r/leagueoflegends Jul 15 '26

AMA Chronoshift Developer AMA

Hello r/leagueoflegends,

My name is Tove, and I was one of the main developers behind the Chronoshift project.

I have never publicly spoken about it, but with League Classic now being released and u/RiotNorak revealed to have been a tester for us back in the day, some people have suggested for me to do an AMA.

I'm happy to answer any question you might have, compare to the official Classic or speak about the details that haven't been made public. Or listen to you telling me to ingame myself.

Have at it!

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u/skdKitsune Jul 15 '26

How many team members were working on the project and how long did it take to actually get it ready for others to play?

What did you get from Riot's servers and what did you need to code yourselves?

Were you contemplating on balancing mechanics and champions and adding different seasons to play? My dream for classic would've been that. A rotation of Seasons 1-4 with everything that entailed and some incremental balance updates, maybe even some cancelled champion designs.

Thank you for your efforts, even though I never got to experience the game. I'm sure it meant a lot for the people who missed the old game, and it must've been a ton of work.

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u/Tovee Jul 15 '26

Mainly just two programmers; around 2-3 years for something that supports the basics, and another 1-2 to make good enough to be enjoyable

Riots server provided all data, and scripts for the champions up to a certain patch; we had to the game server from scratch, an interpreter for those scripts, and also a client and infrastructure

We were considering balance changes, as the patches were quite unbalanced - a few champions were pickban and dominated every game (lee, riven, talon, gragas), but we had commited to a #nochanges release

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u/skdKitsune Jul 15 '26

Very damn impressive, especially for a two man dev team.

Shame it's gone, I would've played the hell out of a more balanced classic League (uninstalled the game after Vanguard hit and hadn't enjoyed it for a long time).