Hot on the heels of yesterday's developer journal, the League of Legends team has posted a second article called "Forging a Champion". Penned by developer Colt Hallum, it can be seen below:

Hey League of Legends Community,

It's Colt Hallam again and I'm back for part 2 of our Forging a Champion blog series. I want to start off by saying how much I appreciate all the feedback I received on part 1, and just in case you haven't read it yet then you should check it out here before continuing. In this blog I'll be adding more information about Jax the Master at Arms' abilities.

Part 2: Building the Champion

After designing a Champion's theme and abilities, we have to build the character in the game. To allow the most experimentation and make abilities cheap (in terms of team resources) to make, we've built a robust in-house ability editor that allows us to try changes quickly. In most cases we can implement entire abilities without any programmer time. The idea behind this is that anything we build once should be able to be used again, and the more pieces we have, the more combinations we can make and the more creative designers can be. For example, we have a building block that is "deal damage to target". The "deal damage to target" block can be customized a bunch of different ways by modifying how long it takes to cast, the range, the amount of damage done, the sounds, the particles played, and much more. We can even completely transform this ability by adding an additional building block to make it a stun or a DOT, (damage over time), for instance.

Although the ability editor is easy to use, the combinations possible with dozens of blocks lead to a lot of impromptu designer creativity. The ability editor, also known as the Block Builder, allows us to create abilities that we often didn't think we had the capability of making. The time delay we added for a heal ability today, becomes the trigger for a time bomb ability someone wants to make tomorrow.

Use of the Tool

We start off by using the ability editor to create the Champion's abilities on a placeholder character - a "temporary" character that is just a copy of one we already made. We do this to test out our gameplay ideas as early as possible, since the more we iterate, the more refined the gameplay will become - it's a simple matter to fill in the art later. After crafting the abilities and doing a few iterations inside the design group, we open the Champion up to company-wide playtesting. We respond quickly to the feedback we get from these playtests, making adjustments, fixing bugs, and sometimes even replacing abilities in a matter of hours; what sounds great on paper may not be fun to play with in the game. Sometimes, the only way to find out if it works or not is to try it.

As we iterate, one thing we spend a lot of time on is making abilities as user friendly and "readable" as possible. Take for example an ability which deals damage to a target that is moving but deals no damage while they are standing still; while you could play a particle on the target while they are moving / taking damage this method may not be explanative enough, and a typical gamer might feel it was confusing. With something like that, we go back to the drawing board, and try to make an ability that gets the aspects of gameplay that we like, but that gamers will respond to better. In that case, we might try something like changing the ability to be a wall of flame surrounding the target. It gives the same "don't move!" feedback, but in a way that doesn't leave gamers feeling perplexed as to what just happened.

After fixing the bugs and finalizing the Champion's abilities we move on to the Quality Assurance tests. In order to ensure that every Champion is ready, our QA team tests every detail of the character. This includes every test you can imagine, and some you probably couldn't. The best QA testers are experts at finding ways to break things and use things in ways designers didn't test or didn't anticipate, and we often have to react to those results as well.

The Champion iteration process does not end here. Another full round of testing occurs after we finish creating the Champion's art assets. Abilities continue to be modified and upgraded as we go through the process of forging a Champion. However, before discussing the final phases of testing, it is important to examine the steps associated with creating the Champion's art assets. To be continued in Part 3: Creating the Champion.

Building the Champion: Jax the Master at Arms

The process of implementing Jax into the game was a memorable one. We started off by identifying that the ability to close distances with opponents was missing in his kit. This aspect can be assuaged by a number of different abilities such as movement slows, movement hastes, short range teleports, stuns, invisibility, etc. Some fit his concept better than others, and each offers a different gameplay feel. We also identified that his Coup de Grace ability, a short range single target nuke which deals a % of damage to a target based on how much life they are missing, was too strong if we gave Jax a distance closing ability. While trying to solve this problem we received the new 'move unit' building block from the engineering team, a block which moves your allies or enemies through the air at a given range, gravity, and speed. Someone got the idea to use this block, and just replace Coup de Grace with Leap Strike. When we gave it a try, everyone loved it, and we stuck with it.

Leap Strike:

Jax leaps toward an enemy unit, hitting it for bonus damage when he lands. Check out the video below

http://m.leagueoflegends.com/newslet...edia/jax_1.mov (Requires Quicktime)

Coup de Grace was not the only spell to be removed from Jax's ability set. We also removed Disarm, a single target disable which makes them unable to attack. This skill was chosen in order to give Jax 1v1 superiority; but in the end it just wasn't fun to play with. Depriving a character of their ability to do something is always problematic on the receiving end, and in the case of disarm, when you used it, an expert would just run away... and with no movement closing ability Jax couldn't catch up. We also identified that Jax was far too fragile to fulfill a duelist role on the battlefield. We ended up opting to create a new ability which would both give him 1v1 superiority, as well as some measure of survivability. Thus the Counter-Strike ability was born.

Counter-Strike:

Permanently increases Jax's dodge chance and allows him do an AoE damage / stun whenever he dodges. These changes helped solidify Jax's duelist nature, yet that is just one aspect of Jax's theme. Next time I will go over Jax's aesthetic theme from concept to in game model.

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