Ghost Dog: Making Devourer’s Wolf

Adding a spectral companion to League of Legends isn’t as simple as stopping by the local ghost shelter and picking the one with the biggest, cutest eyes. Every animation, effect, and art cue in League is purposefully designed to convey information about what’s happening in the game; introducing new visual elements always runs the risk of compromising gameplay clarity or distracting from core objectives. In other words, ideas that are simply “cool” might create confusion rather than excitement.

When we re-worked the Devourer enchant a few (okay… several) patches ago, we knew that, along with balance and functionality tweaks, we wanted to add a visual element to communicate the growth and evolution the item creates for its wielder. However, finding the right expression of that growth, figuring out how to implement it, and getting everything working right weren’t problems with obvious or easy solutions.

Game designers Bradford “CertainlyT” Wenban and Wesley “SmashGizmo” Ruttle led the charge on tackling the challenge of giving Devourer junglers the loyal, ferocious, and adorable companion we affectionately refer to as “Ghost Dog.”

Animal Magnetism

The idea of adding a companion to Devourer had been floating around for a while. Designers wanted a way to communicate the jungler’s progress with Devourer beyond a buff bar and stack counts, and a companion that gets larger and more threatening as the jungler adds stacks seemed like a natural fit. But before such a companion could be implemented, a consensus needed to be reached on what exactly that companion would be.

Wenban and Ruttle toyed with several ideas. “We thought about maybe a carrion bird that picks up the things you kill, or a boar that’s really hungry,” explains Wenban. “But the pet should be reflective of your fantasy. A wolf gets really ferocious – when you bond with the wolf, you feel that ferocity in you.” And because wolves are so similar to dogs, he continues, “it makes sense that this is something that would bond with you or trust you. You don’t see that in a vulture or boar.”

Using an existing model lowered the resource demands on the project and made Ghost Dog easier to implement for a small team

The wolf concept came with other benefits. From a visual information perspective, a wolf is a perfect illustration of what Devourer does. Wolves start out as relatively non-threatening pups and mature into something powerful and dangerous – just like a Devourer jungler. A wolf was also the right choice from the perspective of available resources. With plenty of other changes on deck and lots of work to get done, a brand-new creature with a host of custom animations and textures would be outside of the realistic scope of an item update.

By re-skinning the existing Summoner’s Rift small wolf and doing some relatively light tweaking, Wenban and Ruttle could give Devourer its companion without running the risk of missing the patch or distracting from other design and art priorities.

The Devourer Story

Ghost Dog isn’t just tied to Devourer because he’s cute or because junglers sometimes feel lonely while they’re out farming their stacks. The wolf helps tell the story of what Devourer is doing, both to the jungler and to the enemies across the river. Wenban emphasizes that, to the jungler, “the wolf is a sign that something powerful is coming. To the enemy, if they see the wolf is large, it’s a sign that they need to focus on shutting that person down.”

Ruttle sees the wolf as a mechanism for adding visual impact to the things teams do or fail to do in a given game, such as denying Devourer stacks to an enemy jungler. “I think you can get a large sense of satisfaction by being like, ‘Ha, it’s 20 minutes in and he’s still being followed by a puppy.’ There’s also a clear message about doing the wrong things, like ‘Oh, 15 minutes and that thing’s about to merge. Shit.’” The wolf is more dynamic than a buff icon, but conveys the same information.

Work-in-progress screencaps show the evolution of Ghost Dog through development

The four-legged phantasm also provides an opportunity to teach players about mechanics and objectives outside of a text tooltip. “The scuttle crab is worth extra stacks. The wolf chases around the scuttle crab, and that’s supposed to tell the player, ‘Oh, he wants this thing. Maybe I should help him get it and something special will happen,’” says Ruttle. Wenban adds, “It helps change the idea of what success looks like when playing jungle. How do we push Devourer junglers, who want to farm, into the middle of the map? Into taking Dragon and controlling the river, controlling vision?”

The previous Devourer design didn’t impact a jungler’s decision tree very much. “There was a general sense of inevitability,” Ruttle explains. “There was never really a story about, ‘How did this guy manage to do this so fast?’” Rebalancing the item around big objectives helps establish that there are consequences for giving a Devourer jungler uncontested access to the map. “Now you see that Shyvana with a Sated Devourer at 15 minutes and you know exactly what happened. She bought it, she got Dragon, she got scuttle crabs for control, and that control gave her a second Dragon. Both teams have to care about it.”

Ghost Dog’s propensity for chasing scuttle crabs helps players to learn these lessons in a more meaningful and active way than a tutorial or text explanation.

Call of the Wild

Though working with existing assets made implementing Ghost Dog slightly easier, the designers still faced a number of major hurdles. First, Ruttle and Wenban had to make sure the new pup played nicely with every existing champion and mechanic in League, which proved extremely difficult (even with extensive testing, Devourer went live with a few bugs). Additionally, they had to convince critics, both internal and external, that the wolf wouldn’t create visual issues within the game.

Wenban highlights League’s existing pet mechanics as one of the major tech problems, explaining, “You’re only allowed to have one pet in League of Legends, and pet is sometimes defined quite broadly. This created some interesting issues.” Wukong’s W, for example, would kill the wolf. With Lulu, the game would issue Pix’s commands to the wolf and then crash to desktop when it couldn’t figure out what went wrong. “It’s not often that you have a follower in League that can follow anyone,” he adds. Wrangling Ghost Dog’s tech problems required a great deal of QA work and trial and error.

On the subject of potential visual issues, Ruttle notes that “most of our internal negative feedback was, ‘Oh, I’m worried about the potential for visual noise.’” The team was able to minimize the impact of that noise by keeping the wolf close to the jungler and emphasizing that most of the time players spend with the item is spent in the jungle, alone. “The wolf goes away after 20 minutes or so,” Ruttle says. “It’s not conflicting with players very much, relative to everything else in the game.” With a few adjustments, even initially hesitant testers grew to like having the wispy pup around.

In fact, love for the wolf was a big factor in keeping the project moving forward despite its challenges. Wenban explains, “The pet excited a lot of people. We had this clear lens of, ‘This will make players smile,’ and we made it very clear how this enhances the gameplay experience.” People put in extra hours and committed their spare time to get Ghost Dog ready for his debut (a particle artist, for example, spent his weekend shining up the wolf’s textures), even while handling all of the other necessary patch changes and balance tests.

Ruttle frames it as an obvious win: “It felt like such a nice little thing we could put in that would excite people. If someone ever asked me, ‘Why would you even put a wolf in the game,’ it would feel like a weird question. It’s cool. As players, we think it’s cool and enhances the Devourer item in a strong, clear way. Seeing that feeling reflected back from the community, like in videos where people are embracing the wolf – it’s just awesome to see that players click with something you really cared about and worked hard on.”

Item Evolution

Embellishing League with more visual cues that clearly communicate important in-game stats and processes is something the design team continues to consider. Finding new ways to innovate and iterate on the game experience without distracting from League’s core gameplay is an ongoing challenge. But Wenban and Ruttle are confident Ghost Dog showcases the potential for ideas that tell an informational and mechanical story with visual cues.

“Designs are arguments,” according to Wenban. “I think Devourer paints a strong case for a lot of thinking about how items manifest in our game, and about the possibility for keystone items that have really distinct points of play.” Ruttle agrees, “There’s a lot to think about. It’s certainly something I would love to spend more time exploring.” That’s not to say every item in the game will end up with a follower or minion, just that the design space around items in League is very open for new ideas.

Wenban concludes, “We want the experience of playing League of Legends to be memorable. The game is stressful and demanding, and we will never relent on that, but there should always be moments of joy and discovery. Hopefully we hit our goals on that with Devourer, and hopefully players will hold us to continuing to do that for them.”