Riot Games Team Fight Tactics: Festival of Beasts Art Blast

By Daniel Wade - January 26, 2021

Hi everyone! The production artists on TFT are excited to share with you some of the work that went into set 4.5: Festival of Beasts. To start off, I’d like to talk about how impressed I am with how the set turned out. This is easily the most ambitious we’ve been with a mid-set. From the insane arenas with brand new music, animations, interactions and stunning art from the concept and environment team, to the biggest mid-set roster update yet.The sheer amount of quality art made in such a short amount of time really amazed me, and to top it all off, set 4.5 had the fewest bugs we’ve ever had on a PBE launch! Festival of Beasts is truly a set to celebrate, so let’s hear from all the incredible artists that brought it to life.

First, here’s Tommy Teguh to talk about our adorable Little Legends.

Little Legends

With the beginning of a new year of TFT, we wanted to take some of our favorite Little Legends to participate in the Lunar New Year festivities—from fireworks, to folklore, to food!

The Lunar Beast and Lunar Revel variants for Shisa, Furyhorn, and Choncc aim to capture a modern twist on a traditional take on the Lunar New Year celebration. Meanwhile, Porcelain Bellswayer and Dumpling Sprite are there with some more straightforward Lunar New Year theming to commemorate the occasion.

It was really exciting to be able to create Little Legends inspired by an event that celebrates culture and tradition in many forms. The team has thoroughly enjoyed creating this set of LLs and it has left us hungrier for more! Dumplings, that is.

We are looking forward to discovering what new Little Legends are on the horizon for this year, and we hope you are too!

Next up is Isaac Wood to tell us about the work his team did on VFX.

VFX

Set 4.5 was full of experimentation for VFX, and we learned a lot from the process. For the new arenas, we pushed the limits of arena interactivity by adding things like the DJ screen that fully animates to match the excitement of your game. We also pushed what our booms could do with our Staff Drop boom, which slams down from the heavens. All of these took many iterations to come up with and even more to execute since they are so different from what we’ve done in the past. For the Staff Drop boom, seemingly simple questions like “How long should it stay on screen?” or “How does it leave the board?” posed some pretty big challenges. And while the end product didn’t feel great until near the end of development, we’ve learned so much from the experience and will be able to push our limits even further in the next set!

Next up, Alison Ho and Jason Walsh are here to tell you about the work we did on audio.

Audio

With the release of set 4.5, our team was faced with the challenge of making custom music for an arena (Club 2) for the first time. To create a seamless transition between the base TFT music and arena-specific music, we had to create a simplified music system that could interchange between the base music, which has 9 music tracks and various solo melodies, and the Club 2 tracks.

The Club 2 music is heavily inspired by the Lunar New year celebration. We referenced melodic content from the Lunar Revel 2019 campaign and used traditional Chinese instruments, but processed them to fit a modern EDM aesthetic. For those seamless transitions between the base music and the Club 2 arena, I wrote the music in A minor. And finally, to include something fun for TFT players, we got some vocal stems from a previous TFT Korean campaign song, “DUDUDUNGA,” to add to our win stingers.

We also experimented a lot with how to best incorporate SFX into the arena, and how to blend SFX and music together so they would feel cohesive whether the player decides to play with music on or off. We also wanted to make sure Club 2 actually felt like a party, and a TFT party at that. With the new tech we used for set 4.5, we’re excited to continue pushing what we can do for these arenas in the sonic space!

Next up, Gino Whitehall here to tell you about the work we did on concept.

Concept Design

Set 4.5 was an interesting journey for the art team. Making a set inspired by a huge holiday like Lunar New Year required a ton of attention to detail. At the same time, we wanted to really “swing for the fences” and try to push the potential of what a TFT arena could be! We started off exploring more traditional ideas of a throne room and a river city. After a few iterations, we thought, “Let’s take a step back, try something crazy, and see what happens!” The process became a team-wide collaboration. We followed the gut feeling of when something just felt cool, and paid attention to which ideas got the team excited. A big thanks to all of our “cultural consultants,” coworkers who were familiar with the Lunar New Year tradition, who gave very valuable feedback about what would resonate with our players, while appropriately paying homage to a time-honored tradition. The end result gave us valuable experience that will continue to raise the bar of TFT arenas moving forward, and I am proud to see the hard work of this talented team released into the world!

I hope you enjoy what we’ve made for set 4.5, and with that, I’ll hand things off to Jeremy on environment art!

Arenas

As usual, the concepts delivered to the environment artists were so amazing that we couldn’t wait to build the arenas. With set 4.5 we were faced with a new challenge: building our first interior arena. We had to make sure the arena felt like the inside of a club, so we added foreground elements like the balcony and a distant city-scape to sell the illusion. Smaller-scale additions like food, spotlights, and a DJ gave the club a human touch. Lunar City had its set of unique challenges, especially when it came to figuring out how to reflect the city lights in the surrounding river. Working with tech art, we were able to use a small texture that sampled the colors of the city lights and added some blur and motion to simulate the look of water. We also wanted to make Lunar City into a futuristic place that still incorporated ancient architecture. Look for subtle nods to classic architecture throughout the arena.

Well, that’s everything we have for now! Thanks for taking the time to check out our art and helping us celebrate the joys of making and playing TFT! Stay safe out there!