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League of Legends
Riot Games
Moments Game Designer I
Crafted new and unique gameplay experiences using Unity for League in-game events. Acted as design liaison with our skins team to uphold gameplay clarity with upcoming skins. Designed and implemented stat trackers (Eternals) for new and reworked champions.
Champion Design Intern
Three-month Internship focusing on revamping an older champion to make them feel better and also assisting with building a kit for a new in-development champion. Built in Proprietary Engine.
*Cinematic not representative of my work
Tournament of Souls
Tournament of Souls was our big debut for showing our players what in-game events will look like in the future. We wanted to create a new experience that truly resonated with the event thematic: Soul Fighter. We created a 2D autobattler that looked and felt a little like a traditional fighting game. Created in Unity, I designed and implemented all 10 boss encounters.
Tournament of Souls Expert Mode Gameplay
Goals for Boss Design
Design Process
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2-3 attacks with one ultimate so fights don't feel stale
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Should resonate with champion kit in League, but not required that attacks directly copy League abilities
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Each boss should have a hook that directly relates to what abilities the player should bring to defeat them
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Create fights as puzzles to be solved where the pieces are player loadout and enemy attack patterns
When tackling boss design for Tournament of Souls, I first went to a paper design. I wrote out each boss's kit and what abilities seemed to resonate best, how they would look, what the counterplay was, and what the goals for each fight were. Since we wanted the fights to feel more like puzzles, each boss needed to have a specific counterplay. I worked very closely with our hero designer to ensure that the players' loadout options covered everything needed to defeat each opponent.
I then began implementing each boss kit into Unity. I wrote the C# scripts, crafted behavior trees, and put placeholder VFX so that we could do preliminary playtesting on whether an ability was fun to play against or not. I created a base enemy script that held all the core elements needed for each boss (i.e. health, take/deal damage, add/remove buff/debuffs, etc.) then created a child script that held each boss ability specific to them. Lastly, I created another child that was the behavior tree for each difficulty. This allowed us to make the bosses act differently depending on difficulty and more easily keep their stats separated and readable for tuning.
Once we got sign-off on the paper-designed abilities and onboarded our outsourced art teams, I worked as a liaison for the artists to ensure they understood each enemy and player animation needed. I also helped to set up our animation blend trees for each character and direct my peers on how to use the system and create spritesheets. We utilized animation events to call our damage and VFX since we wanted animation canceling to be a part of the game.
Shortly before going on leave, we noticed our art teams weren't going to hit the deadline we needed. We needed to downscope to ensure we hit the deadline. Before being officially asked, I went through each boss kit and labeled 1-2 abilities for removal that were not core to their identity and handed them to my manager. He was extremely appreciative.
Before taking parental leave, I carefully documented how all the animation and spritesheets were created and implemented, and I completed as much preliminary work as possible. I also made sure all enemy functionality was finished and would only need tuning and animation. My goal was to set my team up for success during my 3-month absence when the project would be shipping.
Core Lessons Learned
Animation blend trees are completely unnecessary for 2D projects. I'm grateful I got to learn this system, but it added a lot of unneeded headaches for this project.
Always have multiple layers of downscoping prepared. Inevitably you will downscope and it helps to be prepared for that. Our first downscope wasn't painful but the second one (while I was on leave) was painful for certain enemies and the choices were difficult for my peers.
Gameplay Clarity and Eternals
As part of my every-day responsibilities, I was also tasked with reviewing and helping our artists with new skins to uphold gameplay clarity as well as creating Eternals (stat trackers) for reworked and new champions.
Gameplay Clarity
I would be the gameplay SME for our artists to make sure our skins didn't push the boundaries too much to where they became either pay-to-lose or pay-to-win. With League being a game so focused on its competitive integrity, it's important that every skin still looks and feels enough like the champion that players can distinguish who they are and understand what they do as a character. Sometimes the art would push these limits with the scope and intensity of animations or effects, and I frequently worked to find compromises and balance these projects. Many times, this meant I had to have tough conversations with our art team who were so passionate about the work. We worked together to figure out where to pull back for clarity while preserving the excitement.
Eternals
Using League's proprietary engine, we would create new stat trackers for reworked and new champions. I created names and descriptions for ~15 stats, ensuring there was an even spread of stats where numbers go big and where 1 increment of the stat felt like a triumph. There was always a goal that a stat must increment at a minimum of twice per match. I did my best to design more out-of-the-box stats when possible; rather than simply tracking damage from an ability. I would often try to track "distance traveled while in combat" or "time spent hidden within your created terrain" instead.
Unannounced Project
I'll describe this project in two segments: prototype phase and preproduction phase.*
During prototype, I was on a team of two to craft a gameplay experience that was not just following what another game had done but truly building something brand new. At the end of the prototype phase, our team opted to move forward with the other prototype my team members were building because it fit the event thematic better. However, we still worked to preserve and icebox our prototype for a future event.
During Preproduction, I worked on our other project for about a month before leaving. In that time I did intensive research and paper design to make a fun experience for our players.
*Due to NDA, I won't be able to discuss either in great detail.
Prototype
When splitting into two prototypes, I wanted to work on the one that had more combat elements included in it. This prototype was in development for about 2.5 months. I worked hard with one other team member, doing research and paper designing a new combat loop experience in the tabletop/board game genre during the first month. The month after, we built the paper design in Unity, making a strong vertical slice to show leadership and get their greenlight to pursue this for another future thematic. The last 2 weeks of this prototype was bug-fixing and documenting all of our design thoughts and decisions so that whoever resumed the project in the future would have a good starting foundation.
PreProduction
I spent the first couple weeks of preproduction onboarding onto the other prototype that we chose for our 2024 thematic. This project was more focused on full immersion and puzzle-solving. I was given a space with a loose narrative outline and beats we wanted to hit within the level. I then began to paper design puzzles for the space, trying to capture narrative moments within the puzzles and creating simple but challenging puzzles for the players. During this time I also paper-designed a system core to the project. I did extensive research on similar products to help drive the design and meet our goals. Immersion was our core focus and this was meant to aid in that.
Champion Design Internship
Maokai Adjustment
(not quite a Midscope)
Goals
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Shift Maokai back into Top/Jung roles without sacrificing his current AP support role.
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Make his E ability useful during team fights
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Make his Ult ability more successful and feel more impactful to the Maokai player
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Keep his current identity as a disruption/sustain/tank
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Use little to no art budget
What we tried
We tried a few different ideas but many of them failed on some of our goals or didn't feel impactful enough. We finally ended in a spot that we really enjoyed, which was giving him a defensive steroid once Maokai had achieved some mini-goal (i.e. stay in champion combat for 5s). This was solid thematically and helped him achieve his identity even more. Sadly, the power budget cost was too high to make this a reality, so we opted to ship out a larger adjustment for him rather than giving him new mechanics and labeling this a midscope.
Where we landed
Despite not shipping anything too large in scale, we still shipped a lengthy list of adjustments that did tackle our goals very well. We were able to downscope his changes to a reasonable power budget so he wouldn't be too overpowered while still buffing him where needed to get players excited about his return to the Solo Tank class.
Final Changelist
Core Lessons Learned
Working on a game that caters to competitive esports along with the rest of its playerbase taught me a lot when it comes to balance and design.
It's necessary to check power budget along multiple layers of competition: Low skill, Elite skill, and Pro skill.
When designing new abilities as well, it must be front-of-mind what type of champion you are making and if those abilities are geared more towards one of those 3 skill groups.
Also when designing a new kit, it's very important to list out your goals first and frequently look at them to ensure you are keeping within goals. It's more efficient to correct course in the early phases before you've actually built something.
Finally, don't be afraid to try out something crazy. It might be completely off but it also might teach us something that we didn't know previously.
Early Naafiri Iterations
This champ was recently released as a mid-lane, low-skill assassin. My role on this project was to assist and visualize early stages of champion development. Towards the end of my time, I built a few ability iterations and trained a peer on their scripts.
While working on her abilities, I was tasked with finding a unique form of wave clearing. With Naafiri being a melee champion in a lane with mages, she needed a tool that would allow her to farm safely if she needed to. We also wanted this ability to be a fishing tool: an ability that, once landed, told the player it's time to go all in. My ability iterations helped influence the final shape of her Q ability, although we moved away from requiring it to be a fishing tool.
*Skip to 1:21 to see the Q ability
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