How a Toronto indie developer made ‘Cheers’ for iconic Disney villains

Since 2012, Bloom Digital Media has been making feel-good games about important subject matter.

Between 2017’s middle school-set LongStory and 2020’s seniors-focused Later Daters, the Toronto- and Peterborough-based indie developer has been making acclaimed LGBTQ+ friendly dating sims featuring all kinds of relatable characters. As per the studio’s slogan, Bloom Digital is all about “Games for a Hopeful Future.” Hearing all of that, then, you’d probably assume the team’s next game would be centred around another group of everyday folks with whom players can easily identify.

But in a seemingly surprise twist, Bloom Digital’s latest game isn’t about everyday people — no, it stars none other than iconic Disney villains. Enter the appropriately titled Disney Villains Cursed Café, a point-and-click visual novel in which you serve as barista “potionista” to some of animation’s most notorious baddies, including Cruella de Vil, The Evil Queen, Gaston, Captain Hook, Jafar, Maleficent, and Ursula. The goal of the game is to brew the right potions for each character while exchanging witty dialogue options.

Following the launch of Disney Villains Cursed Café, MobileSyrup sat down with Bloom Digital Media CEO and executive producer Miriam Verburg to discuss the unique concept of the game, coming up with original modern takes on classic Disney characters, managing to find the relatable human core at the heart of archetypal bad guys and a tease for their next game.

How did the idea for this game come about, and how did that collaboration with Disney start?

Miriam Verburg: It’s a funny story, actually. We launched Later Daters in 2020 — our dating sim about seniors in a seniors home. And we had a pretty good reception of that, I would say. And a family member of somebody from the Disney Games team played it and really liked it. So it was a “right time, right place” sort of situation. And they went and told their spouse, “Why don’t you try this game?” And this was back in the day when Twitter was a thing and some of those conversations were taking place on Twitter, so we were mentioned. So it wasn’t like they were in the living room. It was more like the person, the spouse, had some kind of game podcast, and they were like, “Oh, we’re doing this one.” So somehow, in a public venue, it was mentioned that Bloom Digital made Later Daters and that Disney should make something with Bloom Digital.

And so we stayed very much just in the realm of mentions. But at the time, our producer, Chris Fitzgerald, was very good at keeping an eye on our social media tags. And so Chris Fitzgerald — shoutout Chris Fitzgerald! — she found the tweets, and she was just like, “Hey, look, we could just DM these people at Disney and say that we’d be happy to do that job.” And that’s what we did. And here we are in 2025, three years later.

When you hear about a game with Disney villains, you might think, “Oh, it’s like Kingdom Hearts, I’m going to fight them,” or that sort of thing. But Cursed Café is very much a kind of passive, chill experience. How did that particular concept for a game about Disney villains that’s café-themed and you’re serving them come about?

Verburg: I’ll say this. The game design — the villains’ backstories, a lot of the function of the content in the game — is us, but [Disney] asked us to pitch some villain games to them. And then basically we sent them our three pitches, and they liked them. But then they were like, “Wait a minute, we’ve also been tossing around this. And the original idea, they just said, “What if it was like Cheers — you ran a café and the villains came and told you their problems?” And we were like, “Yeah, okay. That’s great, let’s do that!” So that was how it came about. We were sort of fed a good idea. I thought our other three ideas were also good, but obviously, when the client has an idea, you do that one.

There are so many iconic Disney villains, and you have a well-rounded roster of them in the game. How did that process work of deciding who you wanted to include?

Verburg: I think everybody came from all sides with the villains that they liked the best. So part of it, I think, was kind of “dot voting” — if a villain got more than three dots, they were obviously in the cast. There were some standards and rules from Disney about not having animals come to the café. Like, I was really into this idea of, Shere Khan and Cruella getting into a friendship and going, “Maybe fur is good on the animal, too!” But Shere Khan couldn’t come because Shere Khan is not allowed to be at a café. So we had to stick to humans. Ursula is the closest to non-humanoid, because Ursula, obviously, is a sea witch. But they had to be able to be at a café. They had to have the capacity to be at a café, so they had to be human, and popular. And we wanted, obviously, to stick to the Disney villains. We couldn’t take Pixar villains. There was no crossover in that regard.

And then we wanted to stick with some of the classics. A lot of the classic villains, we discovered in our research — their backstory was very under-explored. They had really great personalities. You could really get into them as characters. Captain Hook is fantastic. But then, Captain Hook’s story of vengeance on Peter Pan, it doesn’t really delve into the “why” of that. How is he the way he is? What happened to him? Who hurt him, besides Peter Pan? So we really wanted to pick the ones where we felt like we could build on that. I don’t want to call it a lacuna, but we wanted to be like, “Oh, that villain keeps our curiosity. What more is there to learn about this villain? How much can we delve into the kind of person they are?” So I think the classic villains were really good for that.

You know, Maleficent’s backstory is amazing. She has so many archetypes. She’s a jealous, bitter person who got left out of a party. You could work with that so easily. A lot of the modern villains, they’re really exciting and interesting, but people already sort of know them.

Once you settled on the roster of villains, how did you come up with what sorts of drinks [potions] each villain is going to like? What makes a “Jafar drink” vs. an “Ursula drink,” for example?

Verburg: In our head, we split it between “regular potions” and “story potions.” So the regular potions had to have properties that could be useful to any villain, so they couldn’t tie into that villain-specific kind of dilemma or their key conflict. So the regular potions just offer pretty multi-purpose abilities. Whereas a “Jafar drink” had to really come into contact with Jafar’s insatiable need for power. That was the other thing. A villain is generally considered to be pretty one-note. They’re bad. They want bad things. So when you’re given a cast of seven, you have to go, “Okay, well, they can’t all want the same one bad thing. We have to have them want seven different bad things, all based on their very unique motivations.”

And so, in particular, with Jafar, he’s always been next to power and able to influence power, but he has never been able to take power. He’s the vizier. Just like Mark Carney right now. There’s a very Canadian example — Mark Carney has always been next to power and now he wants to be the prime minister. [laughs] Jafar has always been next to power. He’s like the Mark Carney of Aladdin; now he wants to be prime minister.

And so weirdly, the parallels now are astounding to me — I’m like, “It’s exactly like that!” and not like I anticipated. But also, because Jafar’s understanding is political and wealth-oriented, we had to make him drinks and a storyline that had to do with wealth in the modern era. Hence, “wish coin” [a riff on cryptocurrency] — the most obvious example of somebody creating wealth out of thin air.

Bloom Digital is known for making these inclusive and heartwarming games, like LongStory or Later Daters, about relatable and likeable people, whether they’re teenagers or elderly folks. So when you think of that, you don’t necessarily think of a Disney villain, because they’re obviously more inherently evil. So, what was it like to pivot from writing about these sorts of everyday people to villains and maintaining their dastardly elements, but also making them more human and relatable for the types of stories that you tell?

Verburg: I have a lot of thoughts about this. So for one thing, Disney was quite clear: “Do not make the villains good people. They’re not good people. We’re not trying to make villains suddenly okay.” I was like, “Fair enough, they have a role to play in the world of Disney.” But on the other hand, I’ve had a really interesting conversation with my friend, whose name is Paul Dowsett, [an] architect. “Hi, Paul!” You could put his name in the article, he’d love it. He’s queer, a gay man, and we were talking about his relationship to the villains. And he was like, “Here’s the thing: sometimes, I recognized myself in the villains as a kid. I wasn’t out yet, I didn’t know what I was. But sometimes, I would see myself in a villain. I would say, ‘Oh, that person is different. They’re feeling shunned.’ They’re not feeling welcomed by their community — they’re responding to that with anger.” Which is okay! Sometimes, if you feel shunned or different from your community, you’re going to respond with anger. It’s going to embitter you.

The other thing, he was like, “As I got older, I realized the villains never got what they wanted. They were always disappointed. They were always made to feel like they couldn’t have a satisfactory ending. That was their lot in life.” So he was like, “Whatever you do with this game, you don’t have to make it obviously gay. The villains aren’t obviously gay. But if you could make the villains have a shot at happiness, that would still be interesting — that would be open and welcoming and wholesome.” And I was like, “Yeah, we can do that. We can make it so that a villain who has got an inherently non-positive desire. We’re good enough writers.”

So you’ll notice that none of the villains want a thing that is pro-social. They all want to cheat, or in some way run the world, or in some way be the boss. And we don’t try to get in the way of that in the story. We just try to show them that there’s a difference between, say, wanting something and what they might need, for the good of their villainous soul. And we also try to demonstrate even getting along with somebody who you would consider [bad], because the villains are all selfish. So a lot of the core of the game is when you make the villains do collabs to do better at the thing that they want. So it’s like like taking a five-year-old and teaching them social skills. “Instead of handing Tommy the toy hammer, why don’t you and Tommy work together to build a fort?” We sort of treated them like that, so that was really interesting.

And then the third thing I’ll say about it is that I think we have this really strong desire to cast people into good and evil right now. It’s very much of the moment. And I think that’s hurting us as a culture — deciding people are evil, deciding we can’t hear them or see them or engage in any way with what they have to say, and then deciding that everything that they stand for therefore also must be evil. Even if the thing that they stand for is not connected to the thing we disagree with. It’s creating these really polarized camps, and I think it’s hurting humanity on the whole. So I think a chance to look at the villains and go, “Okay, they don’t actually have to become good people to be worthy of interest. They might just have to learn to not immediately go to sending people into the void.” You know, Maleficent’s first step is, “I’ll send you to the void. I’ll kill you.” If could just convince Maleficent not to immediately kill people, maybe that’s the good first step for Maleficent.

That’s a great point! I hadn’t actually thought of that. So in that vein, as you were working on this game, was there a particular villain that you saw in a different light or maybe came to a greater appreciation of — maybe seeing new sides of them? Again, there’s a wealth of villains here, but is there one that stood out?

Verburg: I mean, I always loved Hook, so that was easy for me. I saw a lot of myself in Jafar. I think entrepreneurs look at Jafar and his entire attachment of himself to his financial future is also very of the moment. Gaston was the hardest for us, I’ll say that. We had to rewrite his story a couple of times because his personality, on the whole, is interesting. His ego is so overwhelming, it’s hard to kind of look behind that at a real person. So I would say the thing we had to do is really dig. Like, if Gaston had been a real human, the amount of time we would have spent digging deep with him to be like, “What are your actual motivations?” “Oh, I’m the best!” So we had to figure out how to get behind the mask of “What is Gaston?” to the other mask of “What is Gaston?” to, finally, “What is the core of Gaston?” And realize it’s kind of Gaston all the way down.

We’ve talked about the writing aspect and the personalities of these characters. But obviously, part of that is their looks. What’s really cool is that you’ve come up with a lot of really interesting designs that are still identifiably those villains, but you did still have a little creative liberty with that. So, how did you go about designing the looks for each of these characters?

Verburg: Shel Khan, our art director, started concepting out the art styles that we wanted to use. So before we had the individual character concepts, we had this knowledge that we wanted to do this sort of painterly, more abstract kind of stylized film noir and art [nouveau]. The idea was to look a little bit like 1920s, 1940s, decorative arts, mixed with something a little bit more fun and surreal. We didn’t want to go high fantasy. The idea was always to do something that had its roots in a sort of modern alternate universe — not so modern as to be right now today. It had to be somewhere between right now today and all of the different fantasy places the villains lived to marry those two worlds in one other place.

And once we had that, we also had to come up with who the villains were. So then we came up with their roles — community theatre Hook, mobster wannabe Ursula, social media influencer Maleficent, entrepreneur Evil Queen… All these different considerations. And once we had those, we then went back to the art team and said, “Okay, what clothes are they wearing for all these roles?” And that was when costuming started. So the whole development of the characters was easily six months. It took quite some time.

And then we had Jey Pawlik, who was our character artist, who did the art. And then the team at Disney, Grace [Kum] and Young [Choi], who did all the edits and sending feedback and making sure that we were staying inside the lines in terms of the anatomy and the facial characteristics of each character. It was a deep process. I don’t think when we started, we had any idea. They sent us some stuff and said, “Here’s how we tend to work with our characters.” We were like, “Okay, we can do that!” And then, like, six months later, we were like, “All right, that was a thing that happened.” It’s good! They know their characters. They know exactly what the anatomy and the geometry should be between, like, a nose and a chin.

You also have LongStory 2 coming out [soon]. Obviously, there’s been a lot that’s happened in the 10-plus years since that [first] game came out. You’ve released other games and there’s so many other things that have changed [in the world]. How have you expanded upon that original experience? Has there been anything in particular that informed the direction the game has taken?

Verburg: Full disclosure: it was not meant to be 11 years. Actually, we were working on this before the Disney game started. We were, let’s say, 50 percent done, and then we signed on with Disney, and then that took a lot of time. And we were trying very hard to run two projects, but it’s very hard for small teams to do that, so we definitely focused largely on marketing and didn’t do much production […] In terms of the story content, what has changed is that the kids are older, so they’re facing some bigger choices and decisions. And we also set the game outside of school, so it’s set inside the week right before they go back to school. So there’s a lot more sequences and scenes that take place in the real world where they’re interacting with real people outside of school friends.

I don’t know if you remember that feeling, but there was always that thing where you were one person in the summer and one person at school. Sometimes in the summer, you’d be a different version of yourself — maybe depending on the summer friends you had or if your family was like, “Oh, we just go to our home country during the summer and we stay with family?” You’ve got this whole personality that’s not the personality you are at school. So we really played around with that idea that the kids are getting used to, going into grade nine, this idea that they might be one person in one context and a totally different person in another. And so the whole topic of Long Story 1 was about learning to be comfortable with your emotions and your identity in the context of being at a school where you’re getting older.

And this one now is, a little bit, the game about code switching — learning how to be comfortable with who you are with certain people, and knowing who it’s safe to be yourself around, and then knowing how to take that feeling of safety with you into other contexts where you might go, “Okay, not everybody has to know that I’m doing this, because this is a thing for me that I share with my friends.” That’s kind of the big conversation. It’s this idea of as you get older, you have the right to share parts of yourself with different people, and you have the right to make those decisions about who you want to be yourself around, and who you want to show a more social face to. And so we wanted to teach players about that idea.

This interview has been edited for language and clarity. 

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Disney Villains Cursed Café is now available on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch and PC (Steam and GOG) for $19.49.

LongStory 2 is set to launch on PC at a yet-to-be-confirmed date.

Image credit: Disney Games

Update: 15/04/2025 at 2:36 p.m. ET — This article previously quoted Verburg as saying “mobster wannabe Ursula,” when it should have said “rockstar wannabe Ursula.” We’ve updated accordingly.