Riot delves into its process of designing weapon skins for VALORANT

Riot has been transparent about the development process for VALORANT throughout the game’s beta, and it continued that level of openness with a new blog post about weapon skins today.

Riot producer Preeti Khanolkar wrote the lengthy blog post about how the team creates weapon skins from the time they’re a concept to when they’re live in the game, and it’s pretty interesting.

“A fresh coat of paint on your favorite weapon is great, but what more can we do to make you feel an alternate fantasy,” said Khanolkar. “And how far can we push it? This far? Yes. That far? No, stop it. That’s the balance we’re always looking to strike. But before we fall in love with a skin idea, we ask ourselves how we’d execute something like that in VALORANT and whether or not that’s something players even want.”

It’s not a simple process of “this looks cool, let’s make it.” There’s a reason for everything that goes into a gun, and Khanolkar says all weapon skin ideations begin with a series of questions:

• What are some adjectives to describe it?
• What theme song sets the mood?
• Is there a single key piece of art that captures the universe?
• In this alternate universe, who’d use this weapon?
• What materials is the weapon made of?
• How do we want a player to feel when they use this weapon? What’s their mood?
• What’s the “oh sh*t!” moment a player experiences the first time they see this skin?

Concept artists take ideas and references and then put them on paper. After that, they get sent to the animation and VFX teams, and then the audio team. And then it comes time for a design playtest.

“We test everything, and we mean everything, with the team in our Design Playtests (DPT)—our twice-a-day playtest where designers experiment with all of our new features like maps, characters, and you guessed it, skins,” said Khanolkar. “This is where the imagined skin fantasy and commitment to gameplay go through extra scrutiny. Every skin enters rounds of feedback to narrow in on the fantasy without pushing it so far that it violates our commitment to competitive integrity. The DPT crew are our harshest critics, and we love them for that.”

The full blog post is definitely worth your time if you’re interested in how weapon skins come alive in VALORANT.