Rafael Sales - Producer
  • About Me
  • Game Development
  • Game Publishing

YORDLE CAMP

ROLE

Project Manager

PLATFORM

League client & in-game

TEAM SIZE

40

RELEASE YEAR

2017 (alpha)
​2018 (beta)

STUDIO

Riot Games

EXPERIENCE

The project objective was improve the player behavior of Brazilian server, which every LoL player knows that it is a huge problem.
​
These were my key learnings:

  • Uncertainty: improve player behavior in League of Legends isn't an easy task. Since HQ office in LAX has the ownership to implement the most structural projects (like Honor 2.0, machine learning to detect blacklist words) we prioritized this project to try a innovative way to decrease toxicity. Because of that it was pretty challenging define the project scope, since we didn't have similar projects to compare during hard decision moments. To help this we defined 2 epics where we defined deeply the outcomes that we wanted to impact players. After that every user story needed to show a strong relationship with at least one of them. This helped us a lot and decreased drastically the project scope, to focus on our MVP;

  • ​Big team: as far we've had a big team (40 people, between Rioters and vendors) we needed to create a Scrum of Scrums structure with 4 squads. The major challenge here was allocate some Rioters that wasn't used to assume a Delivery Lead role. I needed to manage the overall project scope, but being careful to don't abandon them on their first experience doing that.

The video below explain better the event mechanism (please, turn on English subtitles):

CBLOL OPENING CEREMONY

ROLE

Project Manager

TEAM SIZE

50+

RELEASE YEAR

2015

STUDIO

Riot Games

EXPERIENCE

Riot Brazil became famous into the international eSports scene with their opening ceremonies. Since 2014 we've delivered interesting concerts, but in 2015 we outstanded players' expectations with an incredible show.

My key learning here was:
  • Uncertainty: in a project like that we need to embrace the uncertainty, since anyone into Riot was highly experienced in concert production. From Karthus costume to sync between live music premade video on screen, almost everything was innovative to us. So we prioritized our backlog tagging our user stories in terms of Complexity and Value. After that we focused on solve first all the high/high in the matrix.

WATCH NOW


PLAY TOGETHER _ COMPETITIVE PLATFORM

ROLE

Project Manager

PLATFORM

Browser

TEAM SIZE

10

RELEASE YEAR

2016

STUDIO

Riot Games

EXPERIENCE

Play League of Legends is fun, but play it with friends is much more fun! And as eSports is a major topic to LoL players, a lot of players would love to play League in a amateur tournaments platform.

We`ve launched our beta to Brazilian players in September 2016 and we`ve had a huge number of players using the platform in the beginning.

​My key learning there were:
  • Tournament balancing: players would love to play amateurs, but they should be balanced to avoid bronze players play with diamond ones. So we created a system that auto-balance the teams and distribute them in small tournaments. This system design was replicated in the global product that will be launched in 2018 (Clash).

LEAGUE REAL TURRET GATHERING

ROLE

Project Manager

TEAM SIZE

12

RELEASE YEAR

2015

STUDIO

Riot Games

EXPERIENCE

Imagine how crazy would be to see a League of Legends turret in a real version with 9 meters high. And imagine this turret travelling all over the country for players from each part of Brazil can live this experience!

My key learning here was:
  • Uncertainty + short deadline: as I said in the CBLoL opening ceremony above, here we needed to learn tons of things in a very short time to deliver this turret to players. We`ve had just 2 months after budget approval to build this turret from sketch. Here I believe that the secret was find the correct vendor, that worked hard and shared the dream to deliver this insane experience to players!

VIDEOS

Making-of (with English subtitles).
Video showing players reactions all over the country.

LEARNING CENTER

ROLE

Project Manager

PLATFORM

Browser

TEAM SIZE

8

release year

2015

STUDIO

Riot Games

EXPERIENCE

Play League is not an easy thing and we've created this web portal to deliver to players short videos teaching specific details of the game.

Videos are divided between player knowledge level (basic, medium and advanced) and there are more than 100 videos.

My key learning here was:
  • Video scope: as we wanted to launch the product to players asap, we needed to define the minimum number of videos to launch the product. To decide this we worked to define our WIP limit and the number of videos that was possible to release every month. This was a hard moment, because our stakeholders was pushing us hard to increase the number of videos per week and we needed to balance quantity and quality to avoid delivering low quality videos to players.

WATCH NOW

Youtube playlist with all videos

DUNKMASTER DARIUS LAUNCH VIDEO

ROLE

Project Manager

TEAM SIZE

10

RELEASE YEAR

2014

STUDIO

Riot Games

EXPERIENCE

Promotional video developed in Brazil to promote the Dunkmaster Darius skin.

PS: Back there in 2014 Riot Brazil office worked sometimes on this kind of projects that nowadays is clearly not the scope of a local office.

WATCH NOW


UNILOL

ROLE

Project Manager

PROJECT TYPE

Website + offline events + community building

TEAM SIZE

20

STUDIO

Riot Games

EXPERIENCE

UNILoL was a program to improve the experience of Brazilian League players in College. The program had 160 clubs in the whole country and there is a team that help students to organize their clubs increasing the bonding between players during this important life period.

​YOUR PERFORMANCE

ROLE

Project Manager

PLATFORM

Browser

TEAM SIZE

9

RELEASE YEAR

2018

STUDIO

Riot Games

EXPERIENCE

As far play League of Legends is hard, this project was created to help players understand their ranked performance compared with other players in the same role and elo.

CARNANIVIA _ SKIN DEVELOPMENT

ROLE

Producer

TEAM SIZE

13

RELEASE YEAR

2017

STUDIO

Riot Games

EXPERIENCE

Promotional video developed in Brazil to promote the Anivia skin specially created to be launched during Carnival.

​WATCH NOW


LOL ESPORTS _ BRAZILIAN WEBSITE

ROLE

Project Manager

PLATFORM

Browser

TEAM SIZE

6

RELEASE YEAR

2015

STUDIO

Riot Games

EXPERIENCE

Portal developed to cover all eSports content for Riot Brazil. The same version launched back there in April 2015 is used until now and keep delivering a lot of value to players (without major changes), what I consider a good example of MVP.
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  • About Me
  • Game Development
  • Game Publishing