Valorise

In 2024 I was approached by Riot Games, as they’ve seen my work on Tako - a multipurpose Discord bot. They wanted me to create a Discord bot that could automatically track progress and improvement in the competitive game Valorant, which is a tactical first person shooter developed by Riot Games. The person who ranked up the most in a month in their respective rank, received rewards given out by Riot Games.

My goal was to deliver them a high-quality product in the short timeframe without the use of any AI. That included also designing the brand assets around the event including an animated banner, a logo and emojis used within the Discord bot.

I started with getting to know the Riot Games API, which had some serious drawbacks and was honestly cumbersome to work with. But eventually I found a reliable way to track a profiles competitive rank, while having the individual event participants authenticate via the Riot RSO Client (which used the OAuth 2 protocol). Everything was stored in a PostgreSQL database and all the sensitive data was encrypted.I then had to work out how to display that data to ensure a transparent event. I landed on a leaderboard that would automatically update. To ensure a readable layout, I also designed custom emojis that would signalize whether a person has had a positive history or not. I made use of the logo, which was arrow shaped, to indicate an arrow up or down, depending on the performance.

Speaking of the logo, this is also something I made for the project. Since the event was incentivizing ranking up in their game, I tried to make use of an upward arrow. I also looked at other logos made by Riot Games themselves for Valorant, like VCT, which is their worldwide esports event. I also made sure to use the same spacing, and rounded corners, to make it look like it was made in-house. It took a lot of refinements, but the end result is something I am very proud of, as I obsessed over every little detail.

Although at first, the project was internally known as Project Killjoy, so I made placeholder assets for that too, to make some early exploration (as you can see by the incorporated Valorise text later on).

Overall, this project was a huge success. Valorise was made specifically for the regional Discord server Valorant India & South Asia and it was their biggest event to date. I still get asked whether they will ever bring back, and internally there seems to be discussion on picking the project back up. It was also really fun to work on, as you could see how everyone participating tried their hardest on ranking up the most, which in turn boosted play time of the game by a significant amount. There were over 3,000 rank updates over the course of two months and a 300% increase in event participation. There were over 500 participants, even though the community is just the size of the low thousands.