [Laughter] cool all right cool so hi guys my name is Andrew silver uh I lead the illustration team over RI Riot games yeah what's up Pete um one of the things that we do over at riot games is a thing that we call Splash art which is in short the illustrations of our Champions and skins and League of Legends we've spent a lot of years working on developing this team that we feel like offers a lot of benefit to help players deepen their understanding of the League of Legends IP over time we paid particular attention to leveling up our painting ability bringing on new people training the ones we had and developing the style we wanted our art to live in

but I'd argue that the team's biggest level up throughout the years was actually in something a bit outside the realm of craft here we go just as a heads up before we jump into this uh I wanted to point out that the work featured here is actually the result of all of these guys uh we have a mentality on the team that every Splash comes from every individual on the team so a bit of context around our game real quick League of Legends is a massive multiplayer online battle arena for hardcore Gamers so what the hell does that even mean uh two teams of five set out to kill enemy Champions and minions mow down defensive towers and ultimately destroy the enemy's base now after this they jump into a new session and try to do it all over again it feels like 5v5 chests where each one of the pieces is a fighting game character and had that have many of their own unique abilities Splash art is essentially the player's first experience with that

Champion now taking a look back at how we used to think about splashes Splash art started back in our super freaking humble beginnings with this incredibly Derpy version of s now these were meant to serve the primary purpose of being a character select screen similar to those of the classic fighting games of the90s they meant to show players exactly what Champion or skin they were about to unlock or play now very quickly we realized that Splash art really determined whether a player was GNA pick up and play this Champion so because of this we developed a certain subset of rules in order to maximize splash's impact on a Champion's performance and create a cohesive field for League of Legends splasher so today I don't want to give you guys a tutorial on how to paint what I'd rather do is show how our old way of thinking was extremely limiting to our Champions emotional impact on players and the league Community recognized it check out this Evolution hey not so Derpy splat cion

uh I want to talk about how we evolved our philosophy behind why we create Splash art and share some of the lessons that we learned along the way in our pursuit to make art that really resonates with players as a team we had to understand exactly how players experience Splash art so let's walk through what a player sees when they log into the game let's say you're a jinx player uh you start at the login screen which generally features one of the newest animated splashes uh you check out the champion Details page where you can see your Splash and maybe read up on the champion uh when you click play you'll see the Champion Select screen where you pick your Champion uh and then you load into the game while checking out what the two teams consist of and finally you're in game now for a long time this is what we used to think of as a champion uh the end-game model and for a lot of our content including our Splash art we aimed to best represent the model as the identity for the champion and over time we started to realize well yes

you know the model is an important part of of a player's perception of who this Champion is um the real perception of a champion is comprised of an amalgamation of all the content that we create things like illustration 3D model music music videos promotional teasers web experiences toys and so on you know all of these things give a clear understanding of who a champion is but over time our mentality evolved even further this character doesn't really exist in the the real world players can't go to a real place and meet Jinx the way that we're starting to think is that a true champion ultimately lives in players Minds our job as game developers is to do our best to accurately represent the character we want players to see in their imagination we can only influence our players perceptions of who a champion is and we have to do this well with every piece of content that we create for Champions uh when the illustration team realized this we set out a new goal

use Splash to tell strong fantasy-driven stories for players and create Windows into the League of Legends IP the team saw Splash not as a way of just show showing Champions doing cool things but to show their personalities and give players an identity to relate to I love this uh if you check out the bottom left of the image you can actually see where Jason used birdshit as like a storytelling element so let's rewind again and look at some of our older work you'll notice that these splashes share many similarities Champions are either in what we would call heroic or action poses their source of power is prominently being displayed in the image and most often times being used uh we're always seem to be looking up at the champion and their face is unobstructed I mean why the hell can we see this dude's face if he's wearing a hood uh and all of their abilities look more or less exactly like what they do in game now we made these rules because

we thought this was what players wanted we figured players wanted to pick up and play a champion character model because it was cool in what we would call aspirational which by the way was like our biggest freaking buzz word nobody knew what it meant so let's take a look at fizz here seems like a cool enough looking dude it's this blue fish thing all around happy guy he's going to poke you with his Magic Trident he's got a pet shark I want a pet shark uh he's looking all heroic in the sunlight where he's got water splashes everywhere you know now Fizz is one of my favorite champions in the game but what this doesn't show you is exactly the thing that I fell in love with as a Fizz player I fell in love with his playful nature uh in the hands of a great player and no this is not me saying I'm a great player Fizz is slippery he's going to taunt you while he uses his crazy skills to dance around all of your abilities and attacks he's that little tiny Underdog that's got the attitude of a Whimsical 10-year-old who has fun in everything that he does and what he's generally doing is kicking everybody

ass now before I started at Riot I really admired this Splash and in many ways I still do the shapes of the drawing the control of the warms and cools to direct your eye to the character the general rhythm of how the water splashes interacted with the pose of the character that really create this sense of great motion the fact that the artist did all of these things without realizing it you know just naturally uh you know still irks me to this day but uh my question is looking back at this why did I have to play the character in order to understand that magic personality couldn't I have gotten that just from looking at an image of him you see the rules did a great job of helping us uh you know make the art look consistent but ultimately it homogenized it uh the rules were too restrictive and our players recognized it let's compare compare splashes for a minute this Splash sh of Alisa's death Blossom skin and her base Champion Splash were released on the exact same day you know from all of our metrics on what made good Splash art this skin

should have rocked the worlds of every one of our players look at this crazy freaking action pose she's repelling from the ceiling she's got spider webs flying at our faces um flower petals which are the theme of this skin are everywhere she's hissing at us and there's Magic on pretty much everything including coming out of the asses of these spiders so long story short when we check the the forums players didn't love it now the reason they didn't love it wasn't because of the art execution of the piece was because players were getting tired of the same thing over and over again I mean we did a billion of these things and for the small purpose of being a character select screen they served their purpose but the funny thing is is that looking back players saw a potential in our splashes that we until that point just weren't seeing what players wanted was a fantasy to roleplay and what we were giving them were glorified pieces of box art now here's Alisa's base Champion Splash now it may feel similar in a lot of ways but there was one key difference

that we really felt was important to get across you'll notice that she's sitting down now this may seem really small but in actuality it was a fundamental shift in our philosophy there were actual debates asking questions like if she's sitting down can she really be aspirational to players there's our favorite word again and also why are we hiding her main gameplay hook her giant spider behind her even into our final days of production we're getting feedback like this but ultimately we decided to give it a chance and try it if it didn't work we could always go back to our old rules so what did our players think they actually freaking loved it now what this showed us was that what we thought of as a guide to player resonance these arbitrary rules could be broken and still work we realized that we had to dig deeper into what our goals should be let's analyze the story here Elisa is a Spider Queen why the heck does a queen have to get her hands dirty and killing us I mean sure she attacks in game but that's not what's important to her as a character as a queen Ela should just be able to sit and wait we're already dead

we just don't know it yet at this point we're Beyond saving check it out you could see if you look in the background you could see evidence of her uh victims where the spiderlings had gotten a hold of them uh the thing that made her a champion that players wanted to role play was that Regal feeling that sense of assumed power and ability to command her minions at will so fresh off this idea we figured that we'd crack the code and to some degree we were right we figured the trick was hey let's show what's cool about a Champion's personality we can show the things about Champions that we couldn't show in game so we were like halfway there one of our artists Josh helped to level this idea up with this next splash of kha'zix where he focused on the viewers perspective what's the scariest thing about being hunted how about the moment where you just got paralyzed by flying stingers and have to wait helplessly while he tracks you down and finishes off the job what a cool way of telling the story

about what it's like to play against kha'zix we thought we didn't get a really clear understanding of what the purpose of Splash art should be until this guy Mal fight's a rock Golem in our game that when this was being painted sparked many passionate debates in regard to his scale now funny enough he's one of the smaller models in our game uh so what the hell are we doing painting him like he's eight stories tall uh this debate forced us to reflect on what a Champion's fantasy actually is we were still still focusing on who a player would play as or against but does the fantasy go even deeper than the game this led us to our current idea models are not Champions they're abstractions of our Champions players play league like a competitive Sport and in a competitive sport Clarity matters so the in-game assets are low poly models always seen from above made to represent the idea of a character in a gameplay setting where they can be modified to fit the medium of competitive 5v5 gameplay the real fantasy is

external an implied world of stories and interaction between these characters free from the constraints of balanced and readable gameplay and while we create Mal fight ingame to fit inside that gameplay space Mal fight's chematic of being in is being an Unstoppable Force we need to be able to understand the reason for him being Unstoppable when we see him we need to immediately understand by looking at those ragd doll helmet Bros that are getting dragged along dragged along that any attempt to harness or conru this force is an exercise and futility that's the true fantasy and the core concept that players will seek to role play now in order to understand the fantasy the team feels it's incredibly important to play to know the Champions as well as players do we're constantly playing the game reading up on the backstory of Champions scouring the internet for guides on what players create we're up to date on all the league memes and player made content and many of us watch programs on a regular basis some of us have logged literally thousands of hours of the game and it's

not abnormal for us to play multiple games at work I don't know if you guys can see clearly but literally everybody this is about 1:00 in the office and everybody's playing this type of passion is what helped the team develop trust not only internally but on a company scale as well we try to assign splashes to the artists that are most passionate about those Champions this gives everybody the confidence that the right decisions are being made for splashes and the ideas are coming from the imagination of an authentic player now every week the team does collaborative reviews where we all jump into a room and feedback the absolute crap out of each other's work and during these reviews for this Champion copia we had some serious reservations about our story we used to assume that the Champion's face was the most important part of the splash but what if that inhibits the story copia is a half snake half human champion in League that can manipulate poison and freeze any enemy into stone in our Kona vision and we we were working to create a new Splash to replace the old one that

was no longer meeting our style or quality bars our first inclination wish to show her doing her death stare that's her biggest gameplay thematic and we figured that players that would want to be able to see that to understand her better we felt like this was a no-brainer but Evan the artist on this wasn't sold on that idea when we got to review and he showed us this we had a few concerns about the lighting basically cutting her face in half now even as a Evan is a copian m which is say he's played hundreds of games of copia uh he talked to us about how the magic moment for copia for a player actually isn't in the act of killing herself itself it's in the exhilaration that you get that moment right before it's the moment when the entire enemy team is walking toward you completely unaware of the absolute hell that's about to rain down upon them as you hide in a bush or concealed Terrain in our game like a snake you wait for the perfect moment to strike and unload every ability you have on them

the story had to be about that moment right before now having the shadow across her face creates the feeling of a doorway half open just before the moment where copia would freeze whoever this is with her Infamous Death Stare here's an instance where player perception actually helped us shape the fantasy Sho was originally released about six years ago with this Splash he's a demon Jester in our game that basically fills the fantasy of scary ass clown deed now originally we looked at him as this creepy assassin who terrorizes his enemies and drives them insane before he kills them and while he still does that over the years players's understanding of this guy changed he became known as one of the hardest Champions to catch and his gorilla Style hit-and run tactics have basically become a signature by which players both love and or hate him but how can we create a splash where we show a champion this thing that's supposed to be badass an aspirational enery to players running away from a fight we worried players would perceive him as

a coward in reality though sho's core concept is like that orange smoke that he leaves behind it's all too apparent and antagonizing as hell but ultimately it's still just smoke the goal here was to Target the feeling of being led down the rabbit hole while being indirectly hunted by the very thing that you were trying to hunt so for a while Splash was thought to be a premier image of a champion a One-Stop shop for one single Champion to avoid player confusion and the opportunity to show champions in a moment that makes them more powerful than anything else in the IP so players could aspire to that power from a developer standpoint we assumed the player value was derived from the splash assets themselves the actual illustrations we figured players wanted their own singular Splash per Champion uh and the idea of sharing a splash uh space would lessen their value as our mentality around Splash shifted we realized that instead of being a detriment to the splash sometimes the whole could be greater than the sum of its parts

as a cool thematic hook for a skin line the Skins team created a heavy metal Rockstar line of skins for five Champions and we called them pentakill uh when our music team set out to release a heavy metal album for players inspired by these skins the splash team also set out to create an album cover as well as update the outdated splashes for these five skins as we look to tell their stories we realized there wasn't any cool enough stories individually that represented the fantasy of these guys I mean these guys are a band we can't pull them apart and show how they're awesome at the same time so we showed them taking the stage of this epic demon theater and with particular attention to how players would react to this new combined story it turns out players didn't mind at all in fact the idea of characters existing with the same space was something that many actually liked and this was all the more evidence that we were looking at this all wrong players didn't care about having a unique art asset they wanted a story they could roleplay and think about when they were listening to the music or playing the game

gameplay restrictions often limit what we're capable of doing with our in-game VFX in a game where there's often dozens of spell effects on screen at any given time it's important for players to understand what those effects are and who they're being cast on for competitive gam play Clarity is key take a look at this kale uh model here in game her ultimate ability intervention creates an impenetrable force field around any Ally that makes them invulnerable now one of the only abilities is in game that does this so ingame we made this ability translucent to show who was being protected now in the past we took care to represent abilities exactly as they were in game because we didn't want to confuse players and while making the force field translucent would have been an easy solve to the problem Suk the artist on this felt that we weren't going far enough to convey such a unique ability suk's argument was that a translucent force field has been done many times in many forms of media and while there's many shields in League of

Legends that soak up damage we needed some way to communicate the scope of this particular ability's power when Suk brought this image to review the whole team went freaking nuts the idea of having a dense liquid gold shroud her in a protective bubble was a great solution that was both unique and also felt impenetrable so taking a look back at Talon it's pretty easy to see some of the level UPS from old to new but even now we're doing our best to continue to evolve when we think about the idea of a vicious but Stone Cold killer an assassin uh who Talon is supposed to be we imagine this would say it look at this guy super mysterious with his hood covering his face he's leaping off the top of a building in a larger than life action pose uh his blades coming out of every part of his costume this crazy circular Rhythm where his cape is flaring out uh that's all alluding to the fact that this guy is about to get freaking owned uh you know great assassin story right so let me pose a different

question why are we showing the most feared Assassin from the scariest place on Earth right hand to one of the scariest rulers in all of Runa about to kill helmet bro number 5,43 why are we the viewer of these average dudes able to even witness this event how is this showing us why he's a cooler assassin than any other what it doesn't show us the depth of his tradecraft or or the difficulty rating of the types of jobs that he actually takes ultimately this could be any assassin in any story we feel like we missed the Mark here we like the image but it's not the best story that could have been told sure it's an assassin story but it's not one that's unique to Talon the new Katarina Splash is an example of a better way to tell a unique assassin story Katarina's thematic hook revolves around repeatedly teleporting to her targets and dispatching them with prec precision and ease in her Splash she's featured in a throne room above a red carpet gravity still hasn't even taken effect on these dead guards behind

her uh and she's already coming out of her next portal at lightning speed about to deliver the final blow to the viewer a leader or a king somebody who's worth her time as we've evolved we realized the idea shouldn't be to regulate uh the stories that we're trying to tell in order to create consistency we should create consistency in other ways like finding the right aspects of our visual style that to constrain things like color with vibrant but limited pallets these call back to the limited pallets in game lighting scenes with colorful lights that bounce all over the place um with particular attention to color temperature high polish but handcrafted rendering and strong graphic shapes to our VFX similar to the way that we depict them in game but not constrained by the exact execution all of these are fantasy agnostic but they've done a much better job to allow for the individuality required to create a breath of over 120 unique champions in the

game like our first image of Sion here who's such a behemoth that is Axe something that we used to think of as a source of power has basically become an afterthought all he needs to do is step on us as we get to sit and stare through our helmet as we get crushed while we spent a lot of time working to level up on Craft I'd argue that that was only a small part of what the team attributes its success to today it was far more important for us to understand why we create splashes for players if I could give advice to any and all who make art for games and especially those who create characters I'd say really get to know and love the game that you work on and the audience that you work for know and Lov the characters like your players do before you start telling their stories and understand what purpose those stories will serve it's impossible to tell their stories effectively without first understanding the emotional impact they're supposed to have on your players and lastly Empower any artist to break any rule in favor of creating unique fantasy for players to role play more

often than not they're going to thank you for it [Applause] thanks all right so I think we got do we have time for questions yeah cool I guess jump up to the microphone hi where am I looking oh hey uh I'm just curious did you ever uh through the process consider drastically different art styles like watercolor or any other just to mix up the the look of the characters the impression you give the the viewer yeah I mean so back in the day we kind of did have a whole bunch of art styles with the resources that we had we were you know kind of looking for for any way to depict the champion or or skin that we could um ultimately we wanted to create a consistency so that when people looked at at the art they knew what game they were going to be looking at you know especially when we're going going to start trying to tell different stories

and create different viewpoints and we're not constraining them by the you know the stories that we're telling we need some way of keeping it consistent so that people don't you know get confused about what they're looking at thanks yeah sure hey let me just stand on my tippy toes here um so um one of the things that's very key for a lot of Champions is Rivals like VI is a rival of jinx and Rengar is a rival of kazak and there's a lot of interplay between these two Champions and in a way it makes it makes players quote unquote hate each other not really not really hate hate but like it gives you a sense as like okay I'm playing VI they're playing Jinx I'm going to beat her head in so um have you ever thought about doing a splash art where there's a champion that is fighting another champion not so much you know I'm beating down the champion but more so we're two equals fighting mhm so we have considered that right with champion splashes we do want to be super clear about which Champion that you're picking um with skin splashes we're we tend to be a little bit more liberable liberal with the stories that we tell and put multiple champions in

the splashes um you know we have splashes where they kind of hearken back to each other if you look at the Jinx versus the vi right they both have the same exact background the idea is that Jinx kind of busted in later that night where she you know like got into the bank and and blew everything up but yeah anything else um hi you were talking about how um like there was like a team of I think 10 or 12 that you showed that wear the flash Arts is a as a result of all of you working on it um is that um in that within that process is that a you like if someone does one thing and it like someone works on the face and it passes off to someone else or it passes off to someone else is that the case or is it more of a um while it is still a result of the whole team is it where maybe only three to five people out of that whole team work on certain splashes or is it a mix of that okay so the question was basically if we're you know labeling every splash FL is part of every person on the team um how is that

actually like uh done right yeah how is the work divied up M so uh the way that we look at it is that because we're giving feedback so regular to each other uh it it really becomes like greater than than what that one person can do uh you know we're constantly just like you know giving ideas paintovers all these things um there was a couple splashes up here that that you saw like the Elise based skin Splash we had five people working on that at the same exact time it came together in like 4 days uh but the uh you know we we've kind of developed a layer layer style thing where we you know we'll send certain layers to one person certain layers to another person and then we kind of check back in and merge the files into like a master file um that's you know we we work differently generally generally there's one person working on each Splash but they're getting feedback from the whole team on a regular basis but we do collaborate a lot yeah hey uh what elements would you change about the Fizz Splash to better portray his kind of playful Trickster I've been thinking about this for a long

time so the question is what would we change about the Fizz Splash we're we're probably going to do it relatively soon TM um but the you know I mean my my fantasy for that that Splash like my my dream is to have him like freaking on a on a beach right this giant tital wave behind him like imagine if he was like on his like troll Pole where he's kind of doing his like back flip and giving you like the peace sign but like in the background you can see like the the the shark underneath wave like in the subsurface you know there just massive shark coming at you right and there's like a little tiny fish that he throws at you like to Mark where the the shark is going to go like flapping around in front of you like that's that's my dream but it might come out completely different but thanks hi hey can we expect like any Splash art regarding the hidden passiv of the characters hidden passiv of characters those uh I'm not actually sure like we those have kind of become like little little tiny inside jokes for players you know like with Leona and the the you talking about Leona and the the

sunglasses and stuff like that yeah like Rumble and Tristana that's type of thing gotcha um so with the rumble Splash right we actually for a little while on the inside of the the uh on the inside of the cockpit we had like Tristan or Tristy like scratched into the name you know um we ultimately took it out because we didn't want it to be like super distracting but and it was also really hard to read with the you know the values and stuff we you know we we want to do that stuff but you know it can't be in every Splash you know good job though oh thanks man thanks hi and my question is when when creating a champion there are many possibilities of the personality and the style of the champion that that champion can be overly cute or can be over overly gross and I noticed that H the splash Arts are tending to be somehow a lot more darker or with h colors that are

not that strong how will you foresee challenges of dealing with a character with very strong colors and style H when creating these new splashers for them I'm sorry so you're asking about like how we deal with different maybe not so like badass in your face I'm going to kill you Champions yeah exactly especially with the colors and and the textures they those characters will prefer to look simple while they our styles are very heavy on Textures and and realism like and the lighting and such gotcha um so the way that I would kind of look at that is if you look at you guys are you guys familiar with the Nar Splash you have kind of the the little dude uh you know his his he's got two forms his big form where he's you know big Nar and then the little form where he's like this little like baby ortal thing um and the ways that we're trying to show them are are kind of in their their base form and and uh kind of show them as players would see

them from the beginning right um but still kind of allude to a lot of the other things that that do make them badass so because of him and and him not being super cognizant of what he's doing he's kind of the more Primal version of them uh you know the only way that we can really show that uh is to to show him kind of like just totally distracted by like a little Firefly but still sitting in in like his footprint from when he's like bigar and have the scratches everywhere and like the Shadow with the the little like lightning bug that alludes to you know big form so we generally tend to focus on on kind of the close-ups for those dudes and and try to figure out the ways that we can sell both ends of their personality through like abstract methods you know thank you cool sweet all right I'll be out in around so if anybody has any more questions