League of Legends Dev Tracker

If you want to work as a game engineer, the most important things I would focus on are:

1. Collaboration/communication, particularly with non-technical creators. We constantly work with designers and artists. It's not important that they know exactly what the computer is doing. But they need to know how the computer's behavior will affect their ability to make something awesome.
2. Understanding of how game engines work, at a high level, across a lot of technology areas. For example, rendering, animation, scripting, networking, physics, sound, VFX, etc. I'm not saying that you need to know every detail about how all of these systems work. But having a reasonable understanding of the interactions between them can help you speak intelligently about how things are built.
3. Some technology area that you specialize in. Choose one of those areas from Point 2, and make sure that you understand deeply what's going on. Let's say you want to specialize in VFX. A great...

Yuumi has a Gun, not a shield.

Neeko and Mordekaiser were 2 Champs that we were surprized by there popularity. Both were targeted at being "Niche" Champions but both ended up a lot more broadly appealing then we anticipated

The Champion Design process begins with a opportunity space which I create as the product lead. This space is based on a overall Champion Roadmap which ensures we have different classes, themes, tones, genders and such. That opportunity space then goes to a "Core pod" consisting on a designer, narrative writer and concept artists and they start ideating against the opportunity spaces. For example, Zoe's opportunity space was to make a cute/adorable high mechanics mid laner, since it was a space we felt didn't exist in league

Well we have a lot of bird like champions (Xayah, Rakan, Azir, Quinn) but only one bird Champion (Anivia)

The Champion Design process begins with a opportunity space which I create as the product lead. This space is based on a overall Champion Roadmap which ensures we have different classes, themes, tones, genders and such. That opportunity space then goes to a "Core pod" consisting on a designer, narrative writer and concept artists and they start ideating against the opportunity spaces. For example, Zoe's opportunity space was to make a cute/adorable high mechanics mid laner, since it was a space we felt didn't exist in league

I for sure want to VGU him at some point, there are just Champions that need it more right now. He is creeping up on the VGU priority list though

We discuss that a lot actually. I hope we can fully realize that fantasy at some point in the future

There are so many! I don't think we could ever run out

How did Riot respond initially to the bugs on Riven that became features, like doublecasting and the fast q?

With any champion and any bug, we have to make decisions like that about whether to fix something, or whether to even think of it as a bug anymore. I can't speak to exactly how we make those design decisions. But I have seen "bugs" specifically on Riven that happened because we fixed things that we considered systemic bugs, but we then needed to reimplement the behavior that Riven relied on. Specifically around animation cancelling.

Riven is aimed at a very specific combo/animation cancelling gameplay fantasy that means she stresses our animation and spell casting flow a lot. As a game engineer, I love having a champion like that in the game to make sure we're questioning our assumptions and building with an open mind.

When Riven e's into a wall from a certain distance, she will briefly clip into the wall before...

I think she is in a great place right now. I still play her whenever Akali is banned :P

Best designed Champ in LoL? Though probably controversial in this subreddit but to me it's probably Yasuo. He has had a solid winrate in all elos of SoloQ for along time, which is hard to accomplish for a non-ADC. He sees some competitive play without being pick/ban. He also really embodies the feeling of playing a Samurai and is the most played Champion in the game.

We used to house the PBE in Vegas but its currently in Chicago. You may experience a different ping as we are experimenting with hosting game servers in the cloud.

Me too, at least the last Champion he designed is his most ambitious one to date

Correct, this mouse tracking was built specifically for Yuumi Q.

What you're describing sounds more to me like an issue somewhere between input latency and human perception. Any game engine needs to take into account delays between when a button is pressed and when it is reacted to. You can shift input samples around within a frame. Some games are drawing "last frame" while setting up "this frame", which leads to an extra frame of latency from your input. But also the human brain is bad at identifying exactly what's happening on extremely fast timelines, like the framerate of a video game. Sometimes the brain's prediction of "I'm going to do the thing" winds up dominating the perception of what's actually been done.

I'm guessing, Poluact, that you're experiencing a mix of both of these phenomena, making it so that if your mouse moved a lot in ~1/30 of a second or so, the game won't necessarily agree with you on exactly where it was when you pushed your key.

Yuumi ended up a familiar, but she didn't start that way. She just started with the goals of making a enchanter who remains attached to a ally more then 50% of the game. We also wanted to make a enchanter for our core enchanter audience since we didn't feel like we have made a Champion for those players since Nami. She ended up a familiar as the Discovery phase went on. RiotEarp while exploring different concept for the Champ had one image of a fat lazy Cat, which the whole pod loved, as the cats are generally thought of as lazy, which thematically fit perfectly for a Champ that never really walks themselves in game. This is what led to explore Yuumi and then narrative was excited about the idea of her being some witches familiar since she was a magic cat.

With Aatrox of survey data showed that players really liked his theme of demon blade wielder, but really disliked his gameplay. He was like is the bottom 3 lowest scores of all Champions for gameplay. I wanted to try something with Aatrox based on that data, which was basically the "Start over" with his theme, since the theme was so liked while the gameplay was so disliked. The idea was to basically take his visual theme, and create a fully new kit that really delivered on that visual theme.

In the end that was extremely successful as he had one of the largest jumps in playrate of any VGU we have done, if you look at is historical average playrate pre and post VGU. Unfortunately, this upset not only mains for the Champions but a lot of the community that didn't even play him and created a mistrust for future VGUs, where players were afraid there Champ would change as much as Aatrox did.

Since we know from data that a majority of players play a Champ for visual the...

When it first came out, there were some challenges with it deciding what height to draw at. Our game logic (almost) all takes place in 2D, but we then need to draw missiles at a height that makes them understandable, dodgeable, etc.

I added a new field to the "follow terrain height solver" that controls the maximum slope that a missile can follow. That prevented it from jumping up and down as it crossed over walls, down into the river, etc.

Normally we prioritize bugs based off assessed impact, frequency and ability to reproduce them. Today we're just going off what players request that we're able to fix over the course of the day.