The map has been cut in half so we could double down on the doom.Įnemy towers are invulnerable. Defeat him to win the game!ĭoom bots don't go back to shop or heal, but when they do die they'll be back in lane before you know it. Survive! Try to survive for 15 minutes until The Evil Overlord of the Doom Bots is summoned.
From there, we gathered some references and did sketches and quick paintings to figure out which idea we wanted to go with.Battle against the Doom Bots of Doom on an extra spooky Summoner's Rift in this survival style game mode.ĭoom Bots will rush your lanes relentlessly. Some of the initial ideas included a Star Guardian space palace, a rooftop city-style battleground, a set of ancient ruins, the inside of a school, and a planetary-themed park. That said, this is a hugely subjective topic, so we’d love to hear your thoughts or any ideas you might have for building it out more in the future! Art – David “Sharkcromancer” Harringtonĭuring the concept phase, we came up with a group of different ideas that would make for a cool setting for the Star Guardian PvE battle mode. Using all of the above, we think we were able to create enough distinct experiences to make the mode feel unique across multiple playthroughs.
One of the clearest examples is what we like to call the “Bullet Hell Hallways”-by changing Vel’Koz to fire in a fixed pattern, rather than aiming, we were able to create multiple, clearly differentiated hallways, even though they both employed a high number of Vel’Koz…s. This not only saved a lot of content dev time, but also gave us some advantages in learnability: When you see something brand-new, we need to teach you what it does, but when you see Vel’Koz, you have a rough idea of what he will probably do.īeyond that, we created unique rooms by having enemies employ their combat pattern in a different way. This meant our focus was on crafting situations that would feel good to overcome with the MOBA kits each champ had, rather than try to shoehorn them into a more traditional PvE setting with dungeon mobs. Rather than crafting brand-new PvE mobs to entertain these problems, we used the existing enemy archetypes from League champions. Ahri’s Charm, among many others, felt wildly underwhelming. We still had no solution for support champions, and additionally, we struggled to make non-AoE abilities feel useful. We began testing with a gray square that streamed in Voidlings and VoidSpawn from the four corners (I’d include a picture, but it’s a gray square). We knew we wanted to keep the feeling of rapidly tearing through enemies from our earlier prototype. We now had the seed of what would become Invasion. DPS champs felt good, though, so there was enough in this prototype to give us confidence moving forward. The support kit of Janna or Lulu feels fine in the context of Summoner’s Rift, but there wasn’t anything for them to do here. It was, of course, untuned-and non-damage champs in particular felt very underwhelming. Whenever you reached certain points, streams of voidlings would run at you, and sometimes there’d even be a Gromp or two. After going through a few variants, we ended up trying a prototype where you had to guide your champion across the map to an exit. This process is called “rapid iterative prototyping,” or “find the fun,” where the goal is to quickly search for moments of fun we can later refine and build upon. The first thing we do when creating a mode is begin with a number of very quick prototypes to see which parts of them stick.
This was not a short list, so I want to focus here on two particular challenges that were most core to our final design: With this idea (defeating the hordes) as a core, we sat down and discussed everything we wanted to accomplish, any challenges we needed to overcome, and some of the nitty-gritty of actually building a mode for example, experimenting with map layouts, building revive systems, crafting monsters, and every little detail that makes Invasion the mode it is. Design – Noah “Riot Defaultchar” Selzer The Quest for Joy While Doom Bots was still loosely based on Summoner’s Rift, with Star Guardian, we wanted to explore what it could mean to translate League’s basic gameplay mechanics into a more traditional “defeat the hordes of enemies” setting. We wanted to keep exploring this space, but also try different angles. Other times, we focus on putting what you know into a different context.ĭoom Bots, and more recently “The Teemoing,” were some of our first experiments with PvE. Sometimes, that means taking a very narrow slice and magnifying it (like the push and pull gameplay in Dark Star: Singularity). With Rotating Game Modes, we’re always trying to explore new spaces within the gameplay of League.