Hi, I’m Brandon “mochi” Wang, a software engineer on VALORANT’s Content Support team. I’m specifically going to focus on shaders, which are an essential part of computer graphics, my area of expertise. Shaders are the programs behind what most people consider a game’s graphics - how a program running on your GPU takes in scene/game data and creates the pixels seen on screen. I’m excited to talk about this because the intersection of engineering, art, and design is a personal passion of mine.

Hi, my name is Eric Friedman, and I’m a Software Engineer who has been working on League of Legends for 8 years, focusing mainly on gameplay systems. For the last several years, I’ve been working in the Player Immersion and Expression (PIE) initiative, bringing you skins like Elementalist Lux and personalization options like Emotes. If you’re interested in how Elementalist Lux was implemented, check out our previous article. I’m excited to bring you another article about an ultimate skin, Gun Goddess Miss Fortune, and the technology it took to bring her to players.

Hi, I’m Paul Geerts and I’m one of the engineers on League’s Render Strike Team. A while back my buddy Tony posted an article about how League of Legends currently builds a single frame of the action. Today, I’d like to dive into a component of the rendering pipeline that we’re actively improving: materials. I’ll discuss some of the changes we’ve made and why they’re important for players and developers alike.

Hi, I’m Tony Albrecht and I’m one of the engineers on the new Render Strike Team under the Sustainability Initiative in League of Legends. The team has been tasked with making improvements to the League rendering engine, and we’re excited to get our hands dirty. In this article, I’ll provide a run-down on how the engine currently works - hopefully this will be the foundation on top of which I can later discuss the changes we make.

With the current scale of a game like League of Legends, it can be hard to remember the humble beginnings: a small group of developers too busy shipping a game and putting out fires to think about fine tuning systems, pipelines, and processes. And while we’ve changed a lot, our priorities remain the same: we’ll always put player experience before tech and process. Sometimes that leads to tech debt, and as we grow, it's important that we look for ways to improve the quality of our work as well as the way we work. Not every step forward has to be revolutionary.

In late 2013, Riot’s map team started to work full-tilt on updating Summoner’s Rift, the flagship map for League of Legends. It was an enormous task: not only did the team need to upgrade the map’s look and feel while preserving the bits that players loved, they needed to do it without increasing the minimum required hardware spec. Looking back, now more than a year after the launch of what we called the Summoner's Rift Update, or SRU, I think the team did an amazing job. The map is more vibrant and engaging, and it better supports the competitive integrity of the game.