Red Post Collection: Trials Final Week Begins, 9.11 Lore Update, & More
Today's red post collection includes the current standings for the Trials event, the Patch 9.11 lore update, a final update on Little Demon Tristana, and more!
"We’ve made it to the final week of the Trials competition. Here are your standings for week three:
1st: United
2nd: Council
3rd: Warband
4th: Faceless
And here’s our overall standings:
1st: United
2nd: Warband
3rd: Council
4th: Faceless
You have one week left to compete, and these missions have the highest point value. Earn points for yourself and your house through missions and MSI watch rewards until June 2, 2019, at 11:59 p.m. PT.
New missions are available this week. Check the Event Article for the full list of Trials missions.
Remember: Only missions that show your house icon count towards your house’s progress. Missions from the Trials Pass won’t count towards the competition, and points awarded increase each week so everyone has the chance for a comeback.
At the end of the event, everyone in the winning house will receive a permanent golden house emote. Players in that house will also retain their house spawn animations for a period of time after the event.
Good luck."
9.11: Lore Update
Here's Riot Ashekandi with the patch 9.11 Lore notes, featuring updates for Mordekaiser, Sion, Cassiopeia, and more!
"Hey everyone!
This week’s Lore Update is shorter, but no less sweet—we’re travelling to the Immortal Bastion for an update on Noxus!
We’ve got a new color story focused on LeBlanc and the Black Rose, and bio updates for a few of our Noxian favorites: Cassiopeia, Mordekaiser, and Sion.
As always, we love to hear your thoughts and theories, so make sure to share them in the comments.
Here's the final update on Little Demon Tristana - "Bug fixing, PBE feedback, and a time-lapse of her splash art illustration to round out the last post!"
"Little Demon Tristana will be live any day now, which makes this our last update on the feisty little yordle from hell. Today we’re talking about bug fixin’, PBE feedback, and the behind-the-scenes work of skin design.
But first, here’s a time-lapse video Little Demon Tristana’s splash art illustration. You can find more details on the process in our previous post.
Sending the Little Demon to PBE
One of the last things we do is name a skin and write the skin’s bio. It’s something we think about throughout development, but don’t lock in until the end. In the case of one-off skins like Little Demon Tristana, we usually have a working name (in this case it was “Player Choice Tristana”) and a working backstory. One thing we incorporated due to player feedback was tying her to the Bewitching Tristana skin, which we wrote a little nod to in her skin description.
A witch who is now one of the great queens of Hell, Tristana commands a vast army of lesser demons and rules the twin Aspects of Ruin and Woe. Mortals attempting to invoke her will find a variety of tempting contracts, but signers beware: Tristana’s ultimate goal is bathing her signatories—as well as the world—in hellfire.
For bigger thematics like Star Guardian or PROJECT, the background story is something we keep in mind throughout the entire development of the skin. If you’re interested in learning more about how we think about thematics, check out this Boards post I wrote on the subject or this dev blog about naming skins.
After naming, our next step is to put her on PBE for player feedback.
Getting It Right with Quality Assurance
Alan “Riot KiWiKiD” Nguyen, Senior QA Analyst: Hey friends! I’m Alan “Riot KiWiKiD” Nguyen, and I was responsible for all QA efforts on Little Demon Tristana. There’s a lot to QA, but for this post I’d like to break it down into three parts: ensuring healthy development, testing, and addressing player feedback.
Ensuring Healthy Development
Throughout concept and development, QA want to establish that the way we’re creating the skin will be the least troublesome for development and most valuable for players long term. We always consider how buggy or disruptive certain decisions can be, especially early in production. Any hasty decision can snowball into serious development pain and be a lot harder to deal with if not caught early. A good way to consistently gauge decisions is by asking questions.
For example: If we were to add a pet or familiar to a skin, does it add enough player value considering time needed (to rig, animate etc.), and can the skin support the proposed pet/familiar? Another example: Little Demon Tristana has wings! During development we asked questions like: How big should they be? Do we have enough support for them? Do we want to make them look different during Rocket Jump (W)?
Smol black wings on model vs. bigger blue wings during Rocket Jump (W)
One other part of ensuring healthy development as QA is coordinating playtests! We playtest skins weekly to measure both specific and overall feels. Playtests also make sure we’re not straying too far away from the thematic. Each skin has specific feedback points and questions we’d like the playtester to keep in mind and/or answer. Here’s an example of Tristana’s points during one of her first playtests:
Red flags include anything alarming such as Tristana ult is covering the screen or Tristana’s gun going missing, and we consider a recall “blocked” when the basic animation sequence is in place.
After playtests, feedback is compiled and given to the team, which they’ll consider and potentially act upon. For example…
We did end up acting upon both feedback statements: We cleaned up her explosive charge (E) passive, and also added a fair amount of purples and pinks into her kit! Yay for playtesting.
Testing
We conduct actual testing on Little Demon Tristana via test suites designed to make sure no funny business is going on—no bugs, nothing working unintentionally. Put shortly, a test suite is a collection of tests. These test suites are quite extensive and can take up to two weeks to finish.
Sneak peak of small part of a test suite:
This specific test case accounted for Little Demon Tristana being able to be altered as expected when a specific ability or item affect her.
We want to make sure the skin is tested for both common and uncommon interactions. A skin can be quite different in terms of tech and interaction compared to the base champion. Bugs can occur and exist by a myriad of ways: Lulu and Tahm Kench existing (darn you Polymorph and Devour), VFX covering a full screen, a new part of body not yet animated, etc. The main question we’re trying to answer through testing is, “Does the skin work exactly as how a player would expect?” And from that, we ask, “Are all my VFX thematic? Are the SFX appropriate? When I am stunned does the indicator show up? etc.”
Here are some of the bugs we found while testing Little Demon Tristana. Enjoy!
1. Easy to overlook: Little Demon Tristana was using classic VFX for units surrounding the selected target.
Bug is fixed!
2. Clarity Cleanup: Little Demon Tristana’s Rocket Jump was rendering over impassable terr
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