/dev: Scouting out Teemo

Hey folks! We’re the team working on the ASU for our most loved (or hated) yordle… Teemo. (Editor’s Note: As a quick reminder, ASU stands for Art and Sustainability Update.)

In this dev blog we’ll be taking a yordle-sized deep dive into some of the different disciplines that came together to create Teemo’s ASU. Whether you’re an aspiring video game artist, Teemo hater, or stealth mushroom planter, this one's for you!

Concept

Megan “Ze Ocelot” O’Rourke, Concept Artist:

Tailoring Teemo’s Tired Threads

Teemo has been terrorizing the Rift since 2009, so we’ve created quite a few styles for him over the last 15 years. From small adjustments to full revamps, our goal is to bring Teemo’s looks back up to the quality bar we’ve established for our modern champions. 

Similar to what we saw with Lee Sin, Teemo’s catalog over the years has also created variations in his silhouette. Most notably, his tufted hat and backpack. Some skins feature a hat whereas others lack it.

For his backpack, sometimes it turned into a full tail or was excluded entirely. While we want to retain these two design elements for Teemo’s future skins, we want to preserve the original charm of older skins that had unique features for that time. Fortunately, because of Teemo’s new expressive rig and animations, he’s still pretty dang recognizable in the game!

Some skins had minor adjustments whereas others had more cosmetic changes. Astronaut, for example, keeps the mostly classic suit but is also more aligned with the most recent Astronaut skins for other champions. However, a few of his older skins needed to be redone completely since they were mostly recolors of his original base. 

Happy Elf Teemo was one of these instances, which meant he mostly looked like hair dyed Teemo rather than an elf who lends a helping hand during the holidays. With the update, Happy Elf Teemo is dressed up and ready to deliver some presents! One of the most exciting things about updating old recolors is the transformation. And Teemo had quite a few recolors, so just like Happy Elf, we hope you enjoy the rest of his revamped classics!

3D Art

Jenna “jinyaoart” VanPelt, Character Artist:

Back to the Base-ics

Our goal for Teemo’s ASU on the 3D team was updating his model and textures to our current art and technical standards, focusing on his new yordle anatomy and proportions! We gave Base Teemo some love (yes, even Teemo can be loved) and density to his facial geometry and limbs allowing animation to create a whole new world of expression for our yordle scout. Let’s take a peek at his new look so you can see the difference!

That smile! Look at those arms go!

One of the first steps we do when working on sustainability is creating a new base mesh. This allows us to reuse aspects of the geometry or textures in order to more easily streamline skin development. If the skin is Teemo wearing a panda suit, his face should still remain, well, Teemo’s face! If we needed to create a skin where Teemo has a tiny hat or no shoes, we know what his body officially looks like underneath. So whether Teemo becomes a badger, tanuki, or a little devil, you can guarantee his likeness will remain consistent between thematics.

Did you know yordles have four toes?

The Balance of Skin Reworking

Skin development for Teemo’s 3D models, and all mode updates, poses an interesting question beyond just making awesome models: How can we bring the skin to modern League standards, while maintaining any aspects that were enjoyed before? Let’s look at some examples.

Bee-hold! Beefore and after.

The previous Beemo had an adorable face on his onesie that took advantage of his old rig, where Teemo could only face forward, heads down. With his new rig and animations, it was our job to make sure players could see both Teemo and the onesie’s cute new faces!

Bee-autiful details.

Typically, splash art is created after the 3D model. This means 3D can’t go back and make changes according to the splash. However for updates, when the splash is already fantastic, we have a unique opportunity to add polish utilizing the splash artist’s original vision.

When you and the crew match outfits (and meeps).

With Astronaut Teemo, now that there are more astronauts around, we aimed to align his new model closer to the latest and greatest Astronaut skins for thematic cohesion.

Some Teemo love to the moon and back.

Finally, old Astronaut Teemo’s recall was very simple, and his previous splash has also been to space! We found a way to combine these into an easter egg recall prop that pays homage to his iconic OG art.

Technical Art

David “Riot Duncnasty”Jeka, Izzy Cheng-Henehan, and Rhoam "KingRhoam" Johnson

Teemo Skeleton… That’s the Title

Teemo's old skeletons were a mixed bag of what could be colloquially known as “dumpster fires,” amassing a huge amount of what would commonly be referred to as “technical debt.” We wanted to make sure to really highlight the “sustainability” in “Art and Sustainability” with Teemo.

We did this by making his base skeleton as modular as possible, and then adding on to a skins skeleton where it makes sense. For example with Devil Teemo and his devil face where it’s necessary to avoid skeletal bloat. We also made sure to animate his base skeleton in a way that every other skin could use, such as animating extra long ears, or a tail on his base to then be used on skins like Cottontail and Spirit Blossom. We want each of these skins to be as special as possible while thinking about a world with all possible future Teemo skins.

After all, we don't just want Teemo to haunt your dreams on the Rift, we want him to haunt you in a SUSTAINABLE fashion. You're welcome.

Giving Horror a Face

One of our major goals was to keep the spirit of the rambunctious Yordle as much as possible. We felt there was a lot of personality we could inject in Teemo’s face, so we specifically spent time testing a face rig that could create a wide range of expressions. Between concept art, modeling, animation, and rigging, we started with small proxy tests for the rig and squashed and stretched it into different expressions to make sure we could capture the full range of motion in his face.

We played a lot with the proportions of every element, since Teemo’s a very exaggerated character but still needed to feel like himself in game. We adjusted the head, arms, legs, torso, and backpack very carefully so everything was as cute and readable as possible.

We also wanted to maintain the exaggerated animations in his abilities, so making sure Teemo’s face, head, and limbs could scale up and down as needed was crucial for gameplay readability.

While our animators were doing wonderful work creating a new animation kit for base Teemo, which is inherited by many of his other skins, we spent time carefully “retargeting” (copying animation data from his old rig) his recall animations. This gave our animators a head-start on refreshing those, as well as making sure they could put their calories into updating the rest of the animation kit.

Animation

Sean “Riot Redepoka” Yeung and Einar “Riot Beinhar” Langfjord, Animation Artists:

Then He Waddled Away

When starting animation, the first step is to work with modeling and rigging to communicate the range of behavior we want to have access to in our character rig. For Teemo specifically, a lot of our early discussion was therefore around Teemo’s facial rig and how to sell his personality.

It might seem straightforward, but because Teemo lacks actual eyes, we have to utilize the other elements in his face to really sell what Teemo is currently feeling and thinking. Therefore much of our early work involved testing out what Teemo’s facial range could look like, with help from our amazing concept artist.

This is an early version of the model, known as a proxy model, we used before locking in Teemo’s facial features.

Usually we love to take older elements, and give them a fresh new twist, however Teemo’s animation library was very limited. He always kind of got away with having very little animations, due to his head basically covering everything at all times.

There was however one aspect of the animation kit we really wanted to keep. His signature side to side movement, which we call his waddle. There is something joyful (and perhaps rage inducing for enemies) about the way he moves from side to side, faster as his movement speed increases. We really wanted to double down on that being his signature read, so we really made sure that Teemo’s runs still feel familiar, with some added new charm.

Working with narrative, we also wanted to strengthen his identity as a carefree little explorer. Most of our characters on the Rift tend to look like they are ready for battle, but Teemo’s animations are more catered to a naive-but-excited explorer traveling the world and discovering its secrets, while unintentionally causing incredible mayhem around him in the process. You will notice Teemo feels a bit more agile and capable while moving around, but also keeping some of that clumsiness that keeps getting Teemo into trouble.

Another element for Teemo, is that he enters stealth after a very short amount of time, which causes emotes to be harder to see. We therefore put emphasis on having shorter, but more punchy and quick emotes, really emphasizing what he would look like if you spammed emotes in quick succession one after another. We even gave Teemo a harmonica to jam on! He isn’t very good at it currently, but we support him in his journey to finally master an instrument!

For Teemo’s recall we wanted to showcase some aspect of how yordle magic works. Teemo has to use his abilities as a scout to locate the correct locations where he can open portals and travel across Runeterra. We really want to emphasize that Teemo is almost always on the move, always scouting ahead for his next adventure.

VFX

Yuchen “Riot Applesoda”  Lin, VFX Artist:

Teeny Tiny Mushrooms

Now it’s time for some VFX! If it wasn’t clear by now, Teemo’s VFX kit was pretty out of date so we really needed to bring his base VFX up to modern standards while also improving his gameplay clarity.

Our primary focus was gameplay clarity—really separating his Q and E to make sure players know what kind of rootin’, tootin’ shootin’ they are using for Teemo. His updated VFX uses a totally different color palette to separate Q (purple) and E (green for poison).

We also wanted to enhance Teemo’s Bandle City vibe to accentuate his yordle-ness, so we added some magic-like sparkles and magical shapes. And if you’ve got a keen eye, you can see the magical rune calling Teemo back home to Bandle City in his back animation!

Since Teemo originally got his Astronaut skin, several more astronauts have joined Teemo in space, and now his old skin doesn’t really fit anymore. That meant it was time to make some stellar abilities to bring him in line with the rest.

We added some cute alien meeps and cosmic vibes to emphasize the space vibe of the thematic.

While some skinlines such as Cottontail Teemo and Super Teemo aren’t Epic skins, we still decided to give them some extra love. Normally overhauling VFX would be outside of the scope of an update for these skins, but we really wanted to do a little something extra for some of Teemo’s much older skins.

And finally, we need to talk about the mushrooms. We wanted to give some extra love to Teemo’s shrooms and give each skin some sort of different active time VFX to give more gameplay clarity on when mushrooms become active. We also added small sparkles and interactions when you’re standing near your mushrooms, so now you can enjoy watching the mushrooms while they’re waiting for someone to step on them. And make them regret not banning Teemo.

Audio

Andrew “Dream Theater” Grabowska, Sound Designer:

Opening a Portal for Future Teemos

Making audio sustainable means that the sound effects and how they are hooked up can be easily inherited or redesigned to work on his existing and future skins while maintaining consistency and gameplay integrity across the board. Teemo’s design should not restrict future skin design and exploration while it should also set a clear guide and solid foundation for other skins to reference.

Teemo’s skins deviated from base Teemo in a few places. A big one is his passive stealth. Some skins designed sounds for the passive while others hadn’t. Another example is Teemo’s basic attacks and E attack. Base Teemo features unique sounds for both while some skins use identical sounds for both. Also, many skins have either reused several of base Teemo’s sound effects or used them as a foundation and sprinkled some thematic layers on top—but the main issue is that it is inconsistent and unclear.

Additionally, some sounds were implemented in such a way that inhibited creative design on skins. An example of this is the whoosh sound that plays when Teemo throws a mushroom, which also plays when the mushroom bounces… and again when the mushroom lands. Wait… why does it play when it lands? These are the types of things we’ve aimed to fix. And now with Teemo’s ASU you’ll be able to hear Teemo poof in and out of the shadows on all of Teemo’s skins. Hooray!

There’s also the part where the entirety of the implementation of Teemo’s sounds needs to be updated to modern standards. This includes such things as standardized naming, thorough and clear documentation, ensuring Teemo’s sounds play at the correct time from the correct location or character, testing his sounds to make sure they interact well with stealth and the Fog of War from all player perspectives, and asking important philosophical questions like “should Teemo’s mushroom bounce sound play on the mushroom that’s doing the bouncing or the one that’s being bounced off of?”

Creating the Sounds of the Bandle Scout

Everyone knows that Teemo players play Teemo because of his amazing Joke, Taunt, and Dance expressions. Well, maybe not considering he enters stealth a moment after you use any of them. As part of Teemo’s ASU he now has new expression animations and with that new sound effects! And the news you’ve all been waiting for: They’ve been designed to be spammed. His Joke and Taunt expressions now have multiple variations so Teemo players can spam away and the sounds will still sound good, and hopefully won’t annoy your enemies and friends too much. I’m sure they are already numb to Teemo’s laughter HAHahahaha. For his dance he plays a variety of chords on his trusty harmonica! Some notes sound pretty good and others are a bit questionable, and as I’m sure every music student has heard from their teacher - playing faster always sounds better… or something like that?

For Teemo’s kit we wanted to preserve the iconic sonic identity of Teemo, but also bring a little Yordle magic into his spells where it felt right, as well as further develop the character of his blow darts, smokey stealth, sizzly poison and springy mushrooms.

We worked to align Teemo’s magic with that of other Bandle City magic users found in League and across other Riot games and cinematics such as Yuumi’s chime-like sparkly and swirly magic as well as the bouncing mushrooms and Yordle portals heard in Legends of Runeterra. These sounds are sprinkled throughout the kit but are really highlighted in Teemo’s W spell and his Recall.

I can’t mention the W spell without also talking about Teemo’s new footstep sounds! You heard that right, we decided that you should hear the sound of terror approaching you… so now you can hear Teemo’s footsteps while his Move Quick spell is active! Similar to Lee Sin’s E spell, the sounds change based on the ground material, so you’ll now hear little splishes and splashes from Teemo as he moves quickly in the river. For those with a keen ear, you may also notice a ground material layer when Teemo slams down his blow pipe during his Taunt.

For Teemo’s poison and mushrooms we wanted to make these sounds more dynamic and alive and avoid stagnant noise.The poison sounds have elements of evolving acid-burn sizzles mixed with goopy bubbles so that there is always motion and character. The mushrooms themselves are much more squelchy, squishy, and bouncier than ever before. One of the sources of Teemo’s Q missile launch was the sound of boba being blown through a straw giving it a playful bubbly character. Teemo’s Q hit now plays a stereo sizzle sound for the blinded target that ducks the music and other sounds to enhance that sensation of being afflicted with a debilitating poison. We also added a new persistent sizzle sound for when you’re poisoned by one of his mushrooms that subtly increases in intensity the lower health you are—just in case you weren’t already stressed enough when stepping on a Teemo mushroom at low health.

Ultimately we worked to preserve and polish up the character of Teemo’s sound effects that fans know and love while making his sounds truly live in the world of Runeterra.

TechOps

Matthew “spooty” Becker, Software Engineer:

A Completely Unbiased Engineer’s Take

Teemo is the best champion in the game—hey, I didn’t write the Bandle Scout Code, I just follow it (and it’s okay if you feel otherwise… you’re allowed to be wrong 😏).  As such, our little Bandle Boy of Joy needed an ASU worthy of The Star of the Show! TechOps’ main aim in any ASU is to focus on the Sustainability portion of the endeavor—get rid of the legacy cruft that builds up over time and make the skin-creation process as easy as possible for our artists and designers so they’re able to achieve their vision for skins, both the legacy ones that are being updated here & any future skins. In this section, we’re going to cover some of the work we did to clean up Teemo’s scripts and data & what those updates mean for what you (the player who—naturally—loves Teemo) will see in game!

Cleaning Up the Mess Left in His Wake

Since Teemo has been around for quite some time, there were a lot of opportunities to clean up his scripts. Of course, the goal of an ASU isn’t to change a champion’s behavior, just to bring it in line with modern best practices, so when looking to update any of his scripts we’d first need to answer two questions: (1) what is the purpose of this particular script and (2) is this still the best way to go about achieving the desired result.

The first question may seem like it should be pretty obvious—Teemo’s kit isn’t particularly complicated, so the scripts should be pretty self-explanatory… right? Well, yes they should be, but that wasn’t always the case - whether it was skin-specific logic sprouting up in his base scripts, nearly-duplicate behaviors stealthing their way into multiple areas of his abilities, or the ever-dreaded hard-coded values poisoning his kit (what does “Bounce Distance 3/4/5” mean?!? 🤔), Teemo's scripts were in need of a deep cleaning. We’re happy to report that’s exactly what he’s received and the Bandle Scout is now armed and ready to go with his squeaky-clean, updated scripts!

The answer to the second question is probably where players will actually notice the biggest change. There’ve been so many improvements to the content-authoring pipeline since Teemo was first introduced—improvements that make it possible for our artists and designers to deliver on their vision for a given champion/skin with fewer technical impediments. Over the course of Teemo’s ASU, we’ve aimed to update his setup as much as possible towards a “data-driven” model, with the goal being to make him an “easy” champion to make new skins for. The results speak for themselves, with all the great work our artists did really championing this point.

Narrative

River “Riot TenPaces” Jaffe, Narrative Writer:

If it somehow wasn’t clear, Teemo is one of the most loved (and hated) characters in all of League, so we knew we didn’t want to change Teemo too much: Mostly the job I had was bringing him more stylistically and canonically into line with the amazing work other Rioters have already done. There’s references that we call back to throughout this ASU such as LoR’s “Beyond the Bandlewood” set and the “Don’t Mess with Yordles” cinematic. We worked with our IP team to make sure everything we pulled inspiration from gave our little Yordle his own special place in the larger canon.

In Teemo’s original narrative, there was some implication that the Bandle Scouts were a military institution, but in more modern depictions, we have seen that they’re in the vein of American scouting institutions, where kids learn outdoor skills and camp together (and sometimes sell delicious cookies). We wanted to canonize and make it extra clear that the Bandle Scouts were that kind of scouting and move Teemo away from the military vibes that characterized Omega Squad Teemo. Our modern Teemo is very much a scout troop leader, and making that clear makes his relationship to Runeterra a lot clearer too.

One of the more important parts of playing Teemo (aside from his innate global taunt) is being the lovable troll. It was important that he’s still a cheeky little prankster, but I think what makes him truly, staggeringly infuriating, is that he is completely oblivious to just how much chaos he leaves in his wake. If Veigar is trying to be as evil as he can and winds up accidentally being pretty good, Teemo is his cosmic opposite, who thinks he’s doing good and helping, blissfully unaware of the trail of destruction. This also made it fun to write voice lines that seem innocuous to Teemo, but mean something completely different and delightfully horrifying to everyone else.

Final Notes

Similar to what we’ve done with past ASUs, when this one goes live, we’ll be increasing the cost of the Happy Elf, Recon, and Badger skins to 750 RP due to the increased quality bar of those skins. Like with Lee Sin, if you don’t own these skins yet you can purchase them for 520 RP until his update goes live and you’ll get those skin updates for free.

Teemo’s ASU will be waddling onto the PBE on September 24th, and will be on live with patch 14.20 on October 9th. Good luck on the Rift, Scouts!