The beginning of Teamfight Tactics naturally started with DOTA Auto Chess, and the members of the League of Legends design team could not overlook the appeal of this game. That’s why they wanted to create their own Auto Chess game. A group of designers at Riot set an incredibly short timeline of 18 weeks to design Teamfight Tactics, with the first 8 weeks dedicated to fun concepts and the remaining 10 weeks focused on actually designing the game.
The initial design idea from Riot Games was still heavily based on DOTA Auto Chess, with the difference being that the battlefield for the two teams would be arranged vertically instead of horizontally as it is now. Perhaps this idea was too impractical, so shortly after, they reverted to the normal horizontal battlefield, although they still used an 8×8 chessboard instead of the hexagonal grid system currently in use.
The next issue Riot needed to tackle was designing the interface for the shop, the waiting area, and many other aspects of the game. If you didn’t know, the first shop interface was located right next to the battlefield, as we didn’t have a neat and tidy champion board like we do now. The animation for selling champions was also quite elaborate; you would drag a champion to the selling square represented by Tahm Kench, and it would “eat” that unit and spit gold back to you.
Another issue the design team faced was what would represent the player in Teamfight Tactics? At that time, Riot Games had no concept of a Courier like in DOTA2, which represents the player in DOTA Auto Chess. After some research, the design team decided to use the Crab as the player representation, which can be considered the first Spirit Beast of this mode. Of course, it also occasionally encountered bugs, suddenly becoming larger than Baron.
Regarding the game’s traits and classes, they continuously proposed ideas based on the origins of champions in League of Legends, adjusting parameters to make them as reasonable as possible. However, many traits and classes in the testing phase proved to be too dominant, so Riot sought to remove them and introduce new races. The trait and class system of season 1 was considered the “most balanced” during the testing phase.
Indeed, delivering a successful product like Teamfight Tactics to gamers is no easy task, especially with the huge shadow of DOTA Auto Chess looming over it. According to Riot, the information shared above is just part one, with much more exciting content to be posted on the League of Legends homepage in part two.