League of Legends is a MOBA that has catapulted Riot Games into one of the premier video game companies in the world. The strategy video game has spawned huge esports events filling stadiums, a critically acclaimed animated show on Netflix, and a virtual K-pop band named K/DA. The world of League of Legends has been growing, and this year, Convergence: A League of Legends Story was released with very positive reviews on Steam.

Riot Games’ Riot Forge is the publishing arm that focuses on League of Legends spin-offs made by other developers. With Convergence: A League of Legends Story, it teamed up with developer Double Stallion for a side-scrolling time manipulation game featuring Ekko, a young inventor living in the underground city of Zaun.

Nerd Reactor had the chance to interview Rowan Parker, the creative director of Riot Forge about Convergence: A League of Legends Story and more.

Nerd Reactor: Can you talk about Riot Forge and its inception? How did Convergence come to be and was it challenging?

Rowan Parker: Riot Forge is a third-party publisher within Riot Games. We focus on publishing small, bespoke single-player story games set in the world of League of Legends with the characters of League of Legends. So we’re sort of like the opposite of what Riot usually does. Riot is known for making League of Legends, like giant online PvP, multiplayer games. We’re able to do more storytelling and narrative work with the artisan sort of boutique, indie games, which we make with our studio partners. We’ve released four games to date. And the latest one is Convergence. And all the games that we make we work together with an indie studio that’s external. We partner together with an indie studio that executes and works on the game, but it’s a very deep collaboration where we work together.

So your example of how Convergence come to be? You know, was it challenging? I think the answer to any video game is yes, it’s very challenging to make video games. We’ll often say for every game that shipped, there are 1000 games that are never shipped and didn’t make it across the finish line. For every game you’ve heard of, there are 1000 games you’ve never heard of. So the fact that you’ve even heard of a game already makes it an anomaly. So it’s very challenging to make and finish a video game.

So with something like Convergence, when we work with studios, we don’t really have an idea. Initially, when we reach out to these studios, it’s not like we come to them with a pre-ordained pitch and we’re like, “Here, can you please make XYZ? It’s a lot more organic than that. It’s a lot more collaborative. These studios have a pedigree of genre or craft expertise. So in the case of Double Stallion up there in Montreal, Canada, they are already really good at making sidescrolling, platforming action-type games. They’ve made Speed Brawl. They’ve made other games in the past. And their art style is very unique and very bright, vibrant and colorful.

So we’re coming to the studios, asking them, “Hey, we love your guys’ work. Would you be interested in working with us on League of Legends characters in the world?” They were nice enough to say yes. And that was back in late 2018, early 2019. So then, three and a half to four years later, we have the game finished. And that’s what everyone was playing.

And you mentioned thousands of other games not coming to the finish line. So how do you narrow that down because we have Ekko and then we have the game mechanics, the interesting part with the time travel, and I’m pretty sure for other games, you’ve come up with so many ideas?

Yeah. We use a character called Ekko from League of Legends in Convergence. Ekko is a young boy inventor who can rewind time. And so that rewinding time mechanic is really interesting to play with in a platform setting, not just for the combat. I think for the people that played the game, it’s not just about fighting enemies. It’s also about doing parkour and jumping puzzle segments. But if you make a mistake, you can just rewind time. So it’s pretty fun.

When we start projects with studios making a game, the studios are often describing to me what kind of gameplay they want to use, what matters to their studio culturally, or what kind of stories they enjoy telling. And we start to circle in on the creative, you know, what characters might make sense? What setting might work out? What mechanics do they want to use? They usually have the seed of an idea.

Something that I’m very firm on when we’re making these games is these games have to be great games agnostic of the League of Legends IP. We don’t sign projects until I’m convinced it’s just a sick game, regardless of the League IP. And then we can start talking about how to build a thematic and building design from that.

There are other games with the rewind aspects, for example, Prince of Persia, and when tackling this project, was their mindset, “Alright, let’s just try it. We’ll use certain types, or let’s completely do our own thing and try to make it really unique.”?

As a game developer, you realize you can’t do everything. We want to do everything and we can’t. So you have to pick your battles with where do we want to spend our time and energy. Otherwise, we’ll just be making a game forever. And so we chose to spend a lot of energy and time on the rewind mechanic and on the combat, but I think Double Stallion did an excellent job on the variants in the combat for the builds for the way you can customize the character. So for people who haven’t played the game, you can unlock gadgets and invent new things as you progress through the game, which gives you options for combat strategy.

So you can choose to get close with Ekko and do AoE damage, or you can choose to play more ranged or you can give yourself more time-rewind bubbles. There are I think a lot of different ways to build Ekko and approach the combat puzzles in different ways which felt really good, and it felt true to Ekko. We can’t do that in a big PvP game like League. It would be broken and unbalanced for online PvP. But in a single-player Riot Forge game, we can do that. So that’s kind of the fun.

In the world of League of Legends with Ekko, we get a bit more in-depth with his character from other mediums, for example, Arcane on Netflix. Now he has the Convergence game. So what was that like being able to just create something and nourish it? And if have you used inspiration from other mediums, etc?

We think about the Forge games sometimes like character vignettes or as a way to bring the camera up close and personal to our champions. The online MOBA is not a place we can really do that. You’re playing a 5v5, super hardcore PvP online game. We can’t really do compelling storytelling on individual characters over there in that game. But we can do that in a single-player game like Convergence. So you know, using an example with Ekko, you actually get to see him interact with all of his friends. In town, he’s still meant to be a 15/16-year-old boy doing the things that teenage boys do and so on. You get to see him interact with his parents, you get to see him deal with adversity and go through a story arc. That’s not something we can do in League. But we can do it in a Forge game. So I feel like we really get to tease out the characters more and build out more flesh and meat on the bone of the character that’s there.

I think Reed did an excellent job on the voice performance as well. So Reed Shannon is our voice of Ekko in Convergence. He’s also the voice of Ekko in Arcane. So I think for people that did happen to watch the show, again, they’ll recognize the voice and his continuity there. But being able to listen to Reed’s performances while you’re playing through the game, I think is pretty cool.

And what was that like with Reed in the voice-acting booth?

Oh, no, it was crazy. This was all done during the pandemic. Oh my God, you’re talking about challenges and adversity in making this game. It was made during the pandemic. So when we were doing the voice recordings, we had to come up with a unique solution to get the recordings done in the middle of the pandemic. We actually devised, I guess, we call it like a sound studio in a box. And we mailed it to the voice actors in a box. And they unpacked a sound studio at their house or their apartment and built this little sound studio. And then we record it with them, then they put it back in the box and mail it back to us. That’s actually how we did it with Reed and with Bumper [Robinson], who did future Ekko. I think a lot of studios were probably doing similar things or trying to figure out solutions.

Like Arcane, Convergence is a game that doesn’t require knowledge of League of Legends.

I mean, we have a rule as we’re making all the Forge games that you should not need to know anything at all about League of Legends to enjoy playing the game. We specifically make and design all of the Forge games so that even if you don’t know anything at all about League of Legends, you can enjoy playing the game. Obviously, we also do a lot of work. So if you do know anything about League of Legends, there are lots of Easter eggs, and there is a story and threads and lots of intrigue and stuff there. But even if you don’t, they’re an excellent gateway into the world with our characters and our world.

As for the world of Zaun, just being able to play inside it, how exciting was that for you?

Man, you have no idea because it’s the first time you’ve ever been able to run around Zaun, right? It’s actually there. It’s living, breathing. You’re in Entresol. While you’re in the hideout with Ekko’s friends, you can run around and talk with NPCs and go and explore, and it’s being able to bring it to life is for me, that’s something that only a video game can do, or in the way that only something like a video game can do. I think there are pros and cons to things like passive media, like a film or TV show, as opposed to interactive media like a video game. Something that a video game will let you do is have control. You have control of the character. You can go and touch and feel and interact with the world. Only a game can let you do that.

So while we’re building Zaun out, we’re building out the areas that we’ve been looking at in concept art for years, like Entresol, Sump, and Promenade, but we’re also building new areas that we need for the game, which are also new to the IP. So that’s where we’ll bump into a blank canvas. And then Double Stallion will have ideas for what they need for gameplay, and then Forge will come in and help with IP and help them keep within reason of what we know our players will see as realistic.

And what was that like with just the limit in terms of just being free with creating the environment or just trying to stick close to those artworks or the way it’s been established?

So I mean, you want to do both, right? Because a lot of players have been seeing that concept art for like a decade now. I remember seeing that old Zaun concept art and all of the new stuff that has come out for the last 10 years. So I think there’s a balance of players who want to see that realized and it to look good and to run around and enjoy that. But they also would be sad if that’s all we did, right? Like, if we just did everything you already had seen, and there’s nothing new, you’ll be like, “Oh, okay, well, that’s kind of like not as good as I thought.” So, we also need to do new parts of Zaun or new areas, which are exciting and feel authentic. So we did stuff like the theater section with the balloons and the gramophone, like the floating theater in the sky. We did the carnival section, we did the train crawler where there’s the train that goes on to Zaun. We did factory wood with all the industrial sections. So we built in all these other parts of Zaun to flesh it out and have it feel like a living breathing, undercity.

What’s next in line for Riot Forge? And if you can do any project, what would it be?

So the next game we have coming up later this year is called Song of Nunu. That is announced. That’s the next game that’s coming. But in terms of what would we make if we can make anything? Honestly, it is the rule of cool. Players get to decide what is cool and what isn’t. And if players are asking for the thing, that’s the thing that I’m excited to make. But also I try to think of it as some genres or some games I think do better as narrative loadbearing than others. And when we think about if we want to tell stories or have compelling storytelling, what types of games or experiences probably do a better job of shouldering that narrative load compared to others?

So I guess it’s easy to say like, “What wouldn’t we make?” You know, we’re not going to make a super hardcore competitive thing, because we don’t need to, right? We already have League of Legends over there, so we don’t need to go and do that. Are we going to make a big online thing? No, we wouldn’t make that. We make single-player games that tell compelling stories. So what genres or types of games are the best for that is kind of how I would approach it. But I do like that we can make more chill things on Forge. I think I’ll leave you with that. I enjoy that we can make more chill games, because our world and our characters have a lot of potential for that. And that’s not something we can do in a PvP MOBA.

The interview has been edited for length and clarity.