❖ Version History ❖

May, 2022
In the same weeks where I was focusing my attention toward making the Phoenix Farm bonus card that we discussed in our previous post of the Librarium Games Design Journal, I had come across a couple of interesting inspirations.

Today’s moment of major distraction was a video I had seen of someone else’s business. They had made some amazingly beautiful jars with dice on the inside that worked like a Magic 8-Ball. The idea was meant to be used with a D20 for Dungeons and Dragons players, but the instant that I had seen the video I had the thought that it would be awesome to include this in the possibilities of publishing Phoenix Farm.

But what would this look like? How are these even made? Would it even be possible to make these in such a way that would be able to work for us? ~ Well. This was the time where I started looking into answering these questions, so let’s take a look at what that lead to!

In the featured image of this post, you can see the silly little prototype that I constructed for my first attempt at the magic dice roller. It is made up of: a super tiny jar, a super saturated saline solution, glittering makeup powder, a 10mm 6 sided dice, and some string.

The function of the jar is simple in idea, but beautifully magical in action:

The saline solution makes the dice float. The glittering powder doesn’t float. When at rest for a minute or two, everything settles and the jar is totally translucent. When turned upside down, the powder mixes up to make the jar opaque & glittery (hiding the dice until it rises to the top). When placing the jar flat on the table face down, the dice makes its way to the top and the result is shown:

Overall Goods & Bads Behind the Magical Dice Roller:

Goods:
•This thing looks amazing
•Functionally works with the gameplay
•High desirability
•Might be able to be small enough to fit in the box

Bads:
•Not terribly easy to make (salt solution = complicated)
•Maybe not long-term functional? (needs testing)
•Fragile (it was made of glass)
•Slow (tiny dice = doesn’t float fast…)

In the back of my head, I am in love with the idea of producing something like this for the business, but I am also a bit skeptical. I am almost certain that I cannot expect this type of product to be made during manufacturing the game (it would be wayyy to expensive and an enormous liability to the overall integrity of the product). If something were to go wrong and the piece broke, having a liquid in the box means that the entire product would be at risk and that is not something that I am ever going to want.

This however, means nothing about the potential of an item like this in other ways. When it comes to ‘special occasions’ in the business, like Kickstarter for example, this item would be absolutely perfect for promotion. It could be contained in such a way that allows buyers the opportunity to acquire the item, while allowing it to be in our control when it comes to packaging, and only needing a small quantity.

Additionally, it would be possible to make batches of these in our free time if we could perfect the recipe, so this would be something in the same category of “items that could be produced by us and sold by us in the store”. It just needs to be made in such a way that can be more functional, more affordable, & simple enough in design to not get out of control.

And now, for a Time Leap!

Luckily, one aspect of the Librarium Games Design Journal that is helpful is the magic of time travel. When I initially wrote this post, it was March of 2023, and the idea for the dice jar was conceived almost a year prior (which is why the post starts in May of 2022). In between last year and right now (February of 2024), an enormous amount of development took place in the designing of these dice. The most important detail that got introduced was: 3D Printing! We will go into the depths of using the 3D printer for Librarium Shenanigans in a different post, but what you should know now is that it changed our recipe for this item in amazing ways!

By using a 3D printer, we could effectively change all of the variables behind how the Magic Dice Roller actually works! Where we had been suffering with the slow floating 10mm acrylic dice in the salt solution of water, we could target both of these problems simultaneously by making the dice ourselves and making them… hollow!

I know, it sounds kind of crazy, but this is the ultimate secret behind simplifying this process! With a little bit of 3D design, we constructed our very one 10mm dice that could be printed with a small air bubble inside of the plastic shell. When we come back to discuss the 3D printer in a future Librarium Post, we will cover just how much work went into that, but for now just know that the hollow 3D dice negated the need for the salt solution in the water! This cut the cost of the product and the production time down by an huge margin AND made the dice float much much faster to the top of the jar! Now that’s what we call a win-win!

With a bit of extra love on the crafting side of things, we started adding a wax seal to the top of the jar when finished, and this was the look of our newest creation:

Though the journey of the Magic Dice is almost always in development behind the scenes here between 2022-2024, and there is an enormous amount of design back story to it, we are going to pause here for now!

While I would love nothing more than to go into the construction side of this story, it is better to stop writing this novel at the moment and come back to it in full swing when we begin discussing the amazing background that the 3D printer story has in store for you in a future post! I hope you are as excited to get back into it as I am, but for the time being, it’s important that we step away from these side quests in this leg of the design journey and return to talking about the digital production process for Phoenix Farm!