Legends of Runeterra: Beyond the Bandlewood

Client: Riot Games

Release Date: Aug 25, 2021

Aug 25, 2021

Release Date: Unreleased

Engine: Unity

As the fourth expansion set to the award-winning Legends of Runeterra, this set focused on the addition of Bandlewood City. The full set was released in 4 incremental releases; Beyond the Bandlewood, The Path of Champions, Magic Misadventures and A Curious Journey.

With 129 new cards, including new Keyword abilities, Spells, and Champions, this set included hundreds of new visual effect challenges, including quite a few new/unique gameplay features and artistic pipelines. The Path of Champions was introduced as its own standalone game mode, and featured story tie-ins with the hit Netflix series Arcane.

Legends of Runeterra is the award-winning, free-to-play collectible card game featuring hundreds of unique visual effects moments from full-screen Champion Level Ups, complex Spells, and individual Board and Guardian customizations. It was released worldwide in April of 2020 across the PC, Android, and iOS platforms to critical acclaim and public praise for rejuvenating the CCG genre. In December of 2020, it was awarded “iPad Game of the Year” by Apple.

Working with Riot Games

The Beyond the Bandlewood expansion continued to push the visual bar of the game and added even more large Keywords and Game Modes. With the addition of The Path of Champions, we were introduced to new challenges to the VFX pipeline that previously hadn’t existed in the core game, including adventure maps, player token and encounter effects and fully fleshed out regions of Runeterra that had to be traversable.

Working closely with technical artists and concept artists from the Riot team, we helped evolve The Path of Champions from a single Lab mode into a hugely popular meta game within Legends of Runeterra. Special abilities, environmental effects, full 3D regions, comic style narrative panels and many more VFX elements pushed the Path of Champions from prototype to polished over the course of the set’s development.

Legends of Runeterra: Beyond the Bandlewood

Working with Riot Games

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