❖ Version History ❖

1st of March – 1st of April 2022
At this point in time, the design phase of Calendra is hitting a very intense uptick in pace. We are well beyond the design needs of The Great Chase now, and I have officially begun a hunt for manufacturing quotes. The conversation of quote acquisition is beyond the scope of this journal entry though, so we will come back to that aspect at another time…

What is very much becoming the forefront of my attention is the fact that it is time to get this game finished (it was probably the realization of the two year anniversary passing that really lit the fire under my ass a bit).

To be honest though… all that was left of the design process from here was specifically to redesign the box and the rule book of the game, which were both things I did not want to do. It’s not that I don’t want to do the art, the art is my favorite element of this whole process. It is much more the knowledge that the next step that must be taken is going to be such a gargantuan one, and I am overwhelmed by this giant shadow looming over my desk. But this box must be fixed. and its time to stop ignoring it.

So. Let’s repeat what we’ve been doing lately in these journal entries and take a peek at where we came from as our starting place with the original design:

The box design has so much that must be done. And if you haven’t done design like this before, it is a whole different beast to consider when creating a three dimensional piece of art.

To achieve the best look, there are five major sides to the box that must be designed, and all of these sides are interconnected by other background color and artwork. If I’ve already lost you and you’re sitting there scratching your head, you have to remember that the box is broken into two pieces: a lid and a tray. Both the Lid and the Tray have five sides to their artwork: a top, and four walls. The top lid walls can be seen while the box is closed, and the bottom tray walls can only be seen when the box has been opened, because they tuck within the space underneath the top lid.

To get a sense of scale, the image featured up above in this post is one of the four walls from the newest box designs that I have just finished creating. My task at this point is to create three other equally beautiful walls like that, and to get the top facing design itself to be as equally beautiful. Luckily, The top of the design is the first thing that I had done in this process:

Though it is compositionally identical to where we had started in terms of detail, there are like 10 tasks that were done over the course of 50 hours to get us to this place:

❖ Background color pallet got textured in a very similar way to the card designs

❖ Celtic knots were redrawn to this shape and scale rather than copied and stretched

❖ The Celtic knots were also totally recolored using texture & filter techniques

❖ Celtic beasts were also touched up to this scale and redone to pure black lines

❖ The Seasonal Logos had new textured color added to them, and they were redrawn to this newer scale as well

❖ The font was altered to get the letters a little bit closer and on the same line

❖ The color details were blended to frame the rest of the box shape

So on and so forth.

Needless to say, it was a large step of progress to get us to this stage, but I am so happy with the result. It retained the look of the box that people loved, but it was brought up in so much quality and somehow turned out very nearly the same in layout at the end.

Now for the sides of the box. This is a little bit tricky, because in the original box design all four of the box walls were identical copies. The artwork used for those four walls is the first thing that I had updated along with the top artwork, and this is that featured image panel, which looked like this:

And then became this upon the update:

Luckily updates to this side of the box are swift and easy… but unfortunately, this is also all we have for template updates from the original design, and we still have three walls to fill here. As for else what should appear on the outside of the box, there are luckily some industry standards to consider. For the rest of the board game industry, a few items that absolutely should appear on the outside of the box are:

❖ Titles (like creator names and company names)

❖ Gameplay Details, or what I like to call superlatives (like, how many players can this game play? What age group is recommended for play? How long does a game take to play? What comes inside of the box? etc, etc).

❖ Gameplay Descriptors (what is the game about? / how does one play?)

❖ Imagery (What do some of the cards look like? / What does a table look like in play?)

❖ Reviews (Sometimes with games that have already been in market, review quotes can appear on a box)

Now, we can’t necessarily expect to get every single one of these details onto our box design, but we can certainly use this list to achieve some good inspiration. What I consider to be one of the easiest panels that I definitely think should appear on one of these sides is the title information for Ben and I as the creators, as well as company name / brand. This panel is mostly going to be text and formatting my logo to the correct size, which will be easy by comparison, so I start here and pretty quickly come to this:

I have exactly one regret about the layout of my company name/logo, and it is how tall the logo letter is by comparison to the rest of the word. It looks nice, I’m certainly not sad about the appearance… but it always leaves a very tricky and fairly large amount of blank space above the title that drives me crazy when trying to fit it into any particular location graphically. This time around, I felt it looked nice to also include the game contents and publication date on this wall of the box.

Now, while this panel looks good and does a good deal to explain what comes with the game when purchased, there are still many other details about the game that should be included in the final artwork. Firstly, including an age range on the box helps dodge a lot of interesting potential legal issues. If the game is sold in America, there are certain safety labels that must be included on the box for it to be sold in retail stores. To avoid trouble with this, there is somewhere I must include a description where the box says that only children 14+ may play the game to avoid getting sued in the future for safety concerns.

In addition to the fact that the age range is necessary on the box, it is very important to reveal how many players can play a game. This detail seems somewhat small and insignificant, but many people I have met will shop for a game specifically based on how many players that game can include.

To encompass all into the box design, I think it is useful to dedicate one entire wall panel to this. It helps draw the eye when it is seen, and it makes it quick and easy to identify the detail information necessary for a customer. But. There is also one other funny aspect about the ‘game details’ that has a bit of a…. underlying / unspoken industry standard. As it turns out from my market research, many games do something clever to incorporate these details into their design by specifically using logos and symbols from within the game to showcase some internal artwork in ways to describe elements of the gameplay, like player count or time to play.

I had a lot of fun creating that panel of information for The Great Chase by using a bunch of typical airport symbols and logos to describe the game (like the emergency exit logo for player count, the seatbelt logo for game difficulty, the ‘put your oxygen masks on’ logo for the age-range, so on and so forth). There was a bit of a struggle when it came to recreating this concept for Calendra until I went rummaging through my cabinets one morning and struck a bit of inspiration. By chance, I had happened to pull out the bag that had the super old wood chip version of the prototype, remember? when the game looked like this back in the day:

Well, I thought it would be super cute to make our superlatives panel based on this ancient design. For anyone who happened to play this version of the prototype (or for those of you super fans who have been reading along the Design Journal), I thought it would be a fun little Easter egg styled homage to the origin of the game when describing its qualities! So, I selected the best symbol I could to represent all of the game details, spent a few days doodling and picking out colors until I came to this as the final design:

Well, that gets us through three of the five sides of the box, and also knocks a solid three out of the five items from our industry bullet points off of the checklist… so what will we do with this last panel? We have game art, we have descriptors, we have titles… but we are missing one of my favorite (and obviously most important) elements: Lore.

The big thing that fuels my inspiration when it comes to game design (other than creating an interactive piece of art) is littering that piece of art with as much lore as possible to help build up a universe surrounding that item. I don’t need it to be real world lore… I actually prefer creating entire worlds worth of lore even for items as small and simple as this game. And for Calendra we have such a rich lore story that we have held on to from the very start: the mythology of the Ferric Season trying to take over the realm.

To this point in time though, we had been using the tale of the Ferric lore on the back panel of the box inner little nursery styled rhyme that we talked about forever ago in making the first box design:

I have always loved this little rhyme… and all this time I’ve been considering that it needs to be the kept on the back of the box. But at this point in time I am considering a new landscape of design for the back of the box that is going to be used more for images and gameplay examples, where I may not have the room for such a piece of lore (also its not that much text, and it does not deserve the whole back of the box).

Well, with some tinkering and a few attempts to get it touched up, I am immediately in love with how the design of the box top looks when this little fable is written along the long side of the box. It fits nicer, and it helps bring the detail of the box together to a nice conclusion. But having just the text isn’t really enough here anymore with how much more beautiful the other panels of the box have been made now. So, I get to drawing in some filigree styled edge art to frame the text, until I come to this design:

And so we finally reach the conclusion of what might very well be the longest entry of the Design Journal to date. It took most of a month to compile all of these ideas and bring them to life, but I am really really happy with how much the box has developed. It has made Calendra feel so much more like a professional product….

… but. don’t forget.

We are also only half way through the design of the box.

~Sigh~

(Remember me talking about the dread of how much work this would be?)

Well, be sure to check back in on the Design Journal next time, when we cover all of the long winded narrative that went into the bottom tray of the box design!