Dream Showdown series skin art design sharing
Hello summoners! League of Legends Mobile Game launched a new Dream Duel Skin Series in the 2022 3.1 version of "Ionian Guardians". This time, we invited the designers of this series of skins to step into the design universe where reality and dreams are intertwined with everyone, and share more behind-the-scenes stories of this series of skin designs.
The Dream Showdown series replaces the "Secret Journey Explorer" series as a new Canyon Treasure Book bonus skin from version 3.1 onwards. As a new skin line, and is the exclusive series of mobile games, the Dream Showdown series skin has a strong and impactful visual style, a unique world view setting, the overall concept is more avant-garde and niche, so we hope to help players understand the story behind this skin in all aspects through CG, pictures and art design sharing, and also hope that players can like the cool setting and world view of this skin. The follow-up Canyon Treasure Book will have more and more original themes and skins to bring to you, so stay tuned.
Background settings:
Dream and reality are two completely opposing dimensions, and the barrier between the two can block almost all communication. Now, the original barriers of dreams are being broken by people with ulterior motives, evil criminals hiding in dreams, greedily tasting the souls of victims, and the whole city is in danger and in turmoil.
(Background Setting)
(Background Setting)
Fortunately, psychic detectives are still struggling to maintain order. They are the guardians who hover between the two realms, taking clues from one side and completing the trial on the other. And among the psychic detectives, there is also a special being who can freely travel through dreams.
(Through Dreams)
In the past, she was originally a victim and committed serious crimes while under the control of criminals. Fortunately, Xena has a firm belief, she has successfully overcome her demons by her own willpower, and she is extremely remorseful for the mistakes she made. To this end, Xena chose to join the psychic detective to prevent such misfortunes from happening again, and embarked on the road to redemption.
Since then, there has been a special Dream Detective among the Psychic Detectives. She firmly believes that only by punishing evil can we promote good.
(Background Setting)
Design Themes and Sources of Ideas:
Dreams, which are both real and illusory, are often presented in fragmented fragments and symbolize human loss and self-redemption. This is also an important carrier in many classic literary and film works, the biggest feature of which is the absurdity and uncertainty of dreams.
If you want to echo this uncertainty in your story, you must ensure that the characters' activities are common sense. At this time, we need an identity similar to that of an "inceptionist" to provide the hero with the motivation and way to act. After many iterations within the team, we finally decided to use detectives to position the characters.
From a realistic point of view, the detective is a well-known and distinctive character, and is often the ace character behind the positive forces. They have the distinctive characteristics of alertness, perseverance, calmness and isolation, and incompatibility. These determine that they have different clothes, words and deeds, and ways of fighting. And the detectives will restore the truth of the case through strict reasoning, which also provides enough driving force for the hero's behavior through the dream.
Of course, this traditional way of reasoning is naturally difficult to achieve for our setting: crimes in the brain. Because dreams should not follow fixed rules, but should be like a crime scene in the victim's mind, in the form of fragmentation and stripping at any time.
After many discussions, we decided to alienate the process of reasoning into finding the right clues in the labyrinth! Compared to reasoning, cracking the maze has similar properties, and the maze can also perfectly correspond to the distorted and fragmented forms in the dream. We believe that this approach can better combine his detective identity and dream background.
(Twisted Maze Effect in Dreams)
(Twisted Maze Effect in Dreams)
Now that the identity of the hero and the display of ability have been determined, only the final scene setting remains. Imagine a world where, despite cutting-edge technology, is rife with violent and evil crimes. If we can skillfully integrate the identity of the hero into this extremely opposing exaggerated world, we can pass on the visual image of the hero as a whole to the player in a more avant-garde and stylish way.
Dream Detective Xena
Identity: Detective Shuttles between dreams and reality
At the beginning of the design, we agreed that the new skin design would be more acceptable to the player if combined with the original story impression, so this meant that we had to carefully choose the design objects.
Xena quickly emerged from the League of Legends universe. First of all, Xena's first impression on the player is very impressive, in the game, her Holy Gun can heal and damage at the same time. In her backstory, Xena holds the dual powers of light and darkness at the same time. In fact, this setting of coexistence of light and dark is very much in line with the concept of dream reality. So now is the time for Xena to gain her new identity.
Soul Divine Gun Xena
Soul Divine Gun Xena
According to the theme of the design, Xena's core identity label is detective. First of all, in many works of literature, detectives are always indispensable to the iconic clothes of the British style. Therefore, in terms of clothing, we have extensively borrowed from the British style of the Victorian era in Europe in the nineteenth century, the overall design is simple and slim, the whole body is smooth and uniform, and the pursuit of natural and subtle gentlemanly temperament.
After deciding on the general design of the outfit, the next step is to choose the color system. In the traditional British style, due to the choice of fabrics, yellow from English old tweed will exist as the main color. Yellow symbolizes the sun and the warning, and has two key elements at the same time, reality and detective, so we retained it and applied it to the skill effects.
(Application of yellow elements)
Secondly, also based on the core theme of the detective, Xena's dress should not be exaggerated, so we embellished her with colorless gray, black and white. And on the pattern of some dresses, the yellow is refined into gilding to make it more textured. As for the design of the costume details, we used the open neckline of the trench trench coat hook and eye, providing a hint of uninhibited rebelliousness to Xena's overall vision.
(Xena Character Design)
Finally, the cloak pendant on Xena's original chest was replaced with a pocket watch, emphasizing Xena's exclusive and personalized attire as a dream detective. It is believed that these changes will make the player more immersed in her new identity.
(Dream Detective Xena)
To further emphasize the positioning of the Dream Detective, we have matched Xena's skill show with a new animation. The first is the ghost of Xena's passive skill, and in the fierce discussion and iteration within the team, we finally chose the puzzle among the footprints, keys, and puzzles. Because the puzzle not only conforms to the fragmented atmosphere in the dream, but also conveys a unique image: gradually perfecting in collection and reasoning, which is more in line with the effect of Xena's skills and the background setting of the dream detective.
(Skill Effect Illustration)
In order to fit Xena's new character design while trying to retain the visual effects of the original skill, we carefully matched her with new special effects.
We restored the city and pool buildings in the world in the CG demo, and the presentation of these buildings will also match the corresponding scene demonstration according to the different states of stealth and appearance, it should be noted that the enemy will also present the signs of opening and closing the eyes above the head according to their different states. Moreover, when Xena escaped into the dream, we also surrounded her with a police cordon, making the element of her dream detective more deeply rooted in people's hearts.
(Black Mist Spell Binding Special Effect Illustration)
Finally, in Xena's overall skin design, we added a lot of styles that we had never tried before. For example, skill effects centered on a large number of flat silhouettes, and skill embellishments that fuse cordons and hypnosis, are actually from our original theme: dream duels.
In addition, I believe that careful people must have noticed that when we returned to the city, we customized a set of small theater animations that restored the scene of the crime. And in the back to town performance and some of Xena's animations, we can find a small Easter egg. This little mask was found in the stone by Xena during the reconnaissance site, what does this mean? Haha, let's sell it here first.
(Some development materials)
As the first skin in the Dream Showdown series, it represents the opening of a new worldview and the collision of ideas. Are you interested in the subsequent design? We will share more information later, so stay tuned.