Valorant was developed and published by Riot Games, the studio behind League of Legends.[33][7] Development started in 2014, within their research and development division.[4] Game director Joe Ziegler is credited with the initial idea of Valorant while formulating potential games with other Riot developers.[4] David Nottingham is the creative director for Valorant.[4] Trevor Romleski, former League of Legends's designer and Salvatore Garozzo, former professional player and map designer for Counter-Strike: Global Offensive are its game designers.[34] Moby Francke, former Valve developer, who has been art and character designer for Half-Life 2 and Team Fortress 2, is the art director.[35][36]

Valorant was developed with two main focuses: making tactical shooters and e-sports more accessible to new players, and creating a game that would attract a large competitive scene, while solving many of the points of criticism voiced by professional players from games in the genre.[37][38][39] Games aimed at large, active communities and player bases, typically free-to-play games like Fortnite or Riot's own League of Legends, tend to put an emphasis on a wider array of system performance improvements and game stability rather than newer technologies or graphics as a way of making sure they're as accessible as possible. In interviews leading up to the game's launch, game director Joe Ziegler and producer Anna Donlon said that Valorant was made for people playing their first tactical shooter just as much as it was for professional players, and that accessibility of the game was a large priority.[38]

Riot chose to develop Valorant using Unreal Engine 4, which the development team said would allow it to focus on gameplay and optimizations rather than spending time on core systems.[40][41] To meet the goal of a lower performance barrier so more people could play Valorant, the team set notably low minimum and recommended hardware requirements for the game. To reach 30 frames per second on these small requirements, the game's engineering team, led by Marcus Reid, who previously worked on Gears of War 4, had to make several modifications to the engine. These modifications included editing the renderer using the engine's mobile rendering path as base, or reworking the game's lighting systems to fit the static lighting that tactical shooters often require, as to not interfere with gameplay.[40] Unreal's modern underpinnings also helped to solve many of the issues that Riot set out to solve from other games in the genre, and additional modifications helped to meet the game's other goal of creating a suitable competitive environment, including optimizing server performance by disabling character animations in non-combat situations and removing unnecessary evaluations in the hit registration process.[42][38][40] During development, Riot Games made promises to work towards a ping of less than 35 milliseconds for at least 70% of the game's players.[43] To accomplish this, Riot promised 128-tick servers in or near most major cities in the world, as well as working with internet service providers to set up dedicated connections to those servers.[43] Due to the increase in internet traffic during the COVID-19 pandemic, Riot has had trouble optimizing connections and ping to their promised levels.[44]