use of Alistar as a placeholder suggests a really tanky, dangerous-when-close-to-you champion, so he wouldn’t by default be a good choice for a squishy long ranged mage). They’re representative of the gameplay we’re building for the new champion (e.g. you know it’s a new champion at a glance when you first see them come out of fog of war). Good prototypes have a number of qualities. from other champions and then modify them to make new champion prototypes. As a result we use what we call placeholder art, where we take character models, spell visual effects, sounds, etc. It would take a lot of artist time - for experiments that are often tossed after just a few days. Since we’re frequently testing and discarding ideas, we don’t want to make new art for every ability that seems promising. More often though, a champion will go through dozens of abilities (or at least variations on abilities) before we settle on their final kit. Occasionally, abilities from the original concept for a champion work exactly as hoped and stay on their kit throughout development.

Things don’t always work out as predicted though testing, with a lot of trial and error, is really important. This involves a team with at least an artist, writer, and gameplay designer working together to identify things like gameplay niche, unique visual appearance, personality, place in the world etc.Īfter that, we need to get the character in game as soon as we can to start testing out the ideas we have - abilities, goals for strengths and weaknesses, solutions for expected technical problems, etc. When we start a new champion, we first create a core concept.

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