Designing Solutions: Creating a Champion
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Identifying Problems: The first step in the design process is asking how League of Legends could be improved, and then identifying problem areas within the game that design is capable of solving. Some of the current issues are: • The current state of tanks and bruisers is leading to many complaints about the AD carry role. Being ahead as an AD carry and subsequently feeling helpless against a one or two item Mundo or Renekton is very dissatisfying. • The recent changes to the support role were fantastic. Playing support is a blast now. However, the role lacks the number of champions that many of the other roles have. There is a great deal of unexplored potential within the support role. • Itemization for AD carries is not varied. They have very few options to choose from outside of one situational defensive item. • With the recent changes to vision, Evelynn is a problem again and Rengar has very little counterplay. Teemo also requires an incredible amount of coordination and effort to deal with later in the game. While not an exhaustive list, identifying multiple core problems is a good starting place for discerning the most effective design solutions.
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Choosing a Direction: With these problems in mind, the best option moving forward is to solve multiple issues with one design. Designing a champion can help solve both issues of fleshing out the support role and empowering the AD carry role against the current tanky bruiser meta. The driving force behind the design will be to create a support champion that fleshes out the role and employs a new set of mechanics that focuses more on making the AD carry effective against aggressive bruisers diving the back line. Examining the existing supports that players enjoy is the most helpful way to create a unique, dynamic support. With a direction for design in mind, the next step is to gather information on existing supports and evaluate precedents. In addition, each champion in the League has a unique back story and stylized cliche they fall into. Sona is the bard, Graves is the wild-western gun slinger, Singed is the mad scientist, and Teemo is the character everyone loves to hate. A lot. One of League’s many strong suits is turning tropes on their head to create innovative and interesting characters. Several archetypes are missing and could make for some interesting champions. Painter and thief immediately stand out as two missing cliches. A painter or an artist themed champion suits the support role very well, so taking the design in that direction is a good choice.
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Precedents: Supports typically fall into one of three categories: caster supports, peel supports, and initiating supports. Caster Supports:
Peel Supports:
Initiating Supports:
These supports bring a lot of damage to lane and present a threat as the game progresses. They generally have great crowd control and pair well with aggressive laners.
These supports excel at keeping carries alive. Whether it be through shields, healing, or crowd control, peel supports make killing a priority target very difficult.
They are usually quite squishy and are weak against initiating, tanky supports like Leona and Thresh. While these supports can sometimes initiate, they are also very effective sitting in the back lines damaging tanks or blowing up out of position carries.
Peel supports offer very little damage on their own. They require teammates to do the majority of the damage. They synergize well with high damage champions that have limited ways to escape assassins or bruisers.
These supports are all about good decision making and knowing when to take advantage of the enemy team’s poor positioning. They have exceptional crowd control and offer many ways for their team to start favorable fights. Due to their high levels of crowd control, these supports are also generally good at protecting their carries. However, their damage tends to be very low, and they have long cooldowns.
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Designing for Success: The basic design foundation for this champion is a painter or artist-themed character that fills the support role. This champion excels at helping AD carries take down bruisers and tanks. What will make players excited to buy and play this champion? Champions with unique abilities or strong lore tie-ins to popular champions are generally the most successful. Diana’s curved skillshot, Ezreal’s all skillshot kit, Khazix and Rengar’s rivalry, and Jinx’s opposition to Caitlin and Vi are all examples of great ways to hype up a champion on release. Alternate resource kits, interesting ultimates like Khazix’s evolutions, and fun abilities like Yasuo’s Sweeping Blade all make champions very appealing to players. Designing a champion with a unique mechanic is a great way to generate a lot of interest in them. It’s also important to avoid anti-fun mechanics involving burden of knowledge, false choices, conflicted ability purposes, and the other points brought up in Zileas’s list of Game Design Anti-Patterns. With the support precedents and successful champions in mind, it’s safe to move on to designing this champion’s abilities with a focus on creating a unique, exciting mechanic. I want this champion to stand out from other supports by having a unique passive and ultimate that compliment each other.
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The Passive: A champion’s passive often times helps define their whole kit or offers an interesting build pattern or play style. Orianna’s passive rewards auto attacking on a caster, Khazix’s passive rewards sneaking in and not being seen, and Ezreal’s passive rewards landing every skillshot. With this champion being a painter, his passive should feel like he’s an artist. Additionally, bringing in a new resource system is one way to create an exciting, mechanically interesting character. Painters rely on colors to create beautiful works of art, and that’s what this passive could capture. Each ability could add a color to the painter’s resource bar, and upon casting two spells, those colors could mix and give a different ultimate. The Q, W, and E abilities could, respectively, be Red, Yellow, and Blue, and the ultimate could change based on whether the painter’s passive is mixed to Orange, Green, or Purple. This adds an exciting level of depth without going into the realm of too complex (Nidalee, Elise, and Jayce all have this many abilities). This also sets up exciting combos and chaining into abilities. So a first pass at the passive could be: The Painter’s abilities each add a color to his paint well, persisting for X seconds or until another spell is cast. If another color is added to the well within X seconds, these two colors will mix, giving The Painter an additional ability for X seconds. The Painter’s auto attacks also gain additional properties based on which colors are mixed in the paint well. Red - The Painter’s auto attacks apply a healing debuff for .X seconds. Yellow - The Painter’s auto attacks deal an additional X magic damage. Blue - The Painter’s auto attacks reduce the enemy’s attack damage by X.
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The Passive: (Continued)
This passive helps establish a very exciting kit. Level 2 fights in bottom lane are often very exciting, and the Painter has a lot of options. Starting with the yellow ability for the extra damage on auto attacks can be good for harrass, but the second ability would be vital. Going for a quick engage with the red and yellow passive up is great for trading if the other AD has lifesteal. The orange ultimate could be an aggressive initiation. Or, in another scenario, the lane hits level 2 second and is afraid of an engagement -- the blue passive would be great for mitigating a small amount of damage. Not only this, but the colors lend themselves to what kind of ability they could be. Red is aggressive, yellow is utility, and blue is more defensive. Using the red ability followed by the yellow ability could proudce an aggressive, orange engagement ability, whereas casting the yellow ability and following up with the blue ability could produce a defensive, green disengage. This also allows for easily identifiable abilities, allowing for players to grasp the concept of the character quickly. However, having 6 abilities and being able to cycle through them based on what is most needed adds an exciting level of complexity to the Painter.
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The Q Ability: A champion’s Q ability is often their most important, defining ability. Look at Ziggs’s Bouncing Bomb, Orianna’s Command: Attack, and Graves’s Buckshot. Since this champion is manaless, their abilities cannot have too much of an impact. So far, the Q ability has had several parameters put in place to define it. The Painter’s Q should be an aggressive ability that feels red in nature, he should be good at dealing with tanks and enabling his AD carry, and the ability should flow well into both the yellow and blue abilities. Each of his abilities should feel almost like a brush stroke. The player should feel like they are stringing abilities together and working towards a greater ability, just like you’d feel working towards a finished painting. The Painter’s Q ability should be a mid-range, skillshot harrass ability that allows him to mark a unit for his team, signifying that they have decreased armor and magic resist. The ability should feel like Malzahar’s Call of the Void, but much shorter range and smaller width. It could feel like a brush stroke moving from left to right. A first stab at the ability could read: The Painter sweeps his brush, marking a target with red paint for X seconds. Marked targets have their armor and magic resistance reduced by X%. This ability adds red paint to the Painter’s paint well.
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The W Ability: The W ability is often a character’s utility ability. With Janna, it’s her Zephyr slow and passive move speed, Zyra has her Rampant Growth seeds, and for Gragas it’s his Drunken Rage. Like with his Q, the Painter’s W has several parameters guiding its design. It should be a utility ability that helps against bruisers. It should synergize with the established Q ability for an aggressive, orange engagement ability and also the E ability for a green defensive ability. One of an AD carry’s strongest tools against a bruiser is their ability to kite, and one of the strongest engagement tools is a burst of speed. The Painter’s W ability is a utility speed boost that acts like Galio’s Righteous Gust. It’s a line skillshot that he paints with the same mechanics as Rumble’s Equalizer and Viktor’s Death Ray, giving allies that travel along it a significant speed boost. This allows for him to mark targets with Q to weaken them and then speed his team up to engage, setting the orange ultimate up for a great combo initiation. Here is a rough idea of the text on the ability: The Painter paints a path for his teammates in yellow granting allies who walk along it increased movement speed. This ability adds yellow paint to the Painter’s paint well.
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The E Ability: The E ability on champions varies wildly. Lulu has her shield from Help, Pix!, Lucian has his Relentless Pursuit, and Ahri has her charm. A fairly wide mix of abilities. For the Painter, E should be a defensive ability with the power to peel bruisers away from a carry. However, the design should avoid giving him any sort of on command heal or powerful crowd control since he has no resources. The most effective way to peel for a carry is hard forms of crowd control. Shields are also a great way to boost a carry’s health without providing sustain. The Painter should be able to cast a shield on a carry that helps when they get dove on the backline by a champion like Rengar or Shyvana. A targetable Jarvan shield would be perfect for this. It only slows in the area around an ally, and not only does it synergize with initiation in being able to shield a tank that goes in and slow the surrounding units, but it can also be used to peel for a carry. The ability can read: The Painter shields an ally with chilling blue paint, preventing the next X points of damage. Upon cast, this shield freezes the surrounding area, slowing nearby enemies for X%. This ability adds blue paint to the Painter’s paint well.
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The Ultimates:
The Painter is defined by his unique ultimate mechanic. He has three different ultimates, each created by combining two abilities. This can lead to a lot of different combinations and synergies based on what they do, and it’s important to take into consideration what a player’s skill rotation would look like so that they can easily optimize the Painter’s kit. With all of the abilities on the same cooldown, imagine a rotation that looks something likes this: • Q into W into Orange Ultimate • E into Q into Purple Ultimate • W into E into Green Ultimate As mentioned earlier, the Orange ultimate is for initiation. Starting with Q first allows for it to come off cooldown earlier, setting up for an E into Q combo to bring up the Purple ultimate. Essentially, the Painter’s kit needs to be simple enough to combo together to feel really sleek and effective. The Orange ultimate (combining the red and yellow abilities of marking a target and giving the team a speed boost) would fit nicely as a single target stun, allowing the Painter to mark someone, speed his team up, and then stun them for a short duration if they are out of position. The Purple ultimate (combining the blue and red abilities of shielding an ally and re-marking a target) is more teamfight oriented. While Zileas advises against “aura” abilities, the perfect ability to fit here is granting an ally a short duration, high impact buff. Shielding a carry and giving them a burst of attack speed, damage, ability power, life steal, and spell vamp for a very short duration could lead to some very high impact plays. The Green ultimate (combining the yellow and blue abilities of speeding his team up and shielding an ally) is a great spot to place an ability that allows for peel or clean up. An area of effect slow fits with his kit and is both a good follow up to his initiation and an effective way to protect high priority targets on his own team.
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The Orange Ultimate: As established, the Orange ultimate works best as a single target disable to follow up with marking a target after a speed boost. The ability also deals a small amount of damage, synergizing with the magic resist shread from properly marking the enemy. Since all of the ultimate abilities have the potential of being available by level 3, none of them can be incredibly powerful. That’s not to say they can’t be fun and impactful! Giving a support the ability to engage with a hard form of crowd control empowers them. Sona’s area of effect engage is not the right direction to take this champion -- Taric’s Dazzle and Leona’s Shield of Daybreak are much more in line with what a support should be able to do, especially on a manaless champion with a lot of versatility. The rough phrasing for the ability is as follows: Upon mixing red and yellow paint in his paint well, the Painter gains access to his Orange ultimate. The Painter astonishes an enemy champion, stunning them briefly for X seconds and dealing X damage.
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The Purple Ultimate: The Purple ultimate is one that’s ideally used in the heat of a teamfight to save a shielded carry. Granting increased attack speed, attack damage, and lifesteal is especially effective when combined with the armor shred from the Painter’s Red ability. Granting increased ability power and spellvamp makes it useful to cast on a burst caster, timing their cooldowns to give them a heal that could save their lives. The ability should not persist for very long or it won’t feel like it’s a high impact, carry-saving ability. One of the best feelings in League as a support is saving a carry with a clutch Monsoon or Wild Growth. This adds a layer of communication and strategy for optimal timing. The ability reads: Upon mixing blue and red paint in his paint well, the Painter gains access to his Purple ultimate. The Painter moves an ally to perform incredible feats, granting them increased attack speed, attack damage, ability power, spellvamp, and lifesteal for a brief time.
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The Green Ultimate: The Green ultimate is suited to be used as teamfight cleanup or peel for carries. Giving allies a brief speed up and shielding a priority target before leading into a more effective slow has a lot of room for allowing incredible zone control and letting the support have more control over movement during lane and teamfights. The slow can be used to zone, catch, or inhibit dives onto carries. The ability should be medium to short range, meaning that the Painter has to make use of his Yellow ability to get in close and slow enemies. Otherwise, he can use his speed boost in conjunction with his shield and slow to help the AD carry kite a bruiser. So the ability reads: Upon mixing yellow and blue paint in his paint well, the Painter gains access to his Green ultimate. The Painter spills a deluge of paint in an area in front of him, slowing all enemies that pass through it. This slow increases the longer an enemy remains in the painted area.
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Summary: This champion design creates high synergy with an AD carry, allowing them to kite bruisers and, potentially, itemize a bit differently. The Painter punishes characters that stack a lot of resistances by shredding them, and allows a ranged carry with no escapes to kite better versus bruisers with movement speed based zone control. The Painter’s passive establishes a unique resource system that gives the support player a lot of choice and potential to make a huge impact by selecting which ultimate is correct for what time, and stringing them together in a way that gives their team an edge. The auto attack portion of the passive encourages the Painter to constantly be active in lane, giving him another layer of choice to make when initiating or peeling for his carry. While far, far from being a complete champion, this illustrates a structured approach to designing the foundation of a character in League of Legends. A few of the many possibilities for a next step could be: tweaking his abilities, defining his personality, balancing numbers, producing more refined art and particles for his abilities, naming abilities, establishing lore, and doing iterations of his abilities that differ from the original design in an attempt to find new mechanics that might suit his kit. That’s what makes the design process so enjoyable -- you are never really done with a design. You can brainstorm changes and continually come up with ideas that really make the design shine, working as a team to create something truly awesome. This champion is simply a way for me to show you how I approach the design process and how it can be applied to League of Legends. Hopefully reading through this monster of a document gave you some insight as to what goes through my head when designing. I would be ecstatic to be given the opportunity to experience how Rioters design and learn from them as I pursue my future career in game design.
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The Painter: (Mock Up)
Create
The Painter’s abilities each add a color to his paint well, persisting for X seconds or until another spell is cast. If another color is added to the well within X seconds, these two colors will mix, giving The Painter an additional ability for X seconds. The Painter’s auto attacks also gain additional properties based on which colors are mixed in the paint well. Red - The Painter’s auto attacks apply a healing debuff for .X seconds. Yellow - The Painter’s auto attacks deal an additional X magic damage. Blue - The Painter’s auto attacks reduce the enemy’s attack damage by X.
Prime
Splash
Coat
Astonish
The Painter sweeps his brush, marking a target with red paint for X seconds. Marked targets have their armor and magic resistance reduced by X%. This ability adds red paint to the Painter’s paint well. The Painter paints a path for his teammates in yellow granting allies who walk along it increased movement speed. This ability adds yellow paint to the Painter’s paint well.
The Painter shields an ally with chilling blue paint, preventing the next X points of damage. Upon cast, this shield freezes the surrounding area, slowing nearby enemies for X%. This ability adds blue paint to the Painter’s paint well. Upon mixing red and yellow paint in his paint well, the Painter gains access to Astonish. The Painter astonishes an enemy champion, stunning them briefly for X seconds and dealing X damage.
Amaze
Upon mixing blue and red paint in his paint well, the Painter gains access to Amaze. The Painter moves an ally to perform incredible feats, granting them increased attack speed, attack damage, ability power, spellvamp, and lifesteal for a brief time.
Awe
Upon mixing yellow and blue paint in his paint well, the Painter gains access to Awe. The Painter spills a deluge of paint in an area in front of him, slowing all enemies that pass through it. This slow increases the longer an enemy remains in the painted area.
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