Ingame Features at the ESL One Birmingham Major
We are back to working on ingame features!
It’s been a while since we released anything new and here is why. This year started off with focus on building graphics packages for broadcasting; all the stuff you see between games: brackets, player stats, lower thirds etc. While this isn’t exciting nor something that is noticed by the audience, we decided to venture out of the game a little bit since it would help us determine the limits of our stack, as well as expand our product offering. Captains Draft 4.0 and both GESC minors used graphics that were built on the layerth stack.
Anyways, back to the fun stuff. We had a backlog of concepts and ideas waiting to be developed, so I took the time during the ESL games to work on some new features. This meant that JJ, on top of his usual observing work and Twitch chat memeing, had to control the layerth features during the game as well.
Smoke Usage Indicator
Our new favorite. We’ve had this idea for a while, it’s development was mainly delayed by the fact that I wanted it to look good, I didn’t want just a basic icon.
Double Damage Indicator
Same as above. We are considering adding other runes but we don’t want to over-saturate the top hero bar.
Thanks to Karpaj for the suggestion.
Hero Movement Heatmaps
Helping visualize hero movement between lanes as well as highlight where kills and deaths occurred.
Shout out to ODpixel for the minimap animation idea!
Split Push Indicator
Even though Matt wasn’t at the event, he helped me get this feature out just in time for the final day.
Courier Death Location
Just a minor little thing to make JJ’s life easier. Shows where the courier died on the minimap.
Shout out to Blackhydrus for the idea!
Mango Count
Minor Ingame UI changes
JJ requested a simpler item overview on the scoreboard. The results are shown below:
I also have a concept for a more detailed inventory overview that shows status effects such as Moonshards and Alchemist Aghs buffs. However, it’s simply not compact enough so its usage would be limited during a game.
As usual, leave us any suggestions or ideas, I’m quite slow with rolling these features out but at least when I do find the motivation to work on them, I’ll have a Trello board filled with hundreds of ideas.
Thanks again to ESL for bringing us out to yet another Major!
