How the Rainbow Billy team swapped combat for conversations
James Batchelor
Editor-in-Chief
Thursday 24th February 2022
From the screenshots, Rainbow Billy: The Curse of The Leviathan may look like a simple turn-based RPG (albeit one with a colourful art style and an indie vibe). And, to be fair, that's how it was originally supposed to be.
The game was dreamed up by ManaVoid Entertainment CEO Christopher Chancey and art director Anthony Vaucheret shortly after they met in 2018. Vaucheret, a big fan of how Disney-style animation was making its way into games via titles like Cuphead and Bendy and the Ink Machine, wanted to create an animated black-and-white RPG, but Chancey was keen for there to be more colour.
Eventually, the two decided on a game where the world starts out as black-and-white and your objective is to explore and find ways to bring back colour. The game would have a traditional turn-based RPG combat system similar to Final Fantasy or Pokémon, and the 1,720 backers who pledged CA$ 88,480 ($68,955) to ManaVoid's Kickstarter campaign suggested the audience would be okay with that.
Christopher Chancey, ManaVoid
Then the team read a GamesIndustry.biz analysis into the balance between violent and non-violent games at E3 2019.
"Your article came at an opportune time for us because we were having issues with our combat system at the time," Chancey tells us. "I always thought it was really weird in Pokémon how you're basically trapping creatures and having them fight each other, kind of like a dog fight type situation, and everyone's cool with this.
"Your article came out, and I'm like, 'Okay, well, you know what? It sucks that there are not enough games that just shun violence altogether.' Video games as a medium are still exploring a lot of things. We've pigeonholed ourselves
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