Riot Games is releasing a new crafting game in the League of Legends client, called Cupcakes 4 Heartaches, which features well-known champions Vi and Caitlyn.
Riot Mikouz, game producer for League of Legends Events Metagames, said on Twitter that it’s a ‘metagame prototype’ that can help ‘redefine’ these kind of in-client games in the future, beyond the usual visual novels Riot has created.
Cupcakes 4 Heartaches is a crafting game that features champions Vi and Caitlyn wearing their new Valentine’s Day/Heartbreaker skins, as Heartache Vi and Heartthrob Caitlyn. These launched in League of Legends patch 13.3.
However, the game is only available in one region for now: the OCE (Oceania) server.
Riot Mikouz said Cupcakes 4 Heartaches took two and a half months to make, and listed the other Riot staff who were part of the project:
Players in OCE can find the game in the third tab at the top of the game client, next to Lunar Revel and Overview.
The blurb in the client said: “Play League of Legends to collect ingredients for Caitlyn’s top secret cupcake recipe!”
SkinSpotlights, which recently passed a ten-year milestone, also said that the Cupcakes 4 Heartaches event hub uses the Unity webplayer in the League client – and Riot is using the same plugin that Wild Rift uses for animated splash arts for motiongraphics.
Some art assets in the game include the following:
These were created by the talented @nekolinkay pic.twitter.com/8kr5J56gBi
— DEN (@RiotDenwhat) February 10, 2023
As well as being playable characters in League of Legends and featuring in Cupcakes 4 Heartaches, Vi and Caitlyn also featured in Netflix animated series Arcane. The name ‘cupcake’ is a term of endearment that Vi says to refer to Caitlyn.
Here’s what Arcane’s creators have said about Vi and Caitlyn’s relationship in the upcoming Season 2 of Arcane.
Why isn’t Cupcakes 4 Heartaches coming to other regions?
Cupcakes 4 Heartaches is exclusive to the Oceania region, so it looks like it won’t be available in EU West or other League of Legends server locations around the world.
So, why is it not available in other regions?
Riot Mikouz said on Twitter: “Just to clarify, this is an OCE-only metagame. Our goal is to validate that the tech works so we can create bigger and better metagames in the future.
“Shipping globally means you need to do sensitivity checks, translations etc and have the proper support in case things go wrong. We had very little time to create this so we made the call to target OCE only because, one, they mainly speak English, and two, the population is big enough to be statistically significant, so they can help validate our assumptions without the need to engage with ten times more people.”
It could be that following the test, other client games like Cupcakes 4 Heartaches that release in the future could come to other regions.
Dom is an award-winning writer and finalist of the Esports Journalist of the Year 2023 award. He graduated from Bournemouth University with a 2:1 degree in Multi-Media Journalism in 2007.
As a long-time gamer having first picked up the NES controller in the late ’80s, he has written for a range of publications including GamesTM, Nintendo Official Magazine, industry publication MCV and others. He worked as head of content for the British Esports Federation up until February 2021, when he stepped back to work full-time on Esports News UK and offer esports consultancy and freelance services. Note: Dom still produces the British Esports newsletter on a freelance basis, so our coverage of British Esports is always kept simple – usually just covering the occasional press release – because of this conflict of interest.
