The presentation team at Riot Games invited me to join them for a little white in order to help with the graphic + motion design direction for their first tactical first-person shooter Valorant. This involved menu screens, in game graphics, iconography and the landing screen for the game. Below are a few examples of the many designs I had the privilege to create while at Riot.
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Early on the project, the idea of having magic as ambient animation throughout every screen was brought on.
One of the first tasks I had to tackle was to come up with the look and feel for said magic. We wanted to have a heavily stylized look for it while keeping realistic physics. These are some early explorations for the magic vfx.
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Apart from designing layouts my task was to come up with the look & feel of the animation for the menu screens. I wanted a snappy and fluid feel for the transitions and reveals while keeping each animation to a maximum duration of 1-1.5 seconds. The reason being that experienced players were going to spend quite some time on these menus navigating through different sections. Their experience needed to be a fast instead of being slowed down by pretty looking but longer transitions.
Apart from designing layouts my task was to come up with the look & feel of the animation for the menu screens. I wanted a snappy and fluid feel for the transitions and reveals while keeping each animation to a maximum duration of 1-1.5 seconds. The reason being that experienced players were going to spend quite some time on these menus navigating through different sections. Their experience needed to be a fast instead of being slowed down by pretty looking but longer transitions.
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Killbanners.
The team needed a visual to communicate confirmed kills -1 to 5- without using numbers and in a way in which the visuals could be customized with different skins while keeping the same visual communication system. On top of this, the visual had a max. screen time of 2 seconds. My solution for this was a simple "revolver-like" graphic that could indicate kills by filling 5 slots. This can be skinned in any way since the key elements are always on the same position.
The team needed a visual to communicate confirmed kills -1 to 5- without using numbers and in a way in which the visuals could be customized with different skins while keeping the same visual communication system. On top of this, the visual had a max. screen time of 2 seconds. My solution for this was a simple "revolver-like" graphic that could indicate kills by filling 5 slots. This can be skinned in any way since the key elements are always on the same position.
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Early explorations for the killbanner graphic.
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HUD, arsenal and loading screen design + layout.
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Early explorations for end of match graphics. These would be super imposed on top of the game.
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Exploration for rank progression.
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Icon design.
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Magic exploration for in-world icons.
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Having the opportunity to come up with the first thing a player will see when starting a new game is always exciting.
The brief mentioned that it had to show a couple of characters, magic vfx and the floating map of Ascent. I came up with a couple of compositions (images 1-4) and this was then given to the concept art team in order to create the final key art (image 5).
