Hey there! Few days ago, I celebrated my one year anniversary at Riot and I wanted to commemorate the day by writing a blog post that would be helpful for younger sound designers who are looking to work at Riot! Obviously, I am not about to breach NDA’s or reveal the entire interview process, but will do my best to explain things that are helpful to know before going in.
Introduction
When I was first applying for my job, one of the most revolutionary advice I was given by Peet was to ‘do what I would do at my job’. While this advice was helpful in getting me researching and working on sound redesigns, there are several details that I wish I knew about working at Riot or specifically, on skin sound design. My hope is that you’ll read this and get some insight into what working in a AAA company as a sound designer is like, and use that as an inspiration to propel your career.
Q: What do you do at Riot?
I am a skins sound designer on League of Legends. My main job is to create new sound effects for new skins, and occasionally other personalization products such as Emotes and Wards.
Q: Who do you mainly interact with at work?
I work with two groups of super talented people: My skins team, and the Audio discipline. There are several other sound designers like me who are put into different skins teams. In that team, I work directly with VFX artists, animators, concept artists and the team’s producer. Each week, the audio discipline gets together in review sessions and listen to each other’s work, give and receive constructive feedback, and playtest them in a custom game together. It’s a lot of fun!
Q: What is the process of working on SFX of skins like?
I’ll use Spirit Blossom as an example. In 2019, I was assigned to work on Spirit Blossom Riven and Yasuo. All of us skins sound designers who were working on Spirit Blossom skins gathered in a room and started brainstorming important sonic pillars for Spirit Blossom that would differentiate it from other pre-existing eastern-inspired themes like Lunar Revel, Blood Moon and Immortal Journey. This process is important, as it’s crucial to construct a solid foundation of what the thematic should sound like while we avoid too many overlaps with other skins. In an IP heavy game like League of Legends, it’s especially important to create distinct sonic identity for everything you design, for the sake of congruity for other skins for many years to come.
You can read more about what the process was like here: The Frequencies of Folklore
Before I start making any sounds, I take about a day researching the champion by playing a couple of games on them, looking through the Champion’s main’s subreddits (r/YasuoMains, r/RivenMains, r/Pykemains etc…) to discover consensus on which skins the mains like and why. I always find helpful information that guides me in a certain direction, as well as the satisfying gameplay elements that I must hit to make the mains happy.
I officially start working on sound design once VFX is about half way done through their kit. I hop onto my DAW of choice Reaper (Riot lets you use whatever DAW you want, so don’t worry about having to learn Pro Tools.) I will usually have 1st pass on the full kit (AA, Q, W, E, R and Passive) in a few days, unless the Champion is complex or require loads more assets because their kit’s size demands it.
We have our own sound libraries full of audio building blocks that our previous sound designers have created, as well as a wide variety of commercial sound libraries in our arsenal. Quick iterations is key when working on skins, so I make sure to get first pass of the full kit done as soon as possible before showing it to my team for review. Other sound designers will helpfully point out a couple important elements that I might have missed that is in the Champion’s base kit, or if my efforts to make the thematic elements are working or whether I need could push them more.
After around 2 weeks, my skin has gone through 2nd pass and is under polish stage. I work on Recalls the last. By now, recall’s animations are done and I would have a good understanding of what the champion’s overall kit sounds like, so I borrow sounds from their kit into the Recall sounds. This is probably my favorite part of making skins - it’s so much fun to design for a short story, even if it’s only 8 seconds long.
There are other technical tasks such as implementation checks - at the end of the production cycle, checking to see if our skin’s Wwise project is clean and optimized. Understanding how to use Wwise to implement your sounds is absolutely necessary. You don’t need to learn any C#, Unity or Unreal, there are programmers whose job is to create tools so that audio designers can work efficiently - so you don’t need to spend hours upon hours learning coding unless you are wanting to be a technical sound designer.
Q: What was your previous education background & work experience before you started working at Riot?
I graduated from college in January 2019, about 6 months prior to applying at Riot. I had a bachelors degree in Music Composition, and worked on 20 small projects in the span of 1.5 years. I taught myself how to do design sounds purely through online videos from Akash, Blipsound, and Marshall McGee. On my resume, I had shipped 1 free game on Steam called Food Drive that I worked on for 3 months, and several of the small projects that I worked on. Here’s what that resume looked like: Link to Resume
Q: What was the interview process at Riot like, and how did you prepare for it?
From start to finish, my interview process lasted 3 months. I first found the job opening online through gracklehq.com (This is a great site for checking which companies are hiring!). I’ve been slowly polishing my website for a year at this point, updating the design, uploading new reels and writing blog posts to document my work and help others. A month prior to finding out about this opportunity, my portfolio was already prepared thanks to lots of applying to other places and Reel Talk (Great resource for Sound folks). All I needed was to write my cover letter that was unique to Riot.
To prepare for my interviews, I watched a LOT of videos from Don Georgevich. His videos really helped me be prepared for some of the most common questions that get asked during interviews. I tried to write up a list of sound design / production questions that could be asked, and tried to rehearse them so I didn’t fumble during my interviews. I did lots of mock interviews with my sister, and recorded myself in front of a camera so I could get used to talking about myself and not stutter. It’s always best to be overprepared!
After several rounds of phone interviews with my soon-to-be manager & audio director, I went to Riot in person and did 4 rounds of onsite interviews with lots of different groups of people who I would be working with. These people were Skins team Director, Audio Director, Art Director, Producer, Sound Designers, and QA. I also had a lunch with my recruiter and we casually chatted about gaming and League of Legends. After the onsite interview was over, I was given a brief tour of Riot. I got to see the PC Bang, and take a picture in front of Annie and Tibbers to commemorate finishing the interview!
The whole interview process was arduously long and I understand why it needed to be that way. They really wanted to make sure that they’re hiring the right person.
Q: What surprised you the most when you first joined Riot?
When I first joined, one of the biggest surprises to me was how nice everyone was. I was half expecting people to be mean and the workplace to be competitive to the point where there would be hostility. Instead, everyone at Riot was welcoming, friendly and ready to help me get started. I can’t understate how patient and willing they were to go out of their way to help me and answer every little question I had. My trust and faith in my teammates grew tremendously during the first few months I was here.
I was also just really amazed at the sheer amount of passion that everyone working at Riot had. No one was taking their work as if it was just a regular job. No matter how many years they’ve been there, everyone loved videogames and working for the product that they were working on. And the games that we were making were all genuinely exciting and fun.
Lastly, the food at Noms (our cafeteria) was providing food for all employees. It was fully subsidized and always ready, which meant that we didn’t need to worry about cooking. The freedom of knowing that there’s resources anywhere I go - it was really freeing and let me focus on my work.
Q: How did you deal with imposter syndrome when joining Riot?
For the first 3 months I felt the imposter syndrome. After shipping my 2nd skin, I stopped worrying so much about my work not living up to the standards, and instead approached it with a “I’m just going to put this in the game and see how it sounds”. After putting it in the game, I would definitely hear the difference between my skin and every other skin in the game, and would make quick changes to mine until it reached the standard.
Funny thing is, everyone at Riot feels imposter syndrome for the first few months they’re there. After that, we realize that our players love what we do as long as we listen to them and think like a player. At the end of the day, it’s important to always remember the reason why we came into the game industry in the first place - to work on fun games that we’re passionate about. I always play games to remind myself of that and never try to play too seriously to the point where I’d get burnt out on my own game that I work on.
Q: What is one mistake that you would warn yourself about?
Speaking of burning out, working on League is like running a marathon - don’t burn yourself out trying to create one perfect sounding skin, but takes breaks while quickly iterating so you can produce multiple great sound skins in the long run.
In my first few weeks I stayed late to work on League, and when I was done working, I would grind solo que. If you eat and breathe League of Legends, you start caring less about other important things in your life. I eventually got a bit tired of my entire life being around League, so I started picking up other hobbies like working out, and playing other games. Now I’m enjoying League when I do play it!
Sometimes, you got to let it go. You’re given around 3-4 weeks to go from 0 to a fully polished kit. After some point, the time you spend on polishing makes diminishing returns, and it would be much better to move on to working your next skin. To some degree, quantity and quick iteration is important. We’re working on a game that constantly receives updates and new skins, so we need to move along.
Q: Do you have any advice for getting hired at Riot?
Do the work that you would do if you would get hired.
Figure out what exactly you would do if you got the job. Then do those things and show them in your portfolio to prove it.
I see so many artists who say they want to be splash / concept artists at Riot or Blizzard who don’t draw enough in those company’s styles. If a company is looking at your portfolio, they want to see that you’re already familiar with their style so they don’t have to second guess whether you’ll be able to learn it when you’re actually hired.
Same with sound design. Create sound redesign videos and put them on your website! My friend Alex recently did a Mordekaiser Sound Redesign and it sounds almost exactly as how it would sound in our game, down to the mix and panning of his assets. We as audio team notice this stuff and get really excited about it whenever someone does it, yet not a lot of people can do it (they’d sound completely different from what our game sounds like).
Play League of Legends, Teamfight Tactics, Valorant, and Legends of Runeterra to familiarize yourself with the game and hopefully have something in common to talk about when you’re talking with your recruiter! And I hope that you’ll actually have fun when you’re playing these games too.
And that’s pretty much it for today. I know you might have more questions for Riot or about sound design. Please reach out to me at my email dkim@riotgames.com for questions, feedback requests on your redesigns or just to say hi! I’d love to hear from you.
Until next time,
~Daniel
