As excited as Disney Lorcana fans were for the swashbuckling sixth set, Azurite Sea, I get the impression that the game’s creators were even more enthusiastic. “You gotta go all in, it’s high seas and pirates!” laughs Shane Hartley, creative director of global games at Ravensburger.
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The Disney Lorcana North American Continental Championship took over the Disneyland Hotel for an unforgettable weekend.
Hartley sat down with us during last weekend’s North American Continental Championship to talk about expanding the world of Lorcana through artwork and storytelling while simultaneously expanding his team at Ravensburger to keep making Lorcana bigger and better.
How A Lorcana Set Is Created
“When we look at a set, we first pick a theme,” Hartley explains. “This is the setting it’s going to be in, how the characters are going to fit, and also what are the characters you wouldn’t normally think would fit in that theme.” The team calls this their “fish out of water” scenarios, which Azurite Sea is full of. A lot of the characters that appear in the set are seaworthy by nature, like Moana, Captain Hook, and Jim Hawkins, but a lot of the fun of Azurite Sea is seeing familiar characters reimagined in new, naval ways.
Hartley wants to keep surprising fans by putting characters in situations they wouldn’t expect. “I often look at a character and say ‘Okay, if Tigger is in the high seas, what would he do? How would he react? What would be interesting to him? We always think through them as a character, what is their personality, what their motivation is in that theme, and how they would react to this new environment they’re put into.”
Into The Inkland’s Piglet, Pooh Pirate Captain was the start of the Pooh Pirates we find in Azurite Sea, but the concept wasn’t fully fleshed out until Piglet came to life. Artist Nicholas Kole did some early character concepts for Pooh and his friends, and one particular image caught Hartley’s eye “There was a little tiny doodle in the corner of a bigger sheet of Piglet with a pirate outfit, and we were like “that is cool’”.
Azurite Sea’s thematic storytelling doesn’t end with the character designs. This set, more than any before it, is focused on the world-building of Lorcana. We’re not just seeing what Disney characters would look like as pirates, we’re also learning more about what Lorcana looks like and how the world is constructed. Perilous Mazes made of water rise out of the sea, familiar locations are reimagined as islands, and places original to the game, like Owl Island, make an appearance to move the story of Lorcana forward.
“The narrative team is really good about figuring out the throughline of the story we want to tell,” Hartley says. “Then we hire a lot of concept artists and, along with the concept artists on our team, we do a bunch of Blue Sky development.” This is where ideas for each new set start to take shape. As the artists create concepts based on the narrative team’s direction, the narrative team is in turn inspired by the art. “We play off of each other, one thing rises up and the narrative team is like ‘Oh yeah, this is cool, let’s do this’ and it all kinda comes together.”
Hartley emphasizes the way things build on each other from one Lorcana set to another, and concepts that were once known only internally are eventually starting to find their way into the game. “There are things we’ve developed early on knowing that we were going to be developing deeper into that, but we don’t go too deep. Then we start to connect those dots as time goes on.
A Bigger Team For A Better Lorcana
The creative team has expanded quickly. There are so many artists working on Locana now that the team had to hire an onboarding manager and an artist resource manager just to keep track of their schedules and ensure all of their needs are being met. “It’s a full-time job just keeping track of them,” he says.
Part of the need for such a big team is due to the sheer amount of work that must be done to keep up with releasing 216 new cards every three months. It’s also about ensuring that each piece of art is created by the person who is going to be the best fit for that card’s theme or style.
When it came to Azurite Sea’s Enchanteds, which have a sketchbook feel to them, Hartley wanted to make sure he had the right people assigned to each one. “When we did the Enchanteds for this set, we had a specific style we were looking for and we wanted to make sure it was right. A few of our existing artists wanted to try it out. We gave them a couple of ideas, they did some test cards for us, and we were like ‘Yeah, that’s good!’”
Azurite Sea’s Enchanteds were so enticing for the artists that Ravensburger’s art directors got involved. Guilia Riva illustrated The Islands I Pulled From The Sea, while Mario Manzanares illustrated Captain Amelia, Commander of the Legacy.
The style of Azurite Sea’s Enchanteds speak to Lorcana’s artists in an interesting way. “We as artists love seeing the early process of a lot of art that comes in, so for us it’s really fun to see that part of it,” Hartley explains. “Sometimes we like the sketches even more than the final product because we can see the life and what the artist was thinking and the process they were using. A lot of artist’s sketchbooks are really cool to see.”
The concept for Azurite Sea’s Enchanteds emerged from the idea that the Illumineers would be using their lore books as journals or field guides while off on this high seas adventure. “Maybe they’re studying the glimmers, or that they’re going on these adventures with and sketching them in their lore books.” While all of the Enchanteds share the field guide aesthetic, Hartley didn’t want them all to look the same. “All these different Illumineers have their own lore books, they’re not all artists, so some of them would be different from others.”
Hartley says there is a big misnomer about set four, Ursula’s Return. “A lot of people think it happened underwater,” he explains. “It actually happened on land, but as you got closer to Ursula’s lair the air got so thick that it’s almost swimmable.”
The hardest question you can ask Shane Hartley is to pick his favorite card, so of course, I had to ask. “There’s so many I love for different reasons,” he says. While scrolling through cards on the Disney Lorcana app, Hartley made a point to stop one underrated bad guy: Yokai, Scientific Supervillain. “So epic!” he says. “How cool is that? It just feels so epic.”
Disney Lorcana
Lorcana is a trading card game developed by Disney and published by Ravensburger, featuring iconic characters, settings, and more from the studio’s long history. As an Illumineer, you must build your deck and help protect Lorcana.