Adaptations aren’t easy. Taking something people love in one medium and giving them a new way to fall in love with its stories and characters is always a herculean undertaking, which is part of what makes it so surprising that Riot Games and the team at Fortiche were able to take the vague sketches of story and character in League of Legends and turn it into Arcane, a beautifully animated show full of compelling, complicated characters and a wonderfully tragic story.
To celebrate the release of Arcane’s final season, Riot created tie-in content for all of its biggest games, including fun cosmetic content for Valorant and Arcane’s Ambessa making her way to League as a playable champion. But the development team behind Teamfight Tactics, Riot’s auto battler spinoff of League of Legends, decided to take their Arcane celebration even further by dedicating an entire season to the show.
Teamfight Tactics, like many live-service games, has distinct seasons (called “sets” in TFT) of content that are refreshed every few months. In TFT’s case, that means a total refresh of the units in the game and the addition of new mechanics, all based around a single theme. Past examples of set themes include music, with in-game factions being made up of different genres, or all the different types of magic in Runeterra, where the League universe takes place. The game’s 13th set, which went live Wednesday, is called Into the Arcane, and is themed entirely around the second season of the Netflix show.
Teamfight Tactics technically did an Arcane tie-in for the first season of the show as well, but the game was fairly new then and the crossover only involved the inclusion of a few characters from the show. It was effective, but it was also small, and the team had grander ambitions of an all-out Arcane set to go along with the series finale.
“We basically had this big brainstorm where it was like, What does it mean to have an Arcane set?” Into the Arcane lead producer Winston Baker says. “What do you bring over? What are the elements of the show that are really great for the game? How do we have to adapt the show so that it fits with the theme and tone?”
Unsurprisingly for a show as visually stunning as Arcane, the first step was finding a way to bring Arcane’s gorgeous art style, full of dark colors and sinister tones to match its melancholy story, into TFT, a game generally known for its bright and inviting colors, in a way that stayed true to both projects. That task fell to TFT gameplay art director Tori Ero.
“We really try to have a lot of variety in our [set] themes for players over the course of the year,” Ero says. “I would say this one is probably our darkest set, and maybe art-wise, our least colorful.”
“I remember making the joke to Tori, ‘Yeah, just go make it Arcane, but it has to be TFT, how hard can it be?’” Baker says, laughing. “And she laughed and she’s like, ‘Maybe harder than you think.’ […] Then a week later my jaw dropped. I saw [this] Vander side-by-side [image]. And I was like, Wait, but you did it. I said it as a joke, Take this grimdark show and turn it into something really beautiful for TFT. And then a week later you guys came back and I was like, Oh yeah, that’s it. That’s our angle. You nailed it.”
The key to nailing all this, according to Ero, was a close and careful collaboration with the show’s animation team at Fortiche.
“We were really fortunate to have so many beautiful concepts and existing work from the show that we did pull from,” Ero says. “For the characters, we started with [Fortiche’s] model turnarounds and painted over them for concepts. We pulled in their direct concepts, we pulled shots from the show to be our card art. […] Every step of the way we were able to collaborate directly with them and say like, Hey, what do you think of this? Is this suiting your vision for this character still? Are we on the right track? And I feel like it created a lot of excitement in both directions. They were excited to see how we were adopting the show, and we were really excited to see what they were making for the show and adopt it into the game as well. So I feel like it was just a really healthy relationship that was a lot of fun for this.”
Fortiche’s characters are beautiful and full of intricate details in Arcane, but you rarely see them from the height or top-down angle necessary in a TFT match. This presented a unique challenge for the TFT art team, and resulted in some creative adaptations to Fortiche’s designs — little changes in styling or detail that help communicate important elements of character on smaller models from farther away.
“In Arcane you see a lot of close-up cinematic shots and stuff, but when we’re adapting a character into the champion space, we have to think about things like silhouette,” Ero explains. Another important factor is whether or not the characters are obvious fits for their role, like making sure tanks really felt like tanks. “For example, with Steb, making a big backpack so he looks a little bit more tanky. And also with the angle and the distance that you’re seeing things from, TFT characters are much smaller. So maybe we think a little bit less about expressions and more about exaggerated animations and things like that,” Ero says.
One example of this kind of adaptation work the team was particularly proud of was Renni. Arcane fans will recognize her as the Zaunite with the massive chainsaw that nearly kills Jayce. She looks incredible in the show, but she presented a few different problems for the art team on Into the Arcane.
“[Renni] in the show has this really iconic cape, and we tried for a long time to keep the full cape,” Ero says. “We thought that was so cool, but then how could she have this big cape but be holding this huge chainsaw at the same time?” So the team went back to Fortiche for ideas and got back a few pieces of concept art that didn’t make it into the character’s final design on the show. In that art was a little half-cape that ultimately went straight into TFT as her final design.
The team behind TFT’s new set wants you to play out your own Arcane fantasy appeared first on Polygon.
