The design process of Teamfight Tactics was not always smooth sailing; members of the design team described the game just 10 weeks before launch as a sinking ship. The prototype and the finalized version of the game were so riddled with bugs that it was impossible to fix them all. Just when it seemed like everything was collapsing, a stable version emerged, likely the Season 1 beta. It took them about three weeks to refine that only stable version.
By the seventh week before the launch, the issue lay in selecting the champion pool and the appropriate traits to ensure balance. Fortunately, League of Legends has a vast universe with many characters from various regions and different species, so the selection wasn’t too difficult. However, Riot Games had to filter through too many units to create the most reasonable champion pool; there was a time when we had up to four Robot units instead of just one with Blitzcrank like in Season 1.
Just when it seemed that everything was finalized, Riot discovered they had “forgotten” to implement the animation for transporting players’ teams to the battlefield of other players five weeks before the game’s release. Before that, they allowed entire teams to teleport directly, which wasn’t interesting at all. Therefore, the initial design was to place champions on a ship and fly them to the battlefield of other players.
However, many opinions within the design team felt that this idea was quite time-consuming since the time for the ship to fly was relatively long. Thus, they shifted to a simpler idea of creating a space portal like the one we have now. Riot’s MapleNectar stated: “The most magical moment was flying through a void and passing everyone while on that ship; I still remember it.”
A unique aspect of the Teamfight Tactics design process was that even four weeks before the game’s release, Riot was still using a chessboard like DOTA Auto Chess. After numerous tests, they decided to discard that battlefield and replace it with the hexagonal board we have today, which helps champions better identify their opponents and use their skills more accurately. Perhaps this is what sets Teamfight Tactics apart from other games in the same genre.
The relentless efforts and risks taken by the Teamfight Tactics design team have been richly rewarded to date. This game is becoming increasingly popular, with in-game events, new seasons, and the strategic depth of Teamfight Tactics continuously evolving.