Design Experiment: Designing a League of Legends Character

Inspired by the Warwick article I wrote earlier, I decided I was going to try my hand at designing a League of Legends champion that was designed specifically for new players, to teach new players about playing a specific role. Rather than just presenting the final character, this article is going to be following along with my thought process, and hopefully that’s more educational.

This article will be written a bit differently than I do most, I’m not going into this with any prepared notes and planning it all out ahead of time like I normally do. Rather I’m writing as I think through the process, then going back later and making it legible. It’s also going to end up being fairly long because I’m not going to be editing as aggressively.

(Any ideas contained in this article are free to be used by any game developer, including Riot or any other MOBA developer.)

Goals and Direction

Okay, let’s start! While the starting point for a champion can start from all sorts of places, in this case it was because I had a specific goal to hit. Therefore I’m going to list some more goals for this champion. Here’s mine:

Teach players to value minion kills over fighting enemy champions. The natural tendency for new players is to spend about 90% of the time fighting the enemy laner(s) and 10% killing minions, but good players actually are the other way around. Let’s try to encourage the right behavior.
Provide a baseline marksman experience. This needs to be a character that we’re confident in being the first marksman a new player ever plays, and it should set the expectations for what a marksman is.
Teach allied players that it’s good to support marksmen. I’m not 100% sold on this goal though, because it’s encouraging the current metagame more than anything.
Have enough depth that existing players and extremely good players can enjoy playing the champion.
Be fun to play!

In the Warwick article I suggested a marksman that gains attack damage each time you get a minion kill. The first thing I realize when I think about this is that it would be incredibly overpowered. At just 1 attack damage per minion kill, that’s a BF Sword worth of attack power without even needing to go back to base. We could scale it back so it’s something like 1 AD per 5 minion kills, but I have a better idea:

Instead, let’s make it so the champion powers up as his minions kills hit certain breakpoints. At 50 minion kills you get a bonus. At 100 they get another bonus, and same at 150. At 200 the champion becomes fully powered and gains a really awesome bonus. I’m deciding to cut it off at 200 minion kills as the final goal because that’s a good number for new players to strive to reach, and theoretically attainable in just about any game with good / pro level players.

Creating a Thematic Base

We have a mechanic and some goals, but that’s not really a character. We need to take a time out and think of who this champion is as a character, what their fantasy/motif etc. will be. We do have a starting off point though, they get stronger by killing little helpless little minions, where can we go with that?

Let’s start thinking of some ideas:

The first thing that comes to mind is a character that steal souls. The seems like the most obvious direction, but it really feels like it’s been done a lot in League already. (Kayn, Thresh, Zed, Yorick off the top of my head.) Let’s keep thinking.

*The suave thief is a classic trope of fantasy.*

An idea I like more is a character that’s a thief of some sort. I like this for a couple of reasons. Thieves in fantasy are typically quick, nimble and fragile when caught: all traits of a marksman. Thieves are also a major old-school trope of fantasy RPGs. The original Dungeons and Dragons classes were fighters, mages, priests, and thieves. League also doesn’t really have any thief type champions, Rakan is the closest I can think of, but even then he’s more of a roguish charmer than a thief.

Minions are pretty small, helpless creatures. This suggests to me somebody who’s a bit of a coward, he doesn’t steal from the powerful like a Robin Hood sort of character. I’m imagining a character that says the sort of lines like “I steal from the poor and give to the rich! That’s me!” and “You’re only in trouble if you get caught!” (and when he get’s stunned he says “I’m in trouble!”).

He’s going to be a ranged character, that’s a core part of being a marksman, so what will he shoot? A bow is right out, thematically, for our not-so-gentlemanly thief. A gun is possible, but seems a bit crude. Instead, let’s have him throw knives. I’ve also got an idea that might translate well to the screen, or it might not. Let’s have him throw various types of knives, and for his critical strike animation he throws from a random pool of objects that he’s ostensibly stolen (like a small gold statue), hitting enemies with a dull “thunk”. Afterwards the object can fall to the ground and roll around for a bit before disappearing. There’s other cool flavor things we could do too, like his initial spawn animation being a safe that fall from the ground and he steps out, all swagger.

Okay, so we have a cocky thief with no morals. Let’s go with that. I’m going to call him Lupin.

Stealing from the poor and giving to the… also kinda poor?

Something I was originally thinking of as a goal was that I might want some sort of ability or passive effect that encouraged other players to support Lupin. I originally dismissed it because I wasn’t sure how much I want to just reinforce the existing meta, but now that we have a theme for Lupin, I’m reconsidering. If Lupin says that he “steals from the poor and gives to the rich”, maybe whenever he last hits a minion he gives a nearby allied champion gold?

Let’s say we went with this, how would we go about it? Let’s say for every minion he last hits, he gives 3 gold to his support, and says something like “Here you go buddy, you deserve this!” We’ll make him have a lot of different lines he could say, and randomly choose one each time. Even then he’d be saying these lines a lot, so let’s make it so he periodically gives the gold as one lump sum to his support, rather than after every single cs. Not only would that be less obnoxious, but it’d feel more impactful for both players involved. For the animation, let’s make it a low priority animation where Lupin throws his arm up in the air and a bunch of gold coins fly in an arc to the support. I’m concerned that this effect could give away your allies’ position in brush, so let’s make it so it won’t trigger on an ally in the brush, and wait until they leave it.

Alternatively, we could make it so the animation isn’t visible to enemies at all. After some brief thought, I’m going to discount that one because we’re aiming this character at new players who won’t have had time research into the character at all, and thus they won’t know that the animation is a one-sided affair, because that’s pretty unintuitive.

Not to say I’m even totally sold on this whole idea of giving your support gold, but let’s put it on the table.

The First Ability

Now that we have a direction for this character, let’s start thinking of his actual abilities. We need to be careful he doesn’t turn into an assassin, which means he shouldn’t have gap-closers, and the majority of his damage needs to be tied into ranged auto attacks rather than abilities. I’m not normally against champions ending up being ideal for roles not originally designed for, but I feel that if Lupin ended up doing that it would undermine our original goals for the champion.

First up, I want some sort of cocky escape ability. Partially this is because I hate playing marksmen without escape abilities, but I also like the idea of teaching new players about the power of escaping over walls. The power of escaping over a wall is often lost on a new player, they often don’t even really know it’s possible, especially because many wall escapes require the player to abuse range extension techniques to get over the thicker ones. Ideally our wall escape would work without the player needing to understand such concepts.

With these things in mind, I’m going to brainstorm some ideas for abilities and choose from them. When brainstorming I’m also going to give each ability a quick name, not intended to be final, so that it’s easier to refer to them later:

Somersault: Lupin does a somersault in the chosen direction. If he flips onto an enemy champion (or a friend…?) he launches off them and goes extra far so that he lands on the other side of them.
Grappling Hook: Lupin fires a grappling hook, if it lands on terrain it pulls him to it and launches him onto the other side of it. Maybe it has an effect if it hits an enemy champion too, maybe not.
Thief’s Tunnel: Lupin draws a Wild-E-Coyote style tunnel onto the side of the terrain, and goes through it to come out the other side.
Take Him Instead: Lupin swaps positions with an allied champion, betraying his selfish nature.

I’m undecided between the Somersault and Grappling Hook. As much as I like the idea of enemies trying to follow your painted on tunnel and not being able to, the Wild-E-Coyote idea is a bit too silly for this character (and possibly League in general). It’d also be a real headache to implement and have look good. I like how the swapping positions idea communicates character (he’s a selfish ass), and it would reinforce the concept that a marksman never really wants to be alone, but it doesn’t really meet my goal of wall hopping, and it could be used to troll your own teammates, something I think Riot has been smart to avoid. Still, maybe it could be used as another ability to supplement the escape ability. That sounds pretty cool.

I like how Somersault could be used to do minor repositioning and dodge abilities, something Grappling Hook wouldn’t be as good for as it would probably have a bit of a wind-up animation. Somersault does seem kinda boring though, and I like how the Grappling Hook ability is a bit more flashy and can be used to always take players over a wall regardless of thickness, so it does a good job of introducing wall-escapes to players (although with some work Somersault could take players over a wall of any thickness too). I briefly considered making the grappling hook being able to hit enemy champions and have some sort of effect, but as a marksman I think the player would rarely want that to happen, and it would end up being more a frustrating downside than a cool extra effect. Imagine hooking into a Darius and pulling Lupin to him, or pulling Darius to Lupin… you wouldn’t want that.

At this point I’m going to put both of Somersault and Grappling Hook on the table as possibilities.

Brainstorming More Ideas

Okay, so after all this we still have three abilities to go. At this point I don’t have any particular goals in mind, rather I’m going to brainstorm some abilities, keeping in mind the theme of Lupin being a thief, and see which I want to explore further.

Take Him Instead: The ability where Lupin grabs and ally and swaps positions with them, as mentioned earlier. If we went with this, I would choose the Grappling Hook instead of the Somersault, as I think flipping over an ally and swapping positions with them would be a really awkward interaction.
Caltrops: Lupin throws caltrops on the ground, slowing and mildly damaging enemies that enter their area. This ability encourages me to go with the Somersault ability instead of the Grappling Hook, because if you’re slowing enemies my gut tells me that having small repositions is going to end up with nicer gameplay.
Appreciate Art: Lupin smashes an expensive painting over the head of the enemy, stunning them. The painting could be randomized and be homages to different famous paintings.
Will the Real Lupin Please Stand Up?: Suddenly, a bunch of Lupin’s henchmen appear, all dressed as Lupin, all walking in different directions and moving randomly. Which one is the real one? Each one is killed in a single hit.
Naruto Lupin: Lupin goes into stealth and replaces himself with a fake Lupin clone (think like Wukong’s clone ability). When the fake Lupin takes any damage, it’s revealed to actually be a cardboard cutout of Lupin and falls over onto the ground and disappears in a puff of smoke.
Now you see me: Throws dust into the opponent’s eyes, granting nearsight.
It’s Your Problem Now: An evolution on Take Him Instead. Instead of swapping positions, Lupin just dashes onto the other side of an allied champion.

At this point, I’m starting to run out of ideas. I really like It’s Your Problem Now, despite it seeming like the least flashy one there, I like how it encourages the marksman player to stay around allies, but none of the others are really doing it for me. Rather than bang my head against a wall for a few hours, I’m going to change tack and think about what I want to accomplish, and see if that opens up new ideas.

At this point, we’ve got two abilities: It’s Your Problem Now and Grappling Hook. That’s two mobility abilities, which is a lot: most marksmen only have one or none. We’re going to need to start thinking of this champion’s role, his strengths and weaknesses. For instance, Caitlyn has long range, is a lane bully, and is good at towers sieges. What’s Lupin’s identity going to be?

So far we know he’s going to be mobile, which fits in well with his identity of a slippery thief. It follows naturally that he’s going to be squishy, since he’s a marksman. His passive is going to act as an attack steroid, so there’s a risk that with the wrong items he could end up super mobile, tanky, and ranged. That’d be bad. Do we need some sort of mechanic to ensure he has to be squishy? It’s a thought. Rather though, I think it just means we need to be careful when we decide exactly what bonuses the passive gives, and have it enhance existing damage rather than granting it from nothing.

It’s becoming obvious to me that while the not-so-gentleman thief aspect is flavorful and lends itself well to escape abilities, it’s not so useful for actual offensive ideas. Being a thief has a few overarching characteristics: sneaking in, stealing stuff, and getting away. Sneaking in suggests ideas like stealth, something I want to avoid for this character. Stealing is hard, we don’t want to actually take anything away from other players. He needs to actually kill things too, not just steal and run away.

Due to his stacking passive, I would like Lupin to have some ability that gives him a second chance to get a last hit he misses, and also help clear large waves in the late game (kinda like Ashe’s Volley and Jhin’s Bouncing Grenade do). It feels to me that Lupin really needs a “Q” ability, an ability that’s intuitive to put more ranks into at the start, that deals damage and deals more damage based on how many ranks you put in it. Also, the nature of his stacking passive also suggests an identity of being weak in the early game, mostly avoiding death with his mobility, until he stacks up a bit and starts to get items.

Also, when designing an ultimate I realize that it needs to be stereo-typically “ultimatey”. No level 1 ultimates ala Karma. It needs to have a long cooldown. Most marksman ultimates seem to have some sort of long ranged ability, maybe we should be looking in that direction?

Now that we’ve had a think about this, let’s see if we can brainstorm some more abilities:

Ultimate Theft: Lupin begins plotting the heist of the ultimate treasure: life itself. The target enemy champion gains a Calling Card that lasts for X seconds. During this time, all damage Lupin deals to the target is increased, and if Lupin kills the target he gains a permanent bonus to damage. While I like how the name has the word “Ultimate” in it, and it’d be fun to introduce new players to this term that way, I’m not a fan of this ability. For starters, it’s pretty boring for an ultimate, and feels more like an assassin ability. (Incidentally, the theme of a gentleman thief would work quite well for an assassin, and perhaps that’s the better direction to go with this character. However, for the purposes of this article I’m going to stick to my original direction.) Also, this ability should probably just be named Calling Card.
Red Carpet: Lupin throws out a canister of flame at the target location, then pulls it back to him, leaving a trail of fire behind. Enemies caught int the fire take damage and are slowed. This is my first attempt to think of the mechanic I really want, then translating it into an ability. The idea is that Lupin throws out the canister, and then he pulls it back to him, including if he’s changed locations drastically because of his mobility abilities. I’m going to try to take another shot at it though, I don’t like flame because I want more of an immediate damage, and giving Lupin a slow in addition to two movement abilities + flash seems like way too much.
Ball and Chain: Lupin throws a chained ball to the target location, dealing damage on impact. After a brief delay, he snaps the ball back to him, dealing damage to units along the way. This is more like it. I’m not sure exactly what the ball and chain would look like, the flavor of it needs some work, but I want something that deals damage immediately upon landing, and then after a moment he can stylishly snap pull back to him. If he changes positions from another ability during this, then he can change the path of the damage or extend it. For instance, he could stand in the middle of a line of minions, throwing the ball one way, then grappling to a wall so that when it’s pulled back it takes out all of them.
Scene of the Crime: Lupin marks a large area as the scene of his next crime for the next X seconds. As long as Lupin is in the scene of the crime, any enemy also within the scene of the crime is considered in range for basic attacks, and basic attacks deal more damage. I’m imagining an area where the boundaries are marked by a semitransparent police line. I’m concerned that this ability places a burden of knowledge on the enemy team, but it should be easy enough to communicate that this area is extra dangerous. I also want to leave little chalk outlines of enemies he kills in that area.

I’m going to go with Ball and Chain and Scene of the Crime.

Lupin the First

Okay, we have all our abilities now. I’m going to put some numbers and fill in some blanks from before, to give us our first iteration of Lupin. I’ve decided to abandon the idea of giving gold to nearby players, it bloats the character too much, considering he already has quite a complicated passive.

(Passive) Indulgence: As Lupin kills enemy minions, he indulges himself with some extra upgrades to his weaponry:

Over 50 minions killed: Lupin upgrades his shoes, increasing his movement speed by 10%. (Note: to compensate for this, Lupin’s default movement speed should be a bit lower than normal. The goal is to communicate that Lupin is slower and weaker than normal at the start.)

Over 100 minions killed: Lupin coats his throwing knives with a poison, and attacking an enemy with a basic attack applies a poison which deals damage over the next 4 seconds, stacking up to 5 times.

Over 150 minions killed: Lupin deals double damage to minions. (Note: the goal here is that after a point, I want clearing minions to be easy, and to give Lupin some waveclear. Past a certain point in the game, killing minions becomes tedious for players if they don’t have something that helps clear.)

Over 200 minions killed: Lupin goes all out and upgrades his knives to Vorpal Knives, dealing 25% increased damage with his basic attacks.

(Q) Hook and Chain: Lupin throws a chained hook to the target location, dealing damage on impact. After a brief delay, he snaps the hook back to him, dealing damage to all enemies in the hook’s path. (Notes: damage increases with rank up, and cooldown reduced.)

(W) Thief’s Honor: Lupin dashes behind the target ally. (Notes: cooldown reduced and ranged increased on rank up. If enemies are around or Lupin is at low health, he yells “Save me!”)

(E) Daring Escape: Lupin throws a grappling hook. If the grappling hook lands on terrain, Lupin is pulled to it and vaults over the terrain, landing on the other side. (Notes: cooldown reduced on rank up. Not a particularly long range ability, ~300 units.)

(R) Scene of the Crime: Lupin marks a large area as the scene of his next crime. As long as Lupin is in the scene of the crime, he can hit any enemy also within the scene of the crime with basic attacks. (Notes: cooldown reduced and duration increased with rank up. Enemies that die inside the effect leave a chalk outline instead of standard dead bodies.)

Reflecting on the First Iteration

*Our first attempt isn’t perfect? Inconceivable!*

Now normally at this point (if not long before!), we’d prototype up Lupin and playtest him, see how he feels, see what issues come up, and iterate from there. Unfortunately I can’t do that, but just by looking at his design, I see some potential issues. I want to stress though, you really should just play the character if you can! You’ll get a lot more insight than just looking at text and playing him through your mind.

The first issue I see is that after reaching max rank in Q, I feel like ranking up the other abilities won’t feel very rewarding. Both W and E seem like abilities that you’d only use once in a fight anyway, so reducing their cooldown doesn’t seem very meaningful. I notice that with a lot of champions in League there’s usually one ability that’s not particularly rewarding to rank up, but that usually doesn’t really come into effect until level 13.

Another issue is that I don’t like how Thief’s Honor doesn’t do anything if you have no allies around. This could lead to a lot of confusion with new players. Ideally, I want every ability to do something if you press it, with no conditions attached. This way, if the player ever presses the button and it goes off, even at a bad time, they’ll gain some understanding how to use it properly next time. I’ve noticed a common fallacy of League players to think that targeted abilities are better for new players, and while it’s true that targeted abilities can’t miss, new players also have a harder time understanding how they work.

I like how laying down Scene of the Crime and then grappling over a wall encourages players to attack from over walls, a good habit when playing a marksman. That interaction might end up being very strong in a good player’s hands though.

Looking over the abilities, I’m also a bit worried. Lupin doesn’t seem as “sexy” as I initially thought he would be. I didn’t want him to be overly complicated because the goal was to create a character that was aimed at new players, but while his abilities seem flavorful thematically, they seem bland gameplay wise.

It’s a Bit of a Fixer Upper

I’m considering merging Thief’s Honor and Daring Escape into one ability to address some of these issues. We’ll just call it Daring Escape, and now you can grapple onto allies, pulling yourself to them. Now we don’t have an ability that does nothing if there’s no allies around, the ability becomes a bit more interesting, and we have some room to sexy up Lupin.

I still want to encourage new marksmen players to hang around allies more, so I’m going to make it so if Lupin grapples to an ally, he gains a movement speed increase. Flavor-wise, we can justify this as Lupin running away from his now-annoyed ally. It’d be great to have some voice lines that play when you grapple to allies, especially with traditional supports. I’m liking this direction because it makes the ability have more dimension to it: if you’re alone it makes sense to grapple over a wall and escape (which is what you should be doing as a marksman caught alone!), if you’re with an ally then you have the option of jumping to the safety of your ally and kiting while dealing damage, also behavior we want to encourage.

Unfortunately, if we’ve established that the grappling hook grabs allied champions, then it seems intuitive that it should grab onto enemy champions too. We don’t have to allow this, but I do think we need to consider it. On the plus side, it’s more intuitive, and it also gives players more options (they can forego their escape ability to chase down an enemy). On the downside, it’s going to be frustrating to players that want to grapple to safety only to be stopped because the enemy was in the way (as an Azir player I know this frustration all too well). It does give opponents some methods to counterplay Lupin’s escape abilities though. I’m going to include grappling to enemies in the design, and playtesting can reveal the truth later (except not really because we can’t playtest Lupin). I’m not going to give Lupin the speed boost when he grapples an enemy, or give any other additional effect like slowing the enemy, because I don’t want to encourage this behavior.

Here’s the new ability:

(E) Daring Escape: Lupin fires his grappling hook, pulling himself to any terrain or champions hit. If it hits terrain, Lupin vaults over the terrain and lands on the other side. If it hits an allied champion, Lupin gains 40% extra movement speed for 4 seconds.

Lupin the Second

Ok, we’ve removed Thief’s Honor from Lupin’s kit. That leaves us room for another ability now. I want to try to think of something cool and refine his identity a bit. Now that he only has one escape ability again we have room to give him something that allows him to avoid attacks. I thought up a few different abilities, and considered all the previously brainstormed ones as well, but this article is getting pretty long, so I’ll just show you the one I went with:

(W) Fan of Knives: Lupin disappears into a cloud of smoke, becoming briefly untargetable, and throws a spray of knives in the target direction. These knives gain all the bonuses of Indulgence. Damage increased with additional ranks, but cooldown remains unaffected.)

I really like brief untargetable effects, it gives the champion a lot of outplay ability. I also like how it ties into the passive and reminds players about it. I want the cooldown to be fairly high (like 15-20 seconds), and not reduce cooldown on rank up, or he could gain Fizz levels of annoyance on a character that it’s not appropriate for.

I do worry with this ability that Lupin has become a bit bloated. He seems like he can do everything, which is always a danger when designing champions, even for Riot, but especially for “armchair designers” like I’m being right now. I’m also concerned that his ultimate was a bit glossed over, and needs more thought put into it. Playtesting is the real proving ground of all these things though, there’s a limit of how much we can truly know about a character without actually playing him, and I’m going to stop here for the purposes of this article.

Lupin the Third?

This is where I’m going to stop, but in reality Lupin would be far from over.

Designing a final character that’s going to end up in such a huge game as League of Legends isn’t this easy. It would be insulting to say so. A lot more brainstorming for abilities would be done, a lot more iterations on the character, and a lot of exploration into other concepts would be done as well. For instance, maybe he really should just be a character that steals souls, and we see where that goes. Maybe the idea of a not-so-gentlemanly thief lends itself better to an assassin archetype, rather than a marksman, and another theme entirely would better hit our original goals. Maybe instead of throwing knives we should flesh out the concept of the hook and chains, and tie his identity more to those, give the hooks names, etc.

*I’ve always loved stories of gentleman thieves. This is fan-art of one of my favorite books, The Lies of Locke Lamora.*

My point is, the first pass is not where you stop, even though that’s where the article is going to. Design is hard work, and it’s not like the champion designers at Riot are just going to hash out an idea in a day and then lean back admiring their own brilliance as the character gets made by everybody else. A lot of production and marketing resources goes into making a new character, so it’s something everybody needs to take the time to make sure is done right.

I’m glad I tried this exercise. It was harder than I originally thought it would be honestly, so it was a good experience. I hope that by following along with my thoughts you gained some insight into design!

Bonus: Summary of Lupin

Here’s the “final” version of Lupin, so you can see it all in one place.

Lupin, the not-so-gentlemanly thief:

Ranged character, marksman class.

Animation ideas:

Basic attack animation: throwing knives with minor variations of shape.
Critical strike basic attack animation: throwing a random small object that he’s stolen in the past (ie small statue, classical bust sculpture, etc). Hits the target with a dull “thunk” sound, then falls to the ground and rolls away, then fades away.
Initial spawn animation: A safe falls from the sky and opens from the inside, and Lupin steps out with a flourish.
Taunt: Specific interactions with some characters where he pulls out of his coat an object belonging to the target of the taunt, saying something like “Oh look what I found!” and they reply with something like “Hey… give that back!”. For example: if taunting a Caitlyn he could produce one of her hats from his coat, to her vexation. May not be feasible.

(Passive) Indulgence: As Lupin kills enemy minions, he indulges himself with some extra upgrades to his weaponry:

Over 50 minions killed: Lupin upgrades his shoes, increasing his movement speed by 10%.

Over 100 minions killed: Lupin coats his knives with a poison, and hitting an enemy with a knife applies a poison which deals damage over the next 4 seconds, stacking up to 5 times.

Over 150 minions killed: Lupin deals double damage to minions.

Over 200 minions killed: Lupin goes all out and upgrades his knives to Vorpal Knives, causing all his knives to deal 25% increased damage.

(Q) Hook and Chain: Lupin throws a chained hook to the target location, dealing damage on impact. After a brief delay, he snaps the hook back to him, dealing damage to all enemies in its path. (Notes: damage increases with rank up, and cooldown reduced.)

(W) Fan of Knives: Lupin disappears into a cloud of smoke, becoming briefly untargetable, and throws a spray of knives in the target direction. These knives gain all the bonuses of Indulgence. (Notes: damage increased with additional ranks, but cooldown remains unaffected.)

(E) Daring Escape: Lupin throws his grappling hook, pulling himself to any terrain or champions hit. If it hits terrain, Lupin vaults over the terrain and lands on the other side. If it hits an allied champion, Lupin gains 40% extra movement speed for 4 seconds. (Notes: cooldown reduced with rank up.)