Abel Paguyo II

A spin-off VR game which revolved around the idea of crafting weapons and armor for players in order to teach new players about item upgrade paths for League of Legends.

Riot Games Hackathon

This was actually my first physical exposure to the game industry as I was randomly accepted to attend Riot's annual hackathon at their headquarters in Santa Monica, CA. Given the opportunity to work and explore what Riot Games was like for half a week was an absolute eye-opener, as I met so many people who loved League of Legends and probably video games in general. Surrounded by a bunch of light-hearted folks of all ages, I found myself easing right in, and the general hackathon procedures followed, that being pitching ideas, team formation, and finding the shortest route to free caffiene.

The Concept

After some quick sketches, "Hey have you ever played _____?", and gauging everyone's experience and exposure to VR, we came up with Ornn's Workshop. Ornn is a character or champion from League of Legends whose special ability allowed him to craft weapons and armors anywhere as a blacksmith. Combined with inspiration from another game called Craft Keep VR, we fused the two concepts to create a VR game that would teach new players 'recipes' from League of Legends while also letting players have fun interacting in VR.

Inspired by Craft Keep VR

Gameplay

The player essentially plays as Ornn, and his teammates will often drop by in order to request a certain weapon or armor. The player will then accept the request and attempt to recreate the specific weapon or armor by using base materials around him. It may take some experimentation for new players to learn recipes as the game of League of Legends throw more than 200 items at a new player to grasp.

There are so many items to choose from, it's slightly overwhelming for a newbie.

Implementation

Since League of Legends is always constantly updating with new patches, we used Riot's API in order to pull the master list of items from their servers at any given point of time, and we would need to design functions in Unity in order to generate those items at the player's world. Due to the quick-fix and 'hacky' nature of hackathons, we didn't manage to implement a self-managing pipeline of pulling data and generating items, however we managed to create a solid foundation of combining items in VR to create an upgraded item with the right recipes.

Ripped and ported over the League of Legends map into Unity, with their Riot's permission of course

Loot + Experience Gained

Leveled up alot this weekend, and crushed a bunch of energy drinks as well. Between creating a solid VR game and learning more of Unity's features and workflow in a hackathon environment as well as enjoying tours of Riot's headquarters and studios, I would definitely want to experience it again the first time. There were some physical merchandise and loot to have had since I love League of Legends and Riot, but in terms of skilltree, I absorbed:

API Development (in general)
More VR Development Experience (this time we used the HTC Vive)
A little bit of modeling and level design (Spent so much time in VR in the Fields of Justice)
How to fix and save a Git workflow (Unity and Git will never be best friends :( but we learn)

Given some more time, I would like to actually implement more crafting interactions, like hammering down a sword, or melting an armor to be used as a piece on an upgraded mold. At that time, Riot didn't have actual 3D models for their in-game items, so someone would've had to roughly model it, which would've been fun to do. Due to our project using Riot game assets with their permission, it's not possible to share the Github source, but if the team decides to get back together to work on it, we'd definitely find a way to get it on a store or available for everybody. It's probably still on Riot's dedicated VR game room, if you work there, feel free to play with it.

Loved the Ornn Workshop Team

Nov. 2017 - Riot Games