Legend of the Five Rings
Ezperanza Studio
Development and motion design: Eric Huguenin
Honorable Mention
Challenge
Legend of the Five Rings tells the story of Rokugan, an imaginary empire where seven samurai clans vie for power. Since 1995, Asmodee has extended the license into a card game, a roleplaying game, novels, board games and video games. The publisher wanted a single entry point, serving the day-one player as well as someone discovering the universe through a novel. The difficulty lay in the whole: thirty years of lore and five product lines to structure without turning the site into a catalog.
Approach
Ezperanza handled the design, Asmodee held the universe, and we had to make both work on screen. We started with an inventory: every content type, every product line, every lore page, to derive a set of reusable templates. Motion came next, once the structure was locked, so we wouldn’t animate pages twice while they were still under construction.
Key solutions
Custom WordPress theme, developed from Ezperanza’s design. The presentation of the seven great clans is its centerpiece. The motion relies on a scroll-synced sprite: the browser plays content reveals, page transitions and entrances frame by frame, without video. The movement stays hand-drawn, in keeping with the license’s woodblock-print style, and the site stays light to load. Asmodee’s teams manage the rest, from products to news.
