Alongside the Act 3 Battlepass, Riot is adding a brand-new Skinline to Valorant on October 13; Singularity. Designed to be high-tech and mysterious, “Singularity exists in a far future, vast in its journey from the beyond.”
When creating Singularity, Riot wanted to design something that involved transformation, animations and visual effects. It’s meant to be unexpected and more complex than what players have seen so far.
Sean Marino, Art Lead said, “We had spent so long working on the grounded base arsenal that the idea of making a gun out of essentially floating rocks would be a new challenge for the team to creatively push themselves.”
Valorant Skinline – Singularity
Marino continued, “Before we started work on Elderflame (the dragon skin), the team needed to demonstrate that they were ready to tackle the challenge of creating something with a drastically different (but still readable) silhouette and unique custom animations. We chose to start with the Ares because it was such a large and menacing weapon and used that gun to set the standard and tone for the rest of the weapons in the set.”
The weapons which can equip the Singularity skin are;
- Sheriff
- Spectre
- Phantom
- Ares
- Melee
The inspiration for Singularity comes from a ‘blue sky’ exploration of ideas from a concept artist. Marino explained many of the early ideas from those sketches ended up becoming skins in the game. “Singularity caught my eye because of how unique and abstract it was while still feeling very sci-fi (though some devs on the team argued that it felt more “fantasy” than “sci-fi” due to the crystals in the concept). I liked it because of its otherworldly shape and unique design for expanding and contracting. It felt like something that couldn’t be from this planet or time in history, which was really appealing to me,” he said.
According to Preeti Khanolkar, Producer, the team could not agree on what Singularity actually was. Some members thought it was a space rock, others thought it was a weapon created in the future and others thought it was an actual alien life form.
“What really brought us together was watching a video of a washing machine stuffed with bricks spinning out of control. That ridiculous video helped us find the one key word to describe the feeling we were trying to hit: unstable. From there, we agreed that Singularity was an unknown rock from another world and the “oh shit” moment would be tied to its instability during animation sequences,” Khanolkar explained.
Singularity is the first skin in Valorant that has an equip and reload animation as well as moving parts and animated sections of the weapon. “It was a huge undertaking for the team, especially so early in our skin development process! But it was precisely the right kind of challenge the team needed to test their ability to collaborate and innovate within the bounds of competitive integrity,” Khanolkar said.
The Singularity Bundle costs 8700 VP and includes the Singularity Sheriff, Spectre, Phantom, and Ares, as well as the Singularity Player Card, Spray, Gun Buddy and Melee. It will be available on October 13, 2020.
