Senior QA @ Riot Games
Senior QA @ Riot Games
Champions, Tools, Gameplay System Engineering, Release Production
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Quality Assurance at Riot Games is different from the industry standards. Successful QA are force multipliers that brings more than just testing & feedback skills. My specialization focuses on Game Design and Gameplay Implementation. My tenure at Riot is more akin to Game Design Assistant/ Interim Game Designer, while fully fulfilling the responsibilities of my full time role.
Champions
Champions
Gameplay Scripting for Champion Designers and Scripting best practice for both designers and Quality Verification, fault tolerant scripting to minimize impact to production when a script does go wrong.
Full Script work on Kled
Warwick Rework latch-on mechanics
Recall System Integration for Rakan and Xayah
Re-scripting on Zed, Azir and many more.
Player & Gameplay Focused
From Prototype to shipping, Maintained, tuned, bugfixed, and polished all aspects of Kled's implementation, including animation, visual effects, behaviors, and other systems, to a polished, shippable quality. Kled was shipped with no issues found upon ship.
With engineering's assistance, Kled features a dual health bar system. In collaboration with sound designers, Kled features the first ever script driven VO system.
Warwick Rework
The team was struggling to timely ship Warwick. His first ability introduced two new mechanics to the game that was technically difficult to execute in script, and was show-stopping buggy. With a 2 week deadline, I was on tasked with getting Warwick fully functional including animations, visual effects, new mechanics, to a polished, and shippable quality.
Warwick's first ability is deceptively simple, but was technically challenging to implement.
"Warwick lunges and clamps his jaws on the target, leaping behind them. While clamped, Warwick follows all movement of the target. After releasing his hold, he does the same damage and healing."
Wanting to capture the feeling the of a rabid dog attack that refuses to let go, we spent a lot of time tuning the feel of the latch on mechanic, This required us to adjust the position and dash speed of Warwick dynamically based on the target's displacement. A lot of vector math was involved. When the target dashes quickly and for long distances, Warwick whips around and creates a deeply satisfying drift.
Warwick cleanly shipped.
Debugging and Bug fixing
Reproduced, Triaged and Fixed functional edge case on Syndra's combo, that has historically caused eSport match interruptions.
Before
After
Player & Gameplay Focused
Vector math.
Before
After
Animation Tuning
A frustrating bug affected Project Yasuo, the premier skin for the most popular Champion, causing players to inadvertently cancel attacks and dubbing it "Pay to Lose". Despite fluctuating between "Can Not Reproduce" and persistent player complaints, the root cause eluded the team. Convinced of its existence, I delved deeper.
I identified the attack animation as the crux of the issue. By painstakingly generating an overlay between the attack animation, we found subtle discrepancies in timing and pose. Project Yasuo's animation lead by a single frame, causing the perception issue, and frustrating experience. By aligning other skins' animations to match, we resolved the issue.
This experience engrained in me the importance of player feedback.
Animation super imposed clearly demonstrating the root issue
Animation comparing fixed animation
Content Efficiency
Content Efficiency
The team was tasked with streamline content. In the past, building content in League of Legend was highly cumbersome. For champions, it required an encyclopedia of knowledge about editable champion properties. For cosmetics, it required careful version control of hundreds of visual assets. These process were prone to human error, and was very time consuming to identify when an error, like a single missing file, do occur. The team was tasked with systematically solving these development inefficiencies.
Having mastered the design tools necessary for creating new content and fulfilling the role of quality assurance to prevent any issues with the new data format, I also took on the responsibility of alpha testing for our design client. Providing feedback to aid streamline the designer experience for this tool.
CONTENT EFFICIENCY: GAME DATA SERVER - Tech Blog by Bill Clark
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