League of Legends Dev Tracker

The moment I learned my coworker was from WoW I started complaining about Rogue balance (Rogue main since 2011). I haven't played since BfA. There's something wrong with me.

WE WERE BORN TO...

DIIIIIIIIIEEE

1. No favorite, but I personally resonate with Eve's whole deal just so much. But as someone who worked on the marketing creative for All Out, yeah you really do kind of fall in love with each in their own way. I think the album being about each individual's quirks and creative approach helped.

2. SY on Baddest was brutal magma, and I love how confused y'all were at the song structure (heh). It's going to be hard, but she and Akali are truly one of a kind, and I think there's always going to be something surprising and different possible with that combo.

That's "Escape from the Arcade" from Arcane Vol 1.

I think the main difference is that with reworks, it feels like there's just a bit more at stake - the champion is already fully formed in players' minds, and we want music that supports that - we don't want to contradict it or let the mains down. With new champions it's a bit more of a blank canvas.

Thank you! I was an Irelia main long before her rework was announced even internally, so I asked/begged to work on her music for the rework. I wanted to create something that felt ferociously agile but also effortlessly flowy, and at times tragic and introspective. For the arrangement, I settled on a string octet for the primary arrangement because I felt like it was small enough to have visceral intimacy of hearing individual players rather than monolithic sections, but large enough to create a motion blur when we needed it to.

Thanks! I have to admit that scene was a bit intimidating to work on. When we decided to try a more grandiose, old-school sound for it, part of me wanted to modernize it a bit, but I'm glad I got the chance to just go for it and not hold back :)

I can't speak for everyone but I think most of us usually start in a DAW, using whatever method of sketching seems most comfortable, produce a fairly polished demo, and then move to Sibelius when we're preparing sheet music for any live recordings as one of the final steps.

There is usually a lot of communication between the sound designers and composers. We actually just did an interview with A Sound Effect where we chat a bit about music and sound for Arcane, and specifically on that collaborative aspect and making sure achieving a cohesive sonic experience and not stepping on each other's toes, if you want to check it out! Many of the things we touch on apply to other non-Arcane projects and workflows as well.

I think it varies - in the absence of a particular musical idea I tend to default to 3/4 as a starting point but I know many of us probably start with 4/4. I love 5/4 and 7/8 but sometimes it does feel like you get locked in to more rigid rhythmic structures in those meters. For whatever reason I've found myself gravitating towards 3/2 or 6/4 at moderate tempos lately because I really like how it feels like melodies have ample time to breathe in those meters.

Interesting thing about the Ekko time signature - because his theme was one of the earlier Zaun themes, and one of the more enduring ones, sometimes the use of mixed-meters actually gets interpreted as a core element of Zaun music. But we always saw that as being specific to Ekko and his ingenuity, and a part of his music almost in spite of Zaun rather than because of it.

We don't currently have plans for this but I'll keep it in mind!

I think that happens to all of us from time to time. Usually in those cases we have two choices - time permitted, we can keep trying, or we just have to accept it and try something else. One particular area that I feel I'm always trying to get better at is mixing distorted elements within a hybrid orchestral track without completely obliterating the mix, or without them feeling underpowered and out of place and scratchy if I turn them down.

If it's a skills or tools question, sometimes we are lucky enough to be able to lean on someone else for support in bringing it to life, but if it's just one of those cases where we just can't figure out why we can't get it to sound the way we envision it, there's only so much you can do. I try to take comfort in the fact that even trying to hit those stretch goals is still a learning experience that might equip me to reach what I'm shooting for on the next project.

It's rare that a track will get that far along before being scrapped, but it's happened once or twice. Usually the demos do a pretty good job at approximating what it's going to sound like when it's recorded, so by the time you get to the recording session things are (hopefully) approved already.

It's been a while since I worked on champion themes, but my personal approach was often to think of the champion's lore, faction, and playstyle as the three primary things we might want to have represented in the music. Sometimes we'd want something that falls straight down the middle between those three, in which case you'd hear a good amount of their regional influence, but in other cases there might be a strong case for shifting the balance towards one aspect. But with limited exceptions, you'll still hear elements of the region in things like instrumentation choices.

For composition specifically, degrees can sometimes be a useful shorthand for knowing that a candidate has a grasp of music fundamentals, but the degree itself is one of the last things we focus on. An impressive demo - impressively composed and produced - will often land someone near the top of the applicant stack. That said, if someone has a great demo that clearly used a bunch of live musicians, we also look for additional demos where most of it was done in-the-box, as we need to know they can make stuff sound great whether they have access to live musicians or not.

More generally, we look for candidates who seem humble, easy to work with, have strong communication skills, and are receptive to feedback.

Gotta love the level 1 first blood with top-lane Olaf

F#!

I am! I've been on Arcane for quite some time, and there are a great deal of string-focused tracks on the score for that :)

I can't speak to the request, but I'd say that the use of A and B themes usually happens organically as we explore the music for a champion rather than as something we plan from the outset. Sometimes a character seems too complex to have all aspects of them be completely represented within one single musical sentence. For what it's worth, I think it also helps give the themes more interest as standalone pieces of music, as having an A theme and a B theme helps give it more structure, and more of a sense of character journey, than just repeating an A theme in various permutations. Similar to the verse/chorus structure of pop songs.

My dogs.