Who knew how much thought went into them?
What Went Into Bel'Veth's Voidlings?
Bel'Veth has been part of the Rift for a while already since her release in LoL Patch 12.11. She's become a dominant force in the jungle and Riot is still trying to iron out the kinks in her kit to make her balanced. But we all know Riot loves to release champions that are a bit too strong, eh?
But this isn't an article where we lament just how broken she is, instead we're going to look at some interesting behind-the-scenes knowledge of what went into making her swarm a reality on Summoner's Rift.
How Did Riot Create the Void Swarm?
Riot Crasong went to Twitter to give fans a little behind-the-scenes knowledge on what it took to get Bel'Veth and her void swarm rolling onto the rift. He explained on Twitter that having Bel'Veth spawn Voidlings was something the team wanted to incorporate into her kit from the get-go.
The idea was there, but the execution would be the tricky part. Each champion only has a specific amount of memory and the champions team, as well as skins team has to be able to compact everything together just right. If a champion has too much information it could lead to FPS drops.
Minions Turning into Voidlings
The idea for Bel'Veth was to have dying lane minions turn into a swarm of void creatures for Bel'Veth. These dead minions, now turned Void spawn, would have the same stats as minions. Basically, a melee voidling would spawn from a dead melee minion and a caster voidling would spawn from a caster minion.
This copy/paste mechanic worked fine until the team had to address canon and super minions.
Until now, we had been spawning a voidling, and then copied each stat from the dying minion over to the voidling, and that worked fine. However, for cannon and super minions, we can't simply copy their stats over, since they are significantly more powerful.
Just spawning regular minions and disguising them as Voidlings also didn't work for the aforementioned memory issues. A whole wave spawning at once could cause frame rate issues, as well as issues with minion levels. According to Crasong, the voidlings would always have the stats of level 1 minions even in later stages of the game.
It didn't make sense for the team to create their own stats for voidlings and their own scaling system, since that would create issues for future designers who might work with Bel'Veth and her voidlings. That's why the solution was to "refactor [the] barracks system to allow designers to spawn custom lane minions easily with very little script."
All New Star Guardian Skins
What is refactoring you might ask? Well it's basically the process of restructuring code without changing its original functionality. This is basically an update to existing code. Making small changes will impact everything as a whole in a good way.
The result of this refactoring? Around 100 voidlings could spawn at once, while in the original the system could only handle around 15. So much went into creating just the few voidlings you can see in her kit. With the changes to the voidlings, it'll also be easier for future changes to be made to minions, or also introducing new kinds of minions if Riot ever wants to do that.
How do you like her kit and how she plays? She is a unique new auto-attack heavy jungler with some fun mechanics Riot added. She has been quite OP and will likely stay strong with her uncapped attack speed setup.