Recently, the new game Chronicles of Light: Darkness Falls (Disney Edition) hit store shelves — and I was lucky enough to get a chance to play it. As I said in my review, I went in with low expectations about my ability and was pleasantly surprised. What’s more, my wife and I found ourselves really getting into the gameplay and having a blast in the process.
Given this experience, when the chance to interview game designer Pam Walls and game developer Shanon Lyon at Gen Con, I jumped at the opportunity. Below is my chat with them, in which we discuss the inspiration for some of the game's unique mechanics, how they chose their heroes, and much more.
Kyle Burbank: Well, thank you for talking to me. I wanted to meet you because I really enjoyed the game. My wife and I both got to play it, and to our surprise, we were decent at it. We actually got to win — which is not expected because some of these games have been really hard for us to pick up on, but we read through rules once and then got to do it.
Shanon Lyon: Wow. Awesome.
KB: First, pardon my ignorance, but what is the difference between your two roles?
SL: I work for Ravensburger. I was a game development manager, and so then my job is to work with outside inventors. Pam is the outside inventor to come up with a game, and then we work together to take it from the early concept that Pam pitched to the final product. I work internally and she's external.
Pam Walls: I came up with the basic core idea, and then Shanon helped shape it and mold it and bring the best out of the idea for it.
KB: I'll say one of my favorite things about this game — we've seen a lot of cooperative games lately — but what makes this one even more different is that you, instead of being “I take a turn, you take a turn,” you have these “days.” And our favorite part was discussing what we should do and strategizing and having the leader ultimately choose. But I'm curious where that idea and that concept came from.
PW: Totally. I really wanted to focus on cooperation and immersion, teamwork and immersion. I knew those were the core concepts that Ravensburger really wanted to have in this game. I'm like, “what are the different ways that we could really encourage collaboration and cooperation?” And so this idea of having a shared action board and shared action selection, that's where that really came from when I was really trying to focus within that framework of cooperation and collaboration.
SL: In the game, there's this weighing between individual goals and the collective goal. And I think that comes out in the shared action too. You have to be willing to cooperate and work for the greater good, which we wanted to pull out in the game in general.
PW: Yeah. With the quest, that was really the immersion part where I really wanted you to feel like you were that character. You have a quest tailored to you, but there's still the ultimate team goal of working together to have the team goal of defeating the Vortex. It's like you have that collaboration, but you still have the individual pursuit to have that fully immersive experience.
KB: Yeah. And I imagine that that aspect of changing the leader each time is key. When it's just my wife and I playing, we're on the same page. We could be like, "Yeah, I think that works." But having a kid take over for that day has got to be interesting.
SL: Yeah, and awesome, actually. Some groups, like you said, don't use that because they are collaborating 100% of the time. But some groups really use it and especially families because it's a way for that kid to shine and say, "I have an idea. And right now everyone is listening to me and I get to voice my idea." And it's actually a really special moment I think that we see in play test with that.
KB: There are four heroines in this game. And they not only span studios and new and old, but then also some lesser-known ones. How did you land on these four?
SL: Yeah. Well, so that was really intentional for us to choose a wide range. A wide range so that we could cater to a lot of different fans, but also so that we could highlight a lot of different ways to be strong and powerful. And so, we wanted the heroines to reflect that diversity in generation, in type of hero, in skills, in all of those things. Yeah. We very intentionally picked from different areas.
KB: It's not really either of your departments per se, but the art of this is also really cool. And my main question is how would you describe it? I had trouble pinpointing exactly what it is about that.
PW: Crystallized.
SL: … Low poly is what it is, low poly, faceted approach to the art that our art director really was intentional about. Here we want to pull out this faceted, it's like a gem. And so that's reflected in all the art.
KB: I know working with Disney, they know all of these details that maybe even the most hardcore fans don't necessarily realize. Were there anything, any ideas that you had where they're like, "That's close to it," but you had to change it a bit to totally fit the characters?
SL: Yeah, I'm trying to think of what those were. I mean, definitely that's part of our processes. We're sending things for Disney for approval. They'll often say like, "Oh, this character doesn't actually do this."
PW: But just to build off that question is that it was really fun to come up with powers that made sense for each character. While Belle doesn't invent anything in Beauty and the Beast, she's an inventor's daughter, she's very curious. She wants to learn as much as she can. In this game, we were allowed to play with that within that space. Her locked ability, her super ability is a catapult that she has invented herself.
And so being able to expand on these characters, so Disney fans can imagine that she would do that growing up or getting older and doing these sorts of things. That was really fun. And then expanding on Maid Marian, being able to really harness your badminton skills to attack the villains and things like that. Not everyone might remember that Maid Marian plays badminton in Robin Hood, but Disney fans know that sort of thing. That was really fun to play with.
SL: Yeah, yeah. And then that stuff all obviously goes through Disney and they say, "Yeah, okay, that makes sense. Belle's dad was an inventor."
KB: One of the things I mentioned at the beginning is my wife and I were able to successfully play this. We did use the easiest ones that were recommended in the guidebook. But to that point, how did you manage to balance it to where you can have that scalability to have it work for beginners but then also add some different challenges if you want?
PW: Making this game scalable was a huge thing that I knew that we wanted to do from the start. That was I knew that I needed to make a system that could be scalable. Each character has their own adventure pack. They have their own landscape trials, they have their own quests, they have their own action tokens. Then they can mix and match depending on how many players are playing and which characters they want to be. Being able to scale up like that was super important.
For the difficulty, we also wanted to be able to increase it or decrease the difficulty depending on the age range or the scalability of the players playing. The way that we have it now is that you can have the beginner set up with the Crystal Castle in the middle.
If you want a more advanced game, make the map as wild and crazy as you want. That's how I play it. Make it a really challenging map to work with Crystal Castle on one end and everything else on the other. You can really gauge it to the skill level or the challenge level that you want. And you can also start at a lower health, which I think we also suggested in the rule book I believe. You can start with a lower starting team health, which also makes it more difficult. Depending on who's playing and the ultimate challenge you want to have, having those leaders is really important to us.
SL: And we have some play testers who, some people we just play with one time to see how a first time play goes. But there's people who we play with who play the game over and over again. And of course we play the game over and over again. And it was interesting in that you really can get better at this game actually, more than a lot of games. You can really increase your skill even though there's a lot of luck. And so that was another reason for including that ability to make it more difficult. If you've played 10 times, you're like, "I'm pretty good at this game." You know what I mean? And so it was nice to be able to crank it up a little bit.
PW: Yeah, because there's just so many different plans, so many different strategies you can do. I've demoed this game so many times this week, and I've had the exact same setup, and every team has done a completely different thing.
And you can see which ones are more efficient than the others, which ones probably are going to lose and which ones aren't. Just there's so many different ways you can go. Just being really remembering all your abilities, thinking of the best combinations of things, the best timing for things.
SL: Efficiency where you can.
PW: Efficiency. So you can really level up and skill up like Shannon's saying in this game, which is really fun.
KB: And I think you're right about that, because even in our first game we're like, "Oh, we were way too conservative on worrying about our health.” We could have taken way more hits.
SL: Yeah. Take more risks, or we'll often have players get to the end of the game and it's like, looks like they're going to lose. And they're like, "Oh, I wasted all that time going around here and I should have focused over here first," or whatever.
KB: My last question is, the title of this game is interesting to me. It's Chronicles of Light: Darkness Falls (Disney Edition). To me that implies that this could go a lot of different directions. I'm wondering if there's anything you can tell me on that front.
SL: No, I think we'd love to see more adventures in the Realm of Light, but I guess we'll just see how it's received and yeah, what fans want, I guess.
Chronicles of Light: Darkness Falls (Disney Edition) is now available from Ravensburger.