Riot Games wants to show us how the teams prepared for this year’s Star Guardians event.
STAR GUARDIAN NARRATION
Hello, story-loving gamers! I’m Stephanie “Riot Lady Smalls” Bedford, narrative producer of League and Wild Rift, and local Star Guardian expert!
The last /devblog of the narrative team goes back a long way (hello 2019! How young we were back then!) We’ve been hard at work in Word Mines™ since then, but we’re excited to go back to the surface to talk to you a bit. The League narrative team has changed a lot since last time, and we have plenty of Rioters to introduce to you (including me, hello!), as well as a few familiar faces.
When we started this year’s Star Guardian Chapter, we wanted to make sure we honored the commitments made after the Sentinels of Light event. Today we want to show you how we prepared for this year’s Star Guardians event.
Star Guardians 2022: Written in the Stars
We were thrilled to bring back Star Guardians and expand on the story we started in 2019. Many players around the world have been fans of this story since that day (and even before!), and we were ready to bring you all back in this world. Star Guardians is one of our favorite themes internally, and it’s amazing how invested you are in this story every time we develop it.
When we thought about the stories we want to tell this year, we had a few priority goals for building this new narrative. We wanted to emphasize continuity, take Lux and her team to well-deserved “legendary” status, reflect the changes the team had made to its world, make room for a new generation of Guardians, and ensure that the new Guardians would reflect and amplify the values established by the victories and failures of previous Guardians. In short, we wanted to focus on topics like identity, relationships and belonging, all universal human experiences… while telling the story of magical heroes who protect and save the world by trying not to repeat high school! As many things as we have all known.
From the start of development, the narrative team created a strategy for the event to be consistent across all games and in its execution. Since the event was planned for League of Legends, Wild Rift and Legends of Runeterra, we wanted players to experience a unified and consistent Star Guardian universe across all games.
We also wanted to incorporate lessons learned in Sentinels of Light, Spirit Blossom, and RiotxArcane to make Star Guardians bigger (and better) than other past story events. With this lesson, we felt it imperative to provide other teams with insights, through our storytelling expertise, so that Star Guardians maintains its overall vibe across all mediums. We wanted players to be able to invest in the truth of this universe and the stories we were going to tell. This led to a strategy that became our North Star (hehe) in many conversations during development.
Here are the narrative pillars that helped us bring Star Guardians to life:
- The narration of this event should be consistent with past Star Guardian stories.
- The narrative moments of the past should have an impact on the future; the character and story changes are lasting.
- All narrative content takes place on the Star Guardian timeline; chronology and continuity are maintained, and story moments should not be depicted more than once.
- All content must respect the tone and thematic pillars of this universe; products and media can tolerate some variation, but share the same central truths.
Narrative consistency was our priority for Star Guardians, and the League Narrative Team (who write for League PC and Wild Rift) worked closely with other Riot teams to ensure that everything in Star Guardians is consistent and tells the same story. We’ve also made sure to plan for future Star Guardian storytelling, because one thing’s for sure, we won’t leave never really Valoran City.
We were also very aware of the need to settle our own narrative debts. Investing in some story arcs that we had started and removing some of the harmful ambiguity in the stories that already existed. For that, we worked with other teams on a campaign to continue stories like Xayah and Rakan’s Star Guardian arc in Wild Rift while retaining core truths of friendship and timeline for things like Life goes onthem vlogs, comics and other content from the Star Guardians event.
I just want to warn you that this part may go into detail about the narrative processes, but I think it’s important to explain to you how long we thought about all this.
We’ve worked closely with all Star Guardian teams to ensure that every piece of content created works with all content created as part of this cohesive story. Everything you’ve seen in League, Wild Rift and Legends of Runeterra, Seraphine Star Guardian vlogs, Another Sky, Life Goes On, The shadow of a doubtTwin stars, skins… The list is too long.
We have created documentation around this story (the number of documents that I have seen and classified…) to present them to our partners, at Riot or outside. Since every decision made in the campaign, even as innocuous as the publication date of an editorial article, could affect the impact of the story and the way we tell it, we ensured above all the narrative production throughout our organization. We didn’t want to spoil the ending of Another Sky before players had a chance to read it!
This vigilance ensured that the entire storytelling team could spot opportunities to seize during the creation of Star Guardians 2022 (which has been underway since 2021!) to make the story stronger for everyone. you. Many of these efforts are visible in the details, such as the consistency of the graphical style from game to game, the sound effects of the skins, and the canonical article Previously on Star Guardians before the start of the event. We wanted to allow you to enter this event to enjoy it regardless of how familiar you are with previous episodes. We wanted to invite everyone to come and enjoy what we had created with so much attention, to facilitate access to it as much as possible.
Internally, we kept a dedicated weekly narrative sync, across all products, to verify that all event elements were working with each other. Our partners were very respectful of the whole process, and we worked with them to find solutions whenever a problem arose. A narrative representative championed the interest of the story at all times, and we hope our players will feel this as they see the consistency of the story throughout the event.
Our regional teams also created fabulous ways to pay homage to the Star Guardian universe to participate in the event in regions that had helped grow that universe. It was a truly unique experience to have this partnership work with so many players from around the world and to enrich the universe.
A word of thanks
Creating this year’s Star Guardians was a labor of love, and we wouldn’t have succeeded without all of the fabulous Rioters who put their hearts into it. Creating a work of such scale requires an army, and while I’m only highlighting one discipline, I’d like to take a moment to list the contributors who deserve my gratitude:
Narrative production of the event: Stephanie Bedford
Event Lead Author: Jared Rosen
Writing Another Sky: Jared Rosen, Ty Sheedlo, Taylor Dinwiddie
Correction Another Sky: John Chambers, Anastasia Basil
PC Fantastic Scripts: Michael Luo, Brooke Jaffe, Nicholas Werner, John Chambers
Nilah (narration): Jared Rosen, Elan Stimmel, John Chambers
Previously on Star Guardians: Erika Haas, Stephanie Bedford
Social media and LoL website: Caytie Davenport, Ty Sheedlo
Life Goes On: Bethany Higa; secondary authors: Phillip Vargas, Cat Cheresh, Caytie Davenport, Julia Shen, Winnie Huang
Shadow of a Doubt: Brooke Jaffe, Calle C. Miller
Star Enemies Development: Kenny Cameron
Wild Rift Metagame Writer: Ty Sheedlo
Fixed Wild Rift metagame: Nicholas Werner, John Chambers
Wild Rift Fantasy Scripts: Kristina Atanasoski, Nicholas Werner, John Chambers
Wild Rift Vlogs: Cat Cheresh, Phillip Vargas, Julia Shen
Wild Rift Comics: Callie C. Miller, Jared Rosen, Sabrina Futch, Molly Mahan
Wild Rift website and social media: Julia Shen
Twin stars: Cat Cheresh, Siege Gary, Phillip Vargas
Legends of Runeterra Star Guardian Kai’Sa: Conor Sheehy, Rowan Williams
Legends of Runeterra flavor text: Esther Kao
Social media and Legends of Runeterra website: Winnie Huang, Esther Kao
All that to say… Star Guardians was, is, and always will be a love letter, by fans for fans. Nothing would have been possible without the support and kindness of players around the world. And it’s only thanks to you that we can accomplish this kind of thing!