❖ Version History ❖

November 20th-30th, 2021
The stage is set. An entirely new prototype must be developed for Phoenix Farm in order to test how the mechanics are coming along, and a holiday weekend is on the approach. I will have somewhere close to four entire days off in a row, and it is time to do my favorite part of the design! I grab all of my pens, my card stock, and my notes, and I prepare for family Thanksgiving.

This year, I had been invited by my girlfriend at the time to spend the holiday with her family. Normally, I would be close to the center of the cooking universe for a day like this, but in this family it is the ladies who do the cooking and I have been left to my own devices. ~The perfect situation for me to get the Phoenix Farm Prototype completed!

At about 7a.m. we arrive at the house, and I grab the stack of mini-cards that I had printed from my cricut a few days earlier. by now, I have managed to at least get the rough measurements and the titles down on the cards, but that leaves us with a stack that currently looks like this:

The Prototype Order of Operations:

For this set of prototype parts, I will be designing every single card by hand. I am fully aware that this is a counterproductive technique in many ways, because none of the elements can be changed once they are on the paper, and it takes an enormous amount of time… but I assure you that there is a rhyme to my reason.

It is critical for me to take these kinds of steps in the making of my earlier prototypes! I learn so many things about the game while I go through this, and I actually iterate multiple ideas at a time when establishing the artwork. As a result, the prototypes like these come with a bit of a haphazard organization, but every time that I have done this, I have laid the foundation down on how I plan my first digital prototypes.

To get the art made like this does require a solid plan of attack though.
These are the steps I take:

1. Lay down important gridlines on the card
2. Begin to fill in title text ~ rule text comes later
3. Establish main artwork
4. Draw in any logos or symbols that are needed
5. add rules text to the areas that are left.

The above image is after the first two steps. The next phase of design comes with the artwork that will appear on each card. By the end of Thanksgiving Day, I have doodled out my favorite player mat idea for four of the six player mats, and I have placed artwork down on all of the mini cards, which leaves us here so far:

Though I do not complete the prototype on Thanksgiving Day, I make an enormous amount of headway on the ideas. It was a blessing to have nearly 10 uninterrupted hours of time to establish this artwork… but of course, the only thing on my mind is finishing the project. I can hardly rest until it is done.

Luckily, I still had some more time to work with on this weekend. My mother’s side of the family had decided to do Thanksgiving on the Sunday after the holiday. So, after some traveling around Massachusetts again, I once more broke out the pens & the project materials and got to work while another turkey was sacrificed for the big meal!

At this point, I needed to add the Rule text on each of the cards, including the dice logos and the outcome rules. I work diligently through the afternoon, and I manage to get the Phoenix facing side of the card designs totally finished. I also manage to establish the card border lines and dice logos needed for this step, but I have still not managed to finish writing out what each outcome does on these cards before the meal is served.

After the dinner, I explain to my sister, her boyfriend, and my mother what the rules are for the game. I give everyone a small jotted down reference guide for how the dice rules work (because these are still incomplete on the prototype), and we give the game an attempt. I wouldn’t necessarily call this is a complete play test of the prototype, but it is certainly a good way to feel out how the parts are moving now that they are about 90% complete:

Seeing the game like this (even though it isn’t even finished yet) is wonderful. It is clearly working better in almost all of the ways that we have planned. There are less cards needed, so less cards need to move around as much, the flow is all around better than it was, the feather counter is perfect, and the play mats are also working well.

I was thrilled. This feels like a very significant step up in the quality of the game from where it had been only weeks earlier. Though the prototype is still incomplete as of this most recent picture, you can refer back to the featured image of this post to see what the final result was of this 10-day stint in the art department!

So what comes next? ~ Well, with only one more day of work needed to complete this version of the prototype, I set out to finish that and then begin assembling plans behind scheduling more play test days with as many people as I can! While working on that task though, I stumbled into something I would never have guessed, so be sure to check back in for our next entry to the Design Journal, where we talk about the magical day of attending the local Yule Festival!