❖ Version History ❖

June-October, 2023
As we saw in our previous journey of the Design Journal, inklings of our box designs and needs were starting to come together. We made some decisions on what the box will start to look like, we got some prototypes made, and then we started thinking forward to what a special Phoenix Farm Components Tray might look like & how/why it would need to function with the game parts.

For today’s journey into the Design Journal, I thought it would be nice to come back to this conversation after now having completed both the final box design and the components tray to talk about what happened on this adventure & some of the lessons I learned along the way! To kick things off, lets take a moment to appreciate the final Box Art for Phoenix Farm:

Looking back to our previous post, you can definitely 100% tell where a lot of the details in this final design came from. I very much wanted to chase after that stained glass look, check. I wanted a warmer color pallet to better reflect the idea of fire in the box design, check. and more than anything, I wanted the aesthetic of the game’s adorable creatures to be featured as much as possible, double check. The storytelling this box does almost entirely through imagery is without a doubt one of my better works, and it is hard to even identify how many critical small features were included into this design. Some notable symbolic details found on the front of the box include:

•All x6 phases of the Phoenix’s life are featured on the left side of the box in ascending order toward the stars, while all x6 tools needed to take care of the birds are found on the right parallel panel of the box.

•The box is simultaneously featuring Daytime and Nighttime (a featured mechanic in the game play is making strategic decisions during your day & night phases).

•The box features both an adult Phoenix & a group of Fireflies (their relationship is very important in both the game play & the lore story of Phoenix Farm).

I put as much love as I could possibly fit on the cover of this box, and the back cover is no less detailed. You simply have to hold the box in your hand and take in every single little detail of it to truly appreciate the depth that it brings, and I am very proud of the final result… there are so few things that I have designed where I can look back at it and have literally nothing I would change to make it better.

In a similar sense of pride is our final renditions of the Phoenix Farm Components Tray. As pictured above, we have here a significantly smoother design that requires so many less pieces than used to be needed for the game play.

This model takes on a totally different approach to the storage needs than the one that was featured in the previous iteration of the design journal, for, it is no longer trying to lay the pieces as close to the bottom of the box so all the cards can fit on top of it. In stead, this model is designed to rest next to all of the cards, only taking up half of the area within the published box.

When all of the pieces are stacked into it, they fit perfectly, with only about 0.5mm of give on any side. Not to mention, they look magnificent in the container itself:

The only major difference that took place between the version you see pictured here & the very last version of this box is that little magnets were designed into the container along the x4 corners & near the middle (between the coins). This change allowed us to add a lid onto the container with our logo on it that manages to hold every single piece of the game nice and snug in the box, even when moved around.

This addition of the magnets was the feature that sealed the deal of ‘completion’ on this design… but it set up a daunting task on our end of the production. Without knowing how many people might be interested in this components tray before our Kickstarter, and into our second season at the Connecticut Renaissance Faire, it very quickly became our goal in 2024 to create as many of these trays as possible. Here is what the final cadkey designs looked like before being printed:

From around the second week in April 2024, all the way until November of 2024, my Ender 3 v2s had exactly one job: make as many of these component trays as humanly possible. I would wake up every day, turn on the printer, then brush my teeth & start my morning. At exactly 1pm, 6pm, and 11pm it was my job to get back to the printer to detach a piece from the printer bed & start up another. The base pieces took about 5.5 hours to make, while the top lids took about 3.75. After 7 months of this process we made roughly x200 of the Phoenix Farm Component Trays, and we sold over x150 in that same time. To this day, I still craft them almost non-stop… they are such a useful add-on that it is hard to turn one down once you see how it works with the game (which is perfect).

And that pretty much seals the deal on todays topic for the Librarium Games Design Journal! I hope you enjoyed taking a look at my process here! Be sure to check back soon for our next entry in the design journal, where we will be talking about what it was like to bring this game to the public for some critical play testing experience!

Thank you again, and see you soon my friends!