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PSA To Concept Creators

Tyrius·5/14/2016, 11:59:53 AM·9 votes·765 views

Greetings! I am Direfury, a Warcraft 3 modder of ten+ years.

I'll cut right to the chase. I want to help the LoL community improve in any way I can. As such, I'll be posting a Public Service Announcement here.

First off. Storywriting. Cut to the point! Irrelevant facts are either alluding to other champions, or wholely unnecessary!

Take, for example, Vivian(Spoiler Warning!). In her lore, there is a reference to her father, who took a job working far out at sea, who never came back. Now, I'll be clear. Try to actually google a word before using it, or atleast saying it outloud before submitting it!

An example I've used in the past was "Zark - The Revenger". To the best of my knowledge, this isn't an actual champion concept. "Revenger" is both not a word, and not something that rolls off the tongue. Now, off of the title alone, "The Revenger", I can assume at the very least, that their story revolves around revenge. So, I'll suggest something more fitting. Lets say "Zark" has associated artwork involving a sword or other bladed weapon. Building off of that, and their completed lore, lets go with... "Zark - The Vengeful Edge". Or lets say they use no weapon. In that case, lets go with.. "Zark - The Hand of Vengeance".

Does that not work? Lets add a slight change to Zark's lore! Lets give his lore an obvious emphasis on payback! Now, lets try a version of Zark with no weapon still. Now, his story revolves around making his enemy pay for their crimes. Perhaps a name such as "Zark - The Hand of Penance" would work.

Simply put, I'd like to ask the concept creation community to actually put some noticeable effort into their work. Thank you for your time.

4 Comments

FloRaider425/14/2016, 7:40:03 PM2 votes

Nothing new, but I like the idea of informing board members, who want to create concepts, about some basic guidelines. [slayer-pantheon-thumbs]

Tyrius5/14/2016, 6:23:42 PM1 votes

Second would be cohesiveness. The best concepts are built around one thing or another, and allude to that/those thing/s in a number of ways. For example, lets start off with something simple, such as... a description.

Our character concept is best described as a rough, gruff, bar-fightin' brawler. A man with two swords, and an abundance of muscle.

Okay, so our character is big, beefy, melee and so far, entirely physical. This eliminates magic-based, or ranged abilities, such as... Swinging a sword/both swords with great force, an shooting off a firebolt or something. There's no mention of any magical elements attributed to either him or his weapons, so lets make sure his abilities don't scale with AP.

Now, lets remember his description. He is described as a man who often picks fights in or around bars, taverns or anything of the like. He'll more than likely be the type to kick over a table at some point- possibly during the fight. He uses the terrain to his advantage. So what can we do with that? Hm... Lets give him the ability to blind someone with a handful of dirt or sand.

Keeping with that theme, the rest of his abilities should be somehow related to his rough-and-tumble fighting style. Things that would promote a playstyle that involves wading directly into battle.

M'kay, so lets say the kit is finished. What next? Well, since we started with a description and a kit, we should come up with his lore, or atleast his place of origin. Of course, you can start with any one of these things and build off of that, instead of doing things in this order.

Now, consider the current trends in League Champion releases, or lore events, so as to avoid jumping on a bandwagon. If we were having this discussion during the Freljord event, which is relatively lore-heavy, releasing this character as a Freljordian would make it seem out of place, what with the 'three-way war' going on. In that case, wait until after the event if you want to give him a Freljordian origin.

If not, lets keep our character in mind. So far, when you think of this guy, what image pops up in your mind? For me, I see a Shuriman. A large man with a pair of scimitars, no shirt, poofy white pants, metal boots and gloves, and some other bits and pieces here and there. Possibly with a turban. Now, this character has an appearance and a personality.

I won't go into detail, but lets give him a backstory. To summarize, a fitting lore might involve this bar-brawling swordsman hoping to test his skills in the League of Legends, or sate his hunger for battle.

So now, the basics are done. We've got a character that is easily defined, with a distinct personality, shown in both their kit and backstory, and possibly their voice clips. I don't often see other concept creators do this, but at this point, I come up with their base stats, stats per level, base values for abilities, and scaling. Done right, a simple bit of number juggling on their stats per level, and ability base values per level/scaling per level can determine what kind of champion we have.

For example, if this champion has a direct damage ability on a 22 second cooldown, and every level put into this ability lowers the cooldown by 2 seconds, while granting appropriate additional damage(+25/50/100/150), they would most likely have a lategame focus. However, if their base stats are already high from level one, and have mediocre level scaling, they'd most likely be an early/midgame champion.

Basically, as a concept, your character can be as under/overpowered as you want, so long as the core elements are there, and they make sense. Ingame, numbers and features will be dialed back, or dialed forward, depending on the state of the character, but its still a good idea to pre-balance their kit. The main point, again, is that all aspects of the character make sense. A gun-toting assassin shouldn't fight solely with their fists ingame. A wizard shouldn't have an AD scaling uppercut ability unless it is explicitly stated in their lore that they're either some sort of 'spellblade', or practice some form of 'full contact magic'.

Tyrius5/14/2016, 8:45:04 PM1 votes

Well, I'm always happy to help other artists and content creators. As an artist, I'd like to encourage creativity and ingenuity. Personally, I'd love to see some innovative, new champion concepts make it into League, with fancy new abilities or effects, or anything of the sort.

For example, if you've seen my latest concept, Pike, I made sure to include certain features that do not yet exist ingame. Features such as:

  1. The 'Dazed' debuff, which causes enemy champions' move orders to be misinterpreted, forcing them to move in a random direction, and fearing minions & monsters (Due to the fact that one has a set path, and the other simply chases after their target if they run away)
  2. Additional hitbars (Simply put, a vision ward health bar acting as a shield for the actual healthbar)
  3. Rooted Defensive Stance (Rooting Pike in place, while causing damage dealt to him head on to push him back, depending on how much damage he had taken)
  4. The Stamina resource (A form of Energy that regenerates extremely quickly while Pike is standing still, and less quickly while moving, while not regenerating in combat.)

I also remember having a conversation with another concept creator who wanted to improve on his character, who revolved almost entirely around silences. One of the potential changes was to outright remove all but one silence, and find workarounds, such as the ability to create a spellshield around an enemy champion. As in, the spirits that interacted with this character would circle the target, blocking any outgoing spells that interact with them.

For clarity, imagine Veigar was afflicted with this debuff. If he were to use his ultimate, the missile would simply hit one of the spirits and fizzle out. Afterwards, the 'shield' would have a large opening in it, circling Veigar, stopping him from effectively casting other spells until that opening circles around, infront of him.

Those are just some of the examples of what I have come up with, and I'd hope that my little advice thread here will encourage others to try and do the same. I'm actually very eager to see what unique effects people can conjure up.