❖ Version History ❖

May 5th-21st, 2023
Almost exactly one year before we are ready for full blown Kickstarter launch of Phoenix Farm, we are still in a position where a couple of critical features about the game are missing from the official prototype. As is pretty much a tradition at this point, Ben & I always focus in on what we consider to be the critical things first: Mechanics, the User Experience with the card designs, and the “Fun” of the game before we worry ourselves with any sort of confined rule book or box design. This is largely in part due to the fact that the rules of the game change constantly in the early phase of the game (so there’s no point in designing the official ‘rule book’), and many of the symbols made for the cards will be utilized in the final design of any box we create.

However!
This does not mean that we cannot start planning. And in these late Springtime weeks of 2023 I set out on the very beginning of a crazy design idea that will take me… months and months to perfect. Today we will talk about how the Phoenix Farm box art came to be & much more importantly the birth of our first ever “Custom Components Tray”.

To start things off, I want to share an amazing piece of art by my good friend Misty, who wanted to help us design a prototype of the game box. She is an amazing water color painter, and after a few weeks of playing around with her new metallic paint set, she conjured up this amazing image, which was the placeholder box art for Phoenix Farm for probably the next 6-8 months:

Of course, as soon as I had this illustration in my hands I needed it to be made into a physical box, so I promptly had one ordered to my house & used it throughout the rest of this months process. At the time, I had so much work on my plate writing the Lore Story of Phoenix Farm that it was hard to justify spending the time I needed to make the proper box design, so this prototype served us well for a good long time.

In the mean time though, I did have a major design problem that I needed to solve for Phoenix Farm. The entire time that we have been working on this game, I had been our left over ‘white box’ from the manufacturing print tests of Calendra… but there is a small issue that I rediscovered upon the arrival of this new phoenix artwork box: Unless every single item of the game is perfectly placed into this box, the components of the game do not fit very well within the container. And to be honest, I forget exactly how it came up in conversation the first time, but right around this time, someone had given me the idea to make a special tray to hold all of the pieces of the game using the 3d printer. To this point in time the printer was only ever used to make our magic dice, and this seemed like an exciting & fun design challenge that I thought might be able to save the rest of the box design, so of course I got to work trying to figure out what the best organization of the parts might be inside of our current container:

To be honest… after a few attempts at this game of ‘sort the box’, this was about as good as I thought I could possibly do with the layout of the game components. They all fit in the box nicely, the rest of the cards would fit too, and I decided this was the time to move forward with some 3d design. So of course I broke out Blender and got to work modeling the design.

At this point in the timeline, my experience with Blender is… very novice, and to be fair, so is my experience with working the original Ender 3d Printer we had on deck at the time. It was a bit of a bumpy ride getting everything to work out the correct way, but after a week or two of tinkering around with this process, I finally got the model I wanted to cleanly print on my second or third attempt of tinkering with all the settings! But is what the very first working edition of the 3d printed components tray looked like when it finally got placed into the box with (most) of the pieces inside:

As you may notice from the photo above, the dice and the coins are not…. necessarily in the component tray. That is because I made a few measuring errors on my first attempts of the tray (which is why it took 2-3 attempts to get it right). The diameter of the coins were really tricky to get just right in the design process… the dice were just a clerical error on my part because I was mistaken in thinking that they were the same size as those amber cubes. Whoooops. haha!

In any event, for a good slice of time I thought that this was how the game was going to fit into the box. I thought that this component tray was practically flawless, and unbelievably cool… but that was only until I tried to take the game literally anywhere in my backpack, because of course the pieces would not stay in their comfy homes very well unless good pressure was kept on the box to stay closed. Needless to say, there was still some work to get done on this agenda, but I wasn’t quite sure how to improve upon it yet (turns out there would be at least x5 other iterations of this component tray before I landed on the version I wanted in the end).

And before we end today’s post, I do want to say that right around this time, while I was busy at my day job, I was daydreaming about what I thought the official box design of Phoenix Farm might look like when I had the time to begin drawing it proper. While i did love Misty’s design, I did not feel like it went with the flavor of the rest of the game quite as well as it would need to in the final design. I had always pictured something a bit more along the lines of ‘stained glass’ and ‘illuminated script’. So, though I was pretty far from having the time to draw this up digitally, I did take all the markers from the front desk one day and whipped this up over the course of a couple shifts:

And with that, I think this is a good place to put a hold on the Design Journal. In this post you get all of the origin story behind the box art and the design tray, next time we will dig into what the final versions of these items turned out like & how we got from here to there!

Thank you as always for reading!
I hope you’ve enjoyed seeing these insights into our process!