One of the things I love the most about Riot Games, League of Legends specifically, is the attention to detail and their ability to design elements without being exaggerated and intrusive.

That being said, I would say that the detail that I value the most about this game, aside from the gameplay and experience, is the animated login screen whenever I fire up League of Legends.

It is such a powerful element, creating an experience right from the moment you click the icon and launch the game, that they found they way to make it right in an elegant way.

These animations generally loop themselves and don't make use of heavily animated material, but the amount of life provided to the character or scene shown in the login screen is enough to captivate the player even as he or she enter their username and password. Pair that with the epic music queued every time and you get the perfect match to get you ready for a session of online arena gaming.

Along the time that I've played League of Legends, I've been amazed by the quality of the animation in the login screen. The first time I fired up the game, Udyr's Spirit Guard Skin was featured, and Riot added the according animation complete with settings to toggle between Udyr's attack configurations. Over the next years, I became increasingly curious and intrigued by this detail.

As I progressed with my skill in the game, I came along Urgot, which I found to be one of the coolest, craziest and most original character in the game. By the time I began using him, I had never seen anyone play with him, which made it all the more appealing to me. This champion quickly grew to my liking, because everything about him is so well designed: The story, the mechanics, his renewed splash art. Of course, I searched everywhere for his animated login screen... And I found nothing.

This is when I started this personal project, which took me roughly 3 months of work in between my job, school and personal affairs.

For some time now, approximately since I was 9 years old, I've wanted to create new worlds and give life to the many stories that develop in my head. I even chose a major related to film-making, but then one day I decided I wanted to create video games. I wanted to create characters, animate them, give them a backstory, bad-ass abilities and then show off these characters to my friends and the world and promote healthy competition through gaming. So I switched majors to Animation. 

During the first semesters, I learned more about coding, and part of my genes gave me some ability in that matter (my dad is a programmer). My drawing skills became better with instruction and the way to weave stories together started making sense to me. When I was ready, me and some friends decided to get serious with Game Development.

We assembled a small team of three guys to work on a project, to learn and share ideas. We researched the assets, limitations and products of popular game engines, as well as the accessibility. Finally, we settled on learning, conquering and mastering Unreal Engine 4, which at the time costed $40 USD a month for a license. 

Then it happened. The day after we paid the $40, Epic Games announced that they were giving UE4 for free. We were brimming with joy. The $40 were given to us as credit and we spent it on some cool assets from the marketplace. And so, I began to code in their famous blueprints.