Elderwood LeBlanc - process by sunnykoda

mhmm.

Working at Riot is extremely collaborative! From inception to execution everything is team-driven. Our Product Owners represent the player's interests and the rest of the team share their ideas/excitement. At every stage what enables us to decide to move forward with a project is this one question; "Are players going to love this?"

We don't really have supervisors but are empowered to champion ideas we ourselves believe in. At the same time with great power comes great responsibility, and we each do our best to understand our players and what will get them excited. That's why it's so important for us ourselves to be players; I play a lot of whatever champion I'm working on so I can really understand what is cool about them.

It can be difficult for new Rioters - you look around for someone to give you the thumbs up or 'ok' so you can pull the trigger and everyone just points right back at you: it's your responsibility and if you get it wrong then that's on you. I think it's an awesome way to work. Over the past 18 months I've made mistakes I've learned from and I've had victories where I go home pumping my fist at all the positive feedback on s20, forums, reddit etc. but the whole time I've been able to decide when I think I've got something players will love instead of being just a tool in a production pipeline.

also, i see a lot of your concepts keep the angle of the camera ingame in mind, you do this because it is important that the biggest design features are recognizable from that angle?

I wonder about the value of skin ideas like that, dark star veigar etc. We feel like they are too close to the base fantasy to make a skin players would want over some alternate fantasy we could do. We always have to think about the limited time we have to work on projects and how to efficiently convert that to player value.

Thanks for checkin' it out

I would be able to get through it much faster today, but when I worked on it initially over a year ago I was really struggling to communicate my idea to the team. Most of the real work of a concept artist is not drawing but helping the team to find a design they are excited about executing on.

Oh dude this one was a potato, took way too long to get alignment on what I had in my head. So glad it came out really well in the end no small thanks to the team.

I will do what I can time permitting. tyty

Thanks for taking an interest in the process!

ty >

I probably won't find the time to go back, but if there's a good example in the future I'll try to put something even better together for it. Unfortunately some of the biggest learnings come from cancelled skins or major pivots that would be disappointing for players so I can't post them.