Riot Forge and Double Stallion are launching CONVERGENCE: A League of Legends Story, a 2D platform action game following Ekko, today. The Boy Who Shattered Time brings his vibrant personality and unique time-rewinding abilities to the latest Riot Forge title set in Zaun for all League fans to enjoy.
After four years of development, it’s finally time for CONVERGENCE to be released to the public. And time plays a major role in Double Stallion’s game. In an interview with Dot Esports, Eric Angelillo, creative director and co-art director, and Daniel Ménard, CEO at Double Stallion, shared their experience of working with Riot Forge and the challenges of creating CONVERGENCE.
Looking back in time at the creation process of the game, both Ménard and Angelillo said they were incredibly surprised by how Riot Forge approached them during the development of CONVERGENCE. “There’s a lot of horror stories out there of people working with certain IPs where the company controls every last thing and it kind of ends up in development hell,” Angelillo said just before confirming that working with Riot Forge was the “complete opposite of that.” According to Ménard, Riot gave them the right tools and support needed to make a game as challenging as one of the caliber of CONVERGENCE. Despite this, the game still took a long time to make, and one of the reasons was the time-rewinding mechanic.
The 2D action platformer features dynamic combat also thanks to Ekko’s ability to travel through space and time. This ultimately gives the player the opportunity to rewind the game as far as 10 seconds anytime they want, but for a limited amount of time.
“[The rewind mechanic] will ruin every other game you play after CONVERGENCE,” Ménard said before explaining the technology behind the feature, which was at the base of Double Stallion’s most difficult challenge in developing the game. The CEO explained all the technicalities of how the networking engine behind the game records not just the “really important information,” like the character’s position and statistics, but the entire virtual world that the player is experiencing. “We hold onto that information for about 10 seconds, but the biggest challenge was to make it run smoothly,” Ménard said. In fact, the acquisition and retention of so much information made the game very memory dependent, with the risk of not running as intended.
Ultimately, the core mechanic of CONVERGENCE worked as the team intended, resulting in a unique experience for anyone who enjoys a challenging 2D action platformer set in vibrant environments. For Double Stallion, working with Ekko has been “a huge honor” both because of the community that surrounds the character and the IP, but also because “it’s not every day that an indie game studio get afforded a chance to build an indie game with an AAA treatment,” according to the studio’s creative director.
With CONVERGENCE, Double Stallion meant to make a game that felt unique for everyone who approached it, whether they’re an experienced speedrunner or a newcomer to the action platformer genre. The two Double Stallion spokespeople described it as a game that does not waste your time: “It’s all killer, no filler.”
Riot Forge’s newest title is now out on various platforms, including PC, PlayStation 4 and 5, Xbox, and Nintendo Switch.
