Double Stallion Games
Convergence: A League of Legends Story
An action-platformer built with Riot Forge, where deterministic rewind technology lets time bend without breaking the simulation.
After Speed Brawl, Riot Games approached us through their Riot Forge label, which published games made by independent teams. The result was Convergence, an action-platformer centered on Ekko, a champion whose signature power is manipulating time. I negotiated the deal and served as Executive Producer, owning the overall success of the project while also leading the technical foundation as the team grew to thirty people at its peak.
Bending time without breaking the world
Rewinding time in a real-time game means the entire simulation has to be reversible and rerunnable. Every system needs to agree on exactly what happened and be able to replay or unwind it without drift. We built the rewind mechanic on top of the state-synchronization and prediction technology from Speed Brawl, recording past positions and running the world backward on demand. Getting determinism and rollback to coexist with a live simulation is where most of the hard engineering lived. I also developed a time-manipulation system with clocks that allowed different game entities to simulate time at different rates. This was used to freeze, rewind or time-scale specific entities to develop many of Ekko's powers.
Shipping at scale
- Launched across six hardware targets: PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series, and Switch.
- A large open world with fully voiced cutscenes, which pushed us to build new cutscene tooling on top of our Toon Boom animation pipeline.
- I managed external QA and porting, and when external console work came back sub-par, we brought much of it in-house and shipped it ourselves.
Developing the team
Convergence is also where I grew most as a manager. This project forced Double Stallion through organizational growing pains that taught me how to scale a studio. I deployed new production methodologies, hired key talent, including four experienced directors, and developed a talent pipeline that prepared the studio for success. Our HR, strategy and approach to product management evolved significantly during Convergence. This project became a defining moment for the company.