The Creators of ‘Disney Dreamlight Valley’ Take Us to ‘The Keepsake Sea’

At a time when AI is threatening to take over handcrafted artistry and ingenuity in the video game industry, the developers and design teams at Gameloft Montreal are committed to satisfying fans and gamers with true human creativity and passion. Such is the case with one of their marquee products, Disney Dreamlight Valley. Since 2022, the game’s popularity has grown in leaps and bounds, not just because of the Disney brand, but because Gameloft puts the time and effort into evolving the game in a meaningful way for Disney fans everywhere.

Upon its initial launch, the game amassed over one million downloads out of the gate within the first ten days of its release in September 2022, and it has not slowed down since. As a life simulation game, players have had the ability to create their own characters and tend to various biomes around the magical kingdoms and realms the game features. Think of it as Animal Crossing with Disney IP. Over the past four years, it has seen several expansions, introducing more fan-favorite characters and valleys for fans to play with, including characters from the most popular Disney and Pixar franchises, like Wall-E, Toy Story, Wreck-It Ralph, Moana, The Nightmare Before Christmas, and the Disney Princesses.

During the 2026 D23 Expo, to coincide with the release of their next expansion, The Keepsake Sea (featuring characters from Hercules, Pirates of the Caribbean, and the cult classic Atlantis: The Lost Empire), we were given an inside look at the game and its latest updates with Lead Narrative Designer Riley Wignall and Creative Director Joshua Labelle. Through their creativity and desire to deliver the best, handcrafted, hand-developed worlds and characters within the game to their loyal players, Gameloft has been able to take Disney Dreamlight Valley to the next level!

Here’s what Wignall and Labelle had to say about their latest updates from our exclusive interview and walkthrough with them during the D23 Expo:

NOC: So tell me about the journey to the latest version of Dreamlight Valley.

Wignall: We’ve got a brand new introduction to the Valley to give you today. So if you don’t know Disney Dreamlight Valley, it is a cozy lifetime adventure game. You get to live in this magical village with all these Disney and Pixar villagers. We have lots of stories. We started off with 18 characters. Now we have over 50 Disney characters. We release a ton of new updates every single year — free updates — and so this year alone, our players have received [characters from] Lady and the Tramp, and Pocahontas. We did a Hercules and Phil update this year, and then most recently we added Wreck-It Ralph [characters] to the game. You can see we also have some fun character games… Lots of new content and free updates. Everything you see here right now are items available to players too. So this is something a player could decorate and build in their own biome with. We really have a focus on telling Disney stories, unleashing our players’ creativity, letting them sort of live and create their own magical worlds.

That’s really cool. So, I’m a Disneyland Magic Key member. So I do go to the parks quite a bit. I know the layout of both DCA and DLR, and I see a lot of familiar things just kind of scattered around.

Wignall: It’s very funny that you say that because we went to Disneyland last night after we were done doing demos, and I’m coming from the opposite way. I know things from the game. So we were in the parks, and I was like, ‘That’s in the game, and that’s in the game, and that’s in the game.’

So what can you tell us about the latest expansion?

Wignall: From our four years in running the game, players have asked, ‘What is out there beyond the edge of the water?’ And so finally, with this expansion, we wanted to answer that question and let them go into the water in the game for the first time. Players can now, for the first time, turn into a mermaid and explore the waters of Dreamlight Valley in the base game, as well as our new expansion, which we will talk about a little bit further in a little bit.

So it’s not just a style change. There’s also a mechanism change?

Wignall: We have a fishing mini game that our players use. The mermaid mechanic changes the mechanics of the fishing game, so you can swim up to a fishing ripple and use the trawl feature to just pick up the fish. For a little change of pace, players can also collect resources like seaweed and stuff this way. Fish could be used for cooking recipes, while seaweed can be used as a crafting item for furniture.

Labelle: You can drop all of those items though and decorate with them. So we do have players who will create like a picnic table. And then they’ll put on the picnic table different food items, or a fish spread.

Wignall: One of the most amazing things that we love about our community and our players is that they are so creative. And so in introducing mermaid tails, we didn’t want to give them one base mermaid. We wanted to provide lots of options for them to have and design their own mermaid look. We also have different fins. You’ll also notice here where we have some two-by-two icons and stuff. This is a development build, so there are things that are not quite ready to be shown.

Wignall: There’s something for everybody, and that’s that’s always the goal. So in addition to your tail, you can also customize your top. We have a war seashell princess vibe. We have a warrior mermaid vibe. We also will have mermaid tails and stuff for the masculine avatars as well. If you are not feeling kind of mermaid-y, we will have more cosmetics that can skew towards sea creature. Like Creature from the Black Lagoon — those sorts of things. So there’s lots of options for players to play around, express themselves, live different mermaid fantasies and that stuff.

In my opinion, one of the things that I love, and one of the things I think people don’t appreciate as much, is the amount of time and detail and effort it takes for developers to actually deliver something like these customizations, aesthetics, all of the things that make worlds like this a lot more immersive and a lot bigger. I know sometimes there are deadlines driving your work. But if your team had all the time in the world to perfect these major versions, how long does that development time look like for you guys?

Labelle: So the thing I think with what we’ve done is that the team has gone further than what we initially asked with it. What we initially asked was really to get that mermaid fantasy. And then immediately the creativity just like burst forth. There are different hands. There are different ears that we’re not quite ready to show yet. And then things that are not necessarily part of the core Little Mermaid fantasy, but just were inspired by the team. And I think that with the time that the team has had, we’re pretty happy with how far they’ve been able to to take it with things like this.

See, I love that, and it’s kind of one of the nice things about doing a game that’s evergreen. You can always expand on it. With something like this, you can really release things iteratively and kind of expand on those ideas, and take a little bit of time, as much time as you want, to get as creative as possible. And I really like that. That’s fantastic to hear.

Wignall: Yeah, we also just have such an incredibly talented team, and so as Josh said, you give them a small mandate, and they’ll run it as far as they can because they want to. Because there’s such a joy in trying to kind of expand and play around. So we love having the time to do that.

Labelle: Some of the tails actually even use fully different animation sets. We’ve got ones that are more like shark style where they’re vertical positioning. And those ones have a different animation set, like how a shark moves. So yeah, lots of lots of different things went into this.

Wignall: We really wanted players to have a soothing, cozy underwater experience. So there’s no timers. There’s no running out of air. Nothing like that. Just like a nice, cool place where you can swim. There’s a little dash move that you can do to kind of swim a bit faster.

Can you decorate this underwater portion of the the game, and customize it?

Labelle: We’ll touch a little more on that in a couple minutes. This area is just intended as a way to get between our main world of Dreamlight Valley to the new world of the expansion, but there are going to be more of those underwater areas for us to discover fairly.

Wignall: So you’ll notice we have our beautiful whirlpools that will take players underwater. These statues are, in fact, magical beings that throughout the world of the expansion, are called ‘guardians.’ So throughout the world of the expansion, they hold the keys to the kingdom. And the player has to solve puzzles for the guardians to prove they have these childlike qualities still that really have become a touchstone for players in our games. It’s about being in touch with your inner child and getting back to having fun. So you will encounter more of these guardian statues throughout the world. Then we can round the bend and meet our first brand new villager for the expansion.

Milo Thatch!

Wignall: Yes!

I love that you guys are putting Atlantis in this. This is the most underrated movie in the history of Disney animation. One of my favorites!

Wignall: One of my favorites as well! We have a lot of people in the fan base who feel that way. And lots of developers on the team are also big Atlantis fans. So we were all very excited to bring Milo to the game. As you probably remember he’s a cartographer, he’s a linguist. He’s kind of got an explorer streak. And so we just felt that he was a perfect addition to the game. He’s going to be the perfect guide for the player as the first person they meet upon arrival.

You know what I love about this — also as someone who loves Atlantis and knows that there is this cult following for it; the studio might not necessarily think initially to invest in a live action remake or revisiting this world. But the more people see elements of Atlantis in games like Dreamlight Valley, the more the studio will realize that the demand is there. So I hope that the popularity of Dreamlight Valley helps them realize that people actually do love these things. Fans love these things.

Wignall: Absolutely. So another thing that maybe you don’t know, with every expansion, we bring a lot of new content and stuff for our players. So that includes new resources such as like plants and flowers and foods that you can pick and new crafting recipes. You can also get lots of new furniture that’s themed to the different areas in the expansion. So this one, “Shipwreck Shore” is more of a pirate-y area. We’ve got our little toucan there hiding in the background. But again, these all can be done in the modular kits that allow our players to plug and play.

Wow! The Easter eggs make it feel so immersive and really tie this nicely into the Disney fandom.

Wignall: Yes, that’s a good soundbite. Also you asked the question before, and now we can talk about it. One of the things we wanted to let our players do to unleash their creativity is to do full decorating underwater. So we have built the expansion in mind with the the ability for them to decorate underwater areas with their water furniture. They can move their house underwater. The house you see there is a player house that can be used on land or under the waves. You can check your mail underwater if you want. You can basically just live your best mermaid life. Also, up to this point, we’ve had a lot of improvements letting our players decorate just in a horizontal way. But for this expansion, we also wanted to allow them to decorate in a 3D axis. So as you can see, in the background here, we have these beautiful platforms. Players will be able to move these around in space and decorate them as much as they like to kind of create tableau or environments that are very easy to manipulate. They can move up and down. You can put decorations there on top. There are different sizes of platforms as well, so you can kind of stagger them as you want.

That’s a pretty big departure from the stuff on the land, right?

Wignall: Yeah, we haven’t really done anything moving these like big platforms before. And as you maybe saw with the one before, there’s floating platforms. You can do things on top of them, around them. You can swim underneath them. So there’s lots going on with them. We’re very excited about it. You’ll also notice, in this underwater area, there are these bubbles. You can use the surge move to swim through them and collect the resources inside.

Wignall: We’ll return back to the land for a little bit. We have more villagers to meet.

I mean, if you guys had Milo, I’m really excited about the next one that we’re gonna meet.

Wignall: Our art team had a lot of fun. They do such a great job of building and including all these themes. Now let’s say hello to Villager Number Two.

Oh! Megara!

Wignall: Yup! We have Megara from Disney’s Hercules. As I mentioned before, we just added Hercules and Phil to the base game, so we are very excited for players to be able to bring those two back together. We love to reunite a couple. Megara has been stranded in the shipwreck or in the shipwreck shores in the Keepsake Sea since the time of the forgetting. Players will get to befriend her. They have to get her to warm back up to them. Meg is a bit more of a guarded character. Not as easy to win over. But once players get her on their side, she’s going to be super loyal and a great adventuring companion.

That’s pretty cool. I mean, your relationship really builds with these characters as you interact with them.

Wignall: We really work hard to try and make sure that each character has an authentic voice. But also that the relationship they have with the player feels real too. It’s one of my most beloved things when I’m writing the game; thinking about what relationship did this character have with the player as a child? And what is it like now, and how does it change?

It really feels a lot more personal to the player because honestly, who doesn’t have that relationship with Disney?

Wignall: So many of us grew up with Disney. So in lots of ways, it is just like a mirror of our real life, right? So we’ve moved through our pirate fortress. We are going onto the beach to meet our final villager for the showcase.

Captain Jack!

Wignall: Yup! You absolutely cannot do a mermaid and pirate expansion without the Captain Jack Sparrow. We are very excited to have him in the game. He’s obviously a very iconic character, and the fans have been curious as to when he might be coming. So Jack is gonna be, the player’s key to the pirate code. He’s gonna teach them the ways of the Keepsake Sea.

There could be no one better!

Wignall: Oh yeah, we everyone’s got their favorites. Now if you’re looking out beyond the edge of the dock, you can kind of see that there is more land beyond. So what you’ve seen right now is just one of three biomes that will be included in the new expansion, and biomes two and three will have their own aesthetic, which means their own furniture, their own unique look, and more characters to be unlocked beyond. We really want players to have the option to spend as much time here and feel comfortable and happy to relax here and do as much as they want. But to get to those lands beyond, we thought maybe swimming as a mermaid might be a bit tiring. So there is one last thing to show you in the demo: you get your own pirate ship!

That’s so awesome!

Wignall: Some features about the pirate ship: If we look up, there’s a little flag. You can design your own pirate colors. You’ll also be able to assign two different villagers, two different posts on the pirate ship. So, if you want to go out on the sea with Mike Wazowski and Belle… You can do all of those things, but also have a couple of skins to change the look of your pirate ship. Inside, there’s a captain’s cabin that sort of serves as like a player house that you’ll be able to decorate. So, we just really wanted to give players both sides of their nautical fantasy. So, if you’re not into the mermaids, maybe you want to be a pirate, or maybe you want to be both. Personally, I’m a both.

I love that when when you actually put in the work into games like this, but you’re literally having fun doing it, it doesn’t feel like work anymore because it’s just really being the Disney nerd that you already are. I could tell even just looking around how much you guys care about the fans. So do you find yourself kind of going on Reddit and forums to try and figure out what the fans really want? Or do you sort of let your own team and the fandoms that you guys personally have fuel what you do next?

Wignall: We do a lot of listening to our community. We really want our players to feel like they are being heard, and want to give them kind of what they want and what they are asking for as much as we can. And so, there might be some like some ideas that will come from within, but we always want to try and look out as well to make sure that it feels true to the game and true to the people who love the game.

As fans yourself, are there things that you hope to see or build someday that maybe you might not have been able to do so far? We’re talking blue sky here, so no idea is off limits.

Labelle: I think that’s that’s a tough question because anything we say can then become speculation. I would say a few years ago, if you asked, we would have said Milo, right? Like to bring a character like that. So like in the interest of preserving the possibility that it comes in the future, we won’t say too much. But we’ll just say, as we mentioned on the panel yesterday, Beauty and the Beast was like a huge one. Getting to work on that was amazing. For me, it’s Toy Story. Yeah, love getting to work on that stuff.

Wignall: I think the thing about working on a Disney or Pixar game is that there’s so much that you already love, and there’s so much to fall in love with. So whatever’s coming next is gonna feel really big and important, no matter what it is.

My last question for you all: What is your favorite thing about work?

Wignall: You just opened such a Pandora’s Box of answers! I think I said this on our panel a little bit yesterday, but this really is the best job I’ve ever had. I really love our team. It’s full of passionate, talented people who are super dedicated to what they do, and the creativity is off the charts, and everyone works together super well. It’s just fantastic. So the team is amazing. The community is also amazing. You know, we have players who love the game. They’re very passionate about Disney. Their creativity is absolutely unmatched in the game. We have something called “Dream Snaps,” which is like a weekly photo competition where players can submit their own creations and pictures based on a different theme. And some of the Dream Snaps that our our players come up with are beyond belief. I don’t understand how they create the images that they do, but they do it. So the community is unbelievable. And then, as lifelong Disney nerds, for me, getting to work on Disney stuff, Milo Thatch, Beauty and the Beast — all that stuff really hits me frequently. I don’t get jaded to it every couple of weeks. I’m working on a Disney game. I just wrote Wreck-It Ralph. I got to write Wreck-It Ralph. There’s just there’s just nonstop kind of like awe, and you never lose that spark because it’s always changing, and there’s always something new to like dig up that you loved before, or something that you’re gonna learn to love very quickly.

Labelle: Yeah, and the benefit of our game is because we’re always adding so much free content to the game, and we always have a new update right around the corner, it’s always different from if you’re working on a game that releases once. And you maybe get to see people get excited about the game one time. We get to see players get excited about completely new characters monthly. Just yesterday we announced that next week we have special cosmetics from Hannah Montana coming to the game in September. We have Oogie Boogie coming to the game and he’s going to be taking over the valley for a big six week event with new rewards. And then at the end of the year we’re bringing Lilo to the game and reuniting Lilo and Stitch together. So just in that one announcement, we got to see so much excitement from fans, and we’re gonna get to see, throughout the end of our year, different kinds of groups of fans who are excited about each of those things, getting excited again and again and again. So that’s really a huge part of it for us.

Well, thank you so much. You could tell that this is probably one of the best jobs in the world. Congratulations and well done on the hard work you and the team have put into the new expansion!

Despite the fact that the teams behind Dreamlight Valley may not seem like household names, the fact of the matter is they are putting their dedication, commitment, and passion into every frame of this fan-favorite game. And in an industry where automation is threatening that passion and skill, Gameloft and Disney are completely fortunate they have good, hardworking storytellers like Wignall and Labelle keeping the dream alive in Dreamlight Valley!

The Keepsake Sea expansion of Disney Dreamlight Valley launches this November!