After nearly three years of work, I’m really proud to announce the release of Bloom Digital‘s newest game, Disney Villains Cursed Café. I art directed this game, and I’m so excited to get to share the results of all our hard work!

You’ve probably heard me talk about Bloom before – we’re an indie game company, known for our beloved visual novels LongStory and Later Daters. We are a team of people who love telling stories! Getting to put all that energy towards the Disney Villains was a real privilege.  

Working with Disney helped all of us hold our work to an even higher standard, and push ourselves as game makers. There’s a real responsibility attached when you get the chance to work with these characters, and it would have been impossible to navigate that nearly as well without the constant guidance and feedback of the team we worked with at Disney. Thanks to everyone there for helping make this game happen!

I have to brag about my coworkers – I don’t think I can imagine a better team than the lineup we have at Bloom. When you have a team that becomes more than the sum of its parts, you get to make games that are also more than the sum of their parts! Huge thanks from me and the artists to Miriam Verburg for steering the ship the whole time, Heather Jackson for making it effortless to bring the narrative into the art every step of the way, Keana Almario for keeping us all accountable to the players experience, JP Stringham for tackling the game design inside and out, and Danielle Russell for facilitating all the communication and oversight necessary to make something like this happen.

It’s important that I tell you how wonderful the art team in particular was! It might be counter-intuitive, but, you’re not going to see a single pixel of my own drawing in this game. As an art director, it was my job to find the best artists possible and then direct them towards bringing this game to life. I had the privilege and responsibility to lead a team of incredible artists towards making this game, and whatever you see in there, I want you to know one of these people made it happen.

Yi Pan was our senior game artist, which means he and I worked together on concepts from the beginning; you can see his brilliant painting and immensely appealing design work up front and center in all our potions, gifts, and in so much of the overall color design of the game. Jey Pawlik was our character artist and I think it’s impossible to understate how charming they managed to make our modernized villains, no matter their moods! Janiel Lo worked with us across many disciplines, laying out and painting our complex, amazing environments, as well as helping us make sure our beautiful UI felt both integrated into the world and also comfortable and easy to use. Ally Rom Colthoff made it possible for us to have the environment art of my dreams by coming in and painting the heck out of that cafe! And the game wouldn’t be what it is without Sara Mena‘s concept work, and the contributions of many artists on the Disney side who contributed not only character art, UI, and identity designs, but helped us fine-tune everything that went into the game.

It’s the biggest team I’ve ever had the chance to work with as an art director, and I’m not kidding when I say that these professionals made it easy and fun to come in every day and see what brilliant new artwork awaited me.

Something extra special about this team was how excited the artists were to work with, brainstorm with, and sing the praises of each other. I’m so grateful for this team not just for their ability to make beautiful art but their ability to collaborate with each other, myself, and with the team at Disney. Everybody should be proud of themselves, not only as artists but as game makers.

I want to shout out the narrative team, who made time to be in the art meetings with me and the artists, making it so easy to keep everything absolutely on point narratively throughout the whole development. Heather and Mike took the time to get to know the art team, and made themselves available for quick questions, brainstorming sessions, and pep talks. I think what this did for the game was make it possible for every visual joke and narrative joke to play off each other in ways that could not have possibly happened without that kind of open communication.

To talk a little bit more about the UI process, one of the things that we decided to do early on was make this game’s UI very diegetic, to keep the buttons feeling as magical as everything else that you see and do in the game, and that would not have been possible without Keana’s expertise and dedication to solving complicated UX flow challenges. Her hard work let us get away with so much more by way of magical props, framing devices, and sparkles.

For me, as the art director, I don’t always get the chance to put my own handiwork into a game, and as I mentioned, all of the amazing drawing and painting that you see on screen is thanks to our art team. But what I did get to do, very much thanks to the support of JP, was tackle the majority of the VFX. Getting to be a VFX artist for a chunk of this project was a dream come true, because if there’s one thing this game is full of, it’s magic! Figuring out how to bring life and mystery and humour to all of the magic in this game was an amazing challenge that I am so glad I got to tackle.

As a game dev, launches are always special, but this launch has been outright overwhelming in such a good way. Thank you to everybody who is streaming the game, sharing lets plays, drawing fan art, and just generally yelling about getting to hang out with their faves in our magical Cursed Café! I hope as you play this game it feels like you’ve gotten to visit somewhere magical alongside the villains.

Thanks again to everybody involved for this opportunity. Drop your fav villian in the comments, and stay in touch with me and with Bloom to find out more about what else Bloom has lined up!