About
Arena is a featured game mode coming to League of Legends: Wild Rift on patch 4.4 in October 2023, where four teams of two players each fight one another in rotating combat rounds, powered up with unique Augments until only one team is left standing.
My Role: Game Designer For Modes
Time Frame: June 2023 - March 2024, 10 months, patch 4.4 - 5.1
Technology: Proprietary engine, Node-based scripting language, Perforce, Tencent Agile Product Development
What i did
✦ Implemented and iterated the Augment Rolling System for the featured game mode, Arena.
✦ Authored the end-to-end design and development process of 46 Arena augments (roguelike power-ups) while working closely with various disciplines including engineering, art, audio and production.
✦ Provided and maintained documentation of the rolling system and all 100+ augments.
✦ Worked with engineers to create and expand designer tools with additional features.
✦ Communicated with QA to identify and triage bugs, and fixed 1500+ of them.
✦ Partnered with technical artists, and solved problems where VFX assets from League of Legends PC were incompatible with Wild Rift’s proprietary engine.
✦ Made a Augment pool generator tool in Excel that filters matching Augments for each champion with one click.
Augment Rolling system
✦ Overview
Once every 3 rounds, during the buy phases, players will each get three Augments to choose from, each providing a different powerful ability.
The goal of the Augment Rolling System is to offer players Augment choices that synergize with their champion selection and adapt to their in-game progression to create tailored Arena experience for each player.
To determine an Augment's compatibility with a player, the system uses a tag-based filtering framework, comparing the Augment's tags against that of the player champion's.
✦ Tag Configuration on Champions
1: Karma is categorized as both an Enchanter and Mage based on her push tags, thus increasing the likelihood for players to receive augment choices that synergize with these two classes.
2: Given that Karma lacks AD scaling and Dash/Blink abilities, her augment pool is configured to exclude all augments related to AD or Dash/Blink mechanics.
✦ Tag Configuration on Augments
1: Windspeaker's Blessing is more likely to be offered to Enchanter champions based on its push tag.
2: When players select Quantum Computing, an additional push tag Autocast is added to their champion tag config, increasing player's chance to receive Augments tagged Autocast in subsequent rolls.
3: Blunt Force is configured to be excluded from the augment pool of Champions that lack AD scaling.
4: When players select Feel the Burn, an additional exclude tag Active Ability is added to their champion tag config. As a result, any augment with an exclude tag Active Ability is automatically removed from the augment pool for it has conflicting mechanics, ensuring it won't be offered in subsequent rolls.
5: When players select Can't Touch This, the augment with ID 680200101, Back to Basics, is automatically removed from the augment pool for it has conflicting mechanics, ensuring it won't be offered in subsequent rolls.
6: Phenomenal Evil has its round limit set to 2 because of its stacking mechanic, meaning it can only be rolled in the first 2 augment selection round.
Augments I owned (for patch 4.4)
iMPLEMENTING Earthwake🌋
Making Earthwake was one of the most fun experiences I had, alongside the implementations of many other Augments (Chauffeur, Phenomenal Evil, Warmup Routine...)
How earthwake Works, a simplified edition
Earthwake, league of legends (pc) patch 13.14
The most authentic league experience, now coming to mobile =]
Its visual effect, as you can see above, varies in length depending on the dash/blink ability's travel distance. Therefore the red outline effect that wraps around the main VFX also needs to be adaptive in its shape. The way League of Legends on PC achieves this, from what I observed, is to generate a mesh procedurally with a given set of start point and end point, and then apply a material to this mesh that creates this outline effect around its edge. However, Wild Rift's game engine does not support procedural mesh generation, and there wasn't enough time left for out engineers to develop it either. So, as the owner of Earthwake, I had to help the VFX artist figure out a workaround.
With my years of experience in Unity and technical art, I came up with several potential solutions to explore:
✦ Splicing:
Split the VFX into head, tail and body sections, then connect them to reach desired length. It was able to connect seamlessly for most dash/blink abilities, except the ones that do not tarvel in a straight course.
✦ Masking:
Create a sprite mask inside each outline effect, and stack them to reach desired length. The intersection between the two effect would be masked off by each other, thus only render the non-overlapping section and seemingly achieve the effect. Unfortunately, due to the game engine's custom render pipeline configuration, Unity's built-in sprite mask component is not compatible with the particle system, so we had to find another way :(
✦ Trail:
Attach a trail emitter to both side of the player, so that two parallel trails are smoothly rendered alongside as the player dashes. In this work-in-progress to the right, you can see how the trail continues to generate and follow Aurelion Sol for a second after the dash finishes. And after some tweaking and polishing, we were able to perfectly recreate the this visual effect!
Augment pool generation tool
The tool Generates a List of matching Augments for every champion with one click!
Showcase
Viego Cameo
Black Hole
Planetary Ring
Fortune Coin
Earthwake
Phenomenal evil
Light'em Up
Chauffeur
Warmup Routine
I also Implemented the Power flower =D
Lab
Ah, the sweet smell of science~
Rest is for the living!
Time to Troll!
I wonder what's happening here🤔
definitely not a bug.
