BRINGING THE FESTIVAL TO LIFE

Hey there, tacticians! The TFT team is excited to share with you what went on behind the scenes during the making of arenas for Fates: Festival of Beasts. From concept to execution, set 4.5 pushed the boundaries of what we can accomplish in TFT arenas. And of course, with that ambition came some unique challenges for environment artists, composers, and VFX artists alike. With the results, we hope to have opened up a whole new realm of possibilities for how you all experience a game of TFT. Keep on reading for the full story! Kaisa Build

Let’s get into it! Here’s Gino to introduce you to the concepts for 4.5 arenas.

Concept Design

Going into set 4.5, we knew we wanted to celebrate the Lunar New Year with players. To do that, we had to make it a fun experience while remaining true to the traditions of the celebration. For a while we played with some traditional explorations of the theme, but we wouldn’t be TFT if we didn’t push it further. We took original arena concepts for a throne room and river village and dialed those up to 11. The throne room became a Chinese-inspired club (with our own adorable DJ), and the river village became a rooftop parade celebration, complete with hologram projections. The team was hyped about the idea; we knew this was the direction we wanted to go.

Our next challenge was to convey all of our grand ideas while still accommodating TFT’s gameplay needs. The club needed to feel like a club on both PC and mobile, and the same went for the rooftop parade. This meant that any visual elements needed to be visible and interactive on all platforms without getting in the way of anything important, like items.

We also had to be very thoughtful with our use of cultural art and symbols. Communication and collaboration became our strongest assets at this point. Shoutout to all of my “cultural consultants,” coworkers who were familiar with the Lunar New Year tradition, who gave very valuable feedback about what would resonate with all of youplayers. Thanks to multiple rounds of feedback and iteration, as well as the beautiful execution by our environment artists, VFX artists, SFX artists, and animators, we ended up with two great boards that I am excited to see 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!

Environment Art

Thanks, Gino! As usual, the environment artists were given beautiful art from the concept team to work with, and our first challenge was to bring those images to life in a 3D space. This included creating our first indoor arena, Club 2! With the previous success of our skyboxes and vistas, we were faced with the unique challenge of creating that same parallax in an indoor environment. We decided that by adding large windows to the Club, we could showcase a vast city in the distance, complete with a fireworks celebration. Beyond that, we added a sweet DJ Ox and concert stage and we were starting to really hit the vibe of Lunar New Year. For that iconic TFT twist of fun, we added little human touches like tables of food, disco balls, and confetti cannons.

For the Lunar City Arena, we wanted to create a futuristic facade on top of an ancient town. We also knew we needed water around the rooftop for floating boats that would emanate holograms. To achieve this, we worked with tech art to create a water shader and used a couple of simple textures to act as reflections.

As a final fun fact: this mid-set is also the first time we’ve introduced foreground elements to our arenas! In Club 2, we created a balcony overlooking the dance floor, and for Lunar City we created some futuristic pagoda-style buildings.