Riot Art Education launches a series of ten videos on the props of gamer art direction

Riot Games wants to take a step to approach with Art Education those who want to understand how video games are made and deepen the concept of artistic direction.

With this intention, a team specialized in education / training and led by Gabby Cherney, Education Program Manager, has launched a series of ten educational videos on the microsite “Intro to game art” (Introduction to the art of video games).

This is the first time that Riot Games has embarked on a purely educational initiative with this completely free and universally accessible formula.

The videos are also published on the official YouTube channel of Riot Games, where they allow the option of enabling subtitles in various languages ​​(including Spanish) and, a few days after their publication, they already agglutinate hundreds of thousands of visits.

So you wanna make games? (So ​​you want to make video games?) It is an audiovisual online course, structured in ten pills that focus on various facets of art: from an introductory presentation that outlines what it means to build digital games to issues such as conceptual art (or design of visual solutions to solve problems), the design of characters (heroes, villains, comparsas, robots ...), the creation of environments or scenarios (maps, combat zones, spaces that are always fundamental for the immersion and the narrative development of the game …) Or technical art.

The sixth piece is dedicated to character animation; the seventh, to the use of visual effects (VSF, Visual effects). And the last three deal with sound design, user interface and a conclusion on game design respectively.

Lasting around 15 minutes per piece, they include advice and clarification from professionals at Riot Games or who have been heavily involved with the development of League of Legends recently. A total of 50 expert professionals who develop various tasks in the art department participate. Senior Concept Artists like Jon Buran and Gino Whitehall, Gem Lim, Thomas Randby. Jason Keyser (Senior VFX Artist), Shannon Berke (Art Lead) and many more industry experts.

Each of the episodes is also accompanied by an annex with resources to deepen the subject: recommended bibliography, a compilation of reference websites, specialized or particularly inspiring blogs, online courses, e-learning platforms or free tools accessible for beginners .

On specific topics, such as character development, Riot shares, via the free download option, actual models from its development team, with actual cheat sheets and annotations.