Help everyone’s true colors shine in Rainbow Billy: The Curse of the Leviathan

It’s been a long time coming, but the entire ManaVoid team (including myself) is excited that Rainbow Billy: Curse of the Leviathan It’s finally available on Xbox One. And since the last year has been especially rough for most of us, we think there’s no better time like the present to launch a non-violent game that advocates acceptance, inclusion, and compassion.

Saving the world from a giant monster by fighting enemies and recruiting party members is pretty familiar RPG territory. But in Rainbow Billy, things unfold a little differently … and not just because you’re bringing color back to a black and white world.

Instead of all-out fights where you beat up lovable cartoon creatures, the “battles” unfold as baffling heart-to-heart emotions. Your goal is not to defeat your enemies, but to listen to their concerns, choose the right words, and bring color back to their hearts to befriend them. In addition, you do not move fights to level up: you offer moral support (and sweets) to get to know your allies better, strengthening your bonds of friendship.

This decision to create compelling, non-violent “confrontations” stemmed from a decision we as a team made to stand out from the vast majority of combat or violence titles on the market. Plus, it made a lot more sense for a story about accepting ourselves and others for who we are to revolve around empathy.

Likewise, we didn’t want that message of accepting others to sound empty. We partnered with Skybound Games and the nonprofit RAD to make sure we find a sweet spot between healthy cartoon antics and serious and accurate depictions of mental health struggles, particularly when it comes to characters with identities of gender specific.

We also wanted to extend those in-game acceptance and inclusion themes to our players, so a large part of the development revolved around making the game accessible to as many people as possible.

Our art team had special considerations with layouts, shaders, and color palettes, so even colorblind gamers can feel the visual satisfaction of slowly re-coloring the world. We also took special care to develop multiple customizable difficulty levels that would NOT reduce the strategic complexity of matches or puzzles.

On top of that, we’ve included a location-wide dyslexia-friendly font option and tactical text boxes to make dialogs easier to follow. We also made adjustments to the more subtle elements, camera movement, animations, and respawn locations that make the game easier to learn and play for everyone!

If you’d like to learn more about these features, our Technical Director Alexis Lessard created a Twitter thread detailing some of our accessibility initiatives in greater detail. You can check right here!

It has been really comforting to see Rainbow Billy resonates with players from all walks of life and their support has been instrumental in making the game what it is. I think I speak on behalf of the entire team when I say that I can wait for everyone to finally experience the same overloaded squeals of cuteness and moments of tears as those who experienced our demo.

Rainbow Billy: Curse of the Leviathan is out now on Xbox One. We hope it fills YOUR world with a little more color too 😉