Exploring Environment Art in Games: League of Legends

In this post, I plan to find different sources of the process behind the creation of environment art in Riot Games' League of Legends and evaluate it.

Why choose League of Legends?

Firstly, in my opinion, I think that the world Riot Games has created is one of the most flavourful and interesting ones that's currently still being worked upon. I think it's revolutionary the extents they go to, to showcase and develop their world to their players. They consistently release music videos, comics, art, writing and much more just to expand upon places within their lore or world. Currently, they're also known to be working on an MMORPG based upon the expansive universe. 

Another thing is quite obviously the addition of Arcane, the Netflix series. I think that this shook up anyone within the art scene purely for the unique visuals and overall approach. At least for me, this art style is something that instantly became one of my favourites.

Starting off, there seems to be a Dev blog from 2014. It seems that the original post has been lost to time, but thankfully, there are many League of Legends news websites that still preserve what was said in the blog post alongside the images. 

Coverage of the original Dev blog that I will be referring to, from Surrender at 20: https://www.surrenderat20.net/2014/11/red-post-collection-defining-rifts.html

At this point, it seems that League of Legends was in the process of updating the visuals of their main map, Summoner's Rift:

One of the first points within the dev blog in regards to updating the map is Increasing Clarity. This means that it was one of their main priorities that was to reduce visual clutter.

In the previous image of the old map, it's sort of got a more "classic World of Warcraft" feel to it. The art generally has a lot more noise, which, isn't necessarily bad. However, for a game in a MOBA genre such as League of Legends, it is really important that the visuals are not distracting for the player. Each character in game has their own unique abilities and spells, so it is important that those characters and abilities are simply the easiest to see and comprehend -- otherwise, you'll lose the game, and that ultimately comes first.

'Quite simply, in every second of a game of League, we’re communicating a ton of information. So when we talk about working to improve clarity, we’re talking about improving the accuracy and usefulness of all of this information and enabling players to more easily digest what’s going on during gameplay. 

This means simplifying shapes and values to make for easy visual reads no matter where you are on the map or what you’re looking at. The map should always relate to the champions, but it also needs to sit behind and frame them clearly as players run around shooting off abilities in groups of up to 10 at a time.' 

Excerpt from the Dev Blog

Another thing that I noticed within the map is that there seems to be a lot of natural lines to signify a path of sorts. I drew over where they were most promiment above. I believe that these are to help the players navigate through the map, and create a readable direction for them to go. When I examined more closely, I noticed that there are very little harsh lines within the ground, possibly as to not disturb the "flow of traffic" within gameplay.

However, this choice in the terrain's art also creates quite a comforting feeling within the shape language; most of the environment art's flooring creating nice, rounded shapes, as opposed to series of sharp lines that could feel rather imposing. The map is designed to feel rather harmonious because of this, and flows very well in gameplay.

Visual hierarchy is another element that was important to designing the new map, according to the dev blog. It was intentional to keep certain areas of the map within the same constraints in the colour wheel as to ensure more important parts of the game remained easier to see, signifying their importance. Here are the examples they showed within the dev blog: 

I think a good test for this is if you squint, do all the colours blend together within the image? In the above examples, due to keeping within certain colour restraints, it does. 

In this before and after picture, the differences are quite drastic. In the dev blog, they explain that their new goal is to create an art-style without visible technology - such as the harsh polygon edges in the rocks in the left image, or the so-called "crunchy", over realistic textures. 

Instead, it seems that they've simplified their art-style, but also made it more cohesive and painterly. Comparing the two, it looks as though they've been more open to leaving intentional brush strokes, whereas the previous style did this less, appearing more noisy. 

In the dev blog for this area, they explain that partly the reason the map used to look as it did was due to technical limitations of the time - keep in mind the game came out in 2009!

The old map uses visible tech – polygon edges stick out and date the visuals. The new version shows how we’re choosing what edges we like and using alpha-blending and hand-painted geometry to achieve the desired look. This technique can also be done on much “cheaper” geometry for video cards to render, allowing us to improve other map elements like visual effects or animated parts of the environment. 

Excerpt from the Dev Blog 

Nexus Blitz Art Blast - ArtStation Magazine

https://magazine.artstation.com/2021/02/riot-games-league-of-legendsnexus-blitz-art-blast/

Here, I've found what seems to be exclusive content of behind the scenes concept art and general work in progress images of when Riot was working on a new gamemode which featured a new map called Nexus Blitz.

It's very interesting from my point of view as someone that is not working within the industry or who would be a junior to see how Riot builds up a new map like this from nothing and what things seem important for them to specifically concept. 

Within the art blast post, a lot of the concept art uses rather natural methods of signifying important areas to the player. A common occurance is the use of dappled lighting, such as on the "jungle monsters" above (monsters in which the player can attack for experience and gold, etc.)

Once more, the lighting is used to guide the player through the environment here. This is the spawn area which leads off into the jungle and the main lane. Although there are minimal exits from the spawn area (left top), they still use lighting to heavily imply where the player should be going. The dappled lighting through the presumed trees not only fits into the art style and rest of the environment, but it still also fits into traditional games design principles; especially of the use of the colour yellow to guide the player. Not only this, but the use of yellow also perfectly contrasts with the somewhat colder environment, mostly made up of blue tones. It can be noted that most of the inaccessible parts of the environment or areas that essentially frame the map are shaded areas, like so:

My draw-over for visualiation purposes

Comparing the Nexus Blitz map to the original Summoner's Rift, which I wrote about at the start of this post, it is quite telling to see what Riot finds consistently important when designing an environment for League of Legends. 

My draw-over for visualisation purposes

Even further into the Nexus Blitz concept art, you can see how they must have evidently decided upon how they want to guide the players around the map. Similiarly to the original map, Summoner's Rift, they keep the same flowing and harmonious rounded shapes in the environment's pathing to indicate to player where they should be going. 

Riot Games Environment Art Guide

https://www.riotgames.com/en/artedu/environment-art

Upon doing further research to try and see if Riot had any environment art tutorials or such, I came across this page linked above. It contains a link to a series that Riot made titled "So you want to make games?", a series of Youtube videos that cover several aspects of making games. One of the videos cover environment art specifically, and this seems to be the page accompanying it.

This page includes a lot of resources and links that Riot seems to have used themselves when creating their own work.

At the bottom of the page also includes some "downloadables":

Here, the downloaded file includes a Maya scene:

A PSD and TARGA of the textures:

And finally, two asset screenshots and the original concept art:

Finding this page honestly feels like an absolute gold mine! It's very interesting and useful to be able to follow along the path that Riot Games' artists had taken themselves, and see what they reference themselves. What I found surprising is even the GDC links - one from Naughty Dog texture artists and another GDC talk titled "Everything I learned about Level Design, I Learned from Disneyland". 

Included in the page is also a link to a reccommended free eBook series named Vertex. They state that these books compile the knowledge from experts in the industry - and if Riot Games says it, it's probably true!

Another thing I'd like to note is that the downloaded folder full of the models and textures has a mindblowing amount of detail, especially within the PSD file. The PSD file includes 100+ layers, and thankfully, is all perfectly organised into different groups and named appropriately:

Snippet of layers in the PSD file

This is going to be extremely useful to go through and analyse. I've only had a quick look at the moment, but it's nice to see some familiar practises in here as to what I do too - such as utilising different layer modes, using high pass to make colours pop as a final touch, and even gradient maps. 

I think in a different post I'd like to go more in-depth about these provided resources and analysing them. 

https://www.riotgames.com/en/artedu/game-design - Also has a superb array of links to resources for general Games Design. Again, has books, podcasts,

https://www.riotgames.com/en/artedu - Start of the series link.