❖ Version History ❖

December, 2023 – January, 2024
With the rule book for Phoenix Farm coming together toward a completed state, we are entering into the home stretch of the design process for the game. We have: the cards, the components, the rules, the box, and a budget coming together for the publication process. Now it is time to start engaging in the marketing tools that we can use to promote the fundraising of the game. This specifically revolves around accessories that we can use to enhance the shopping experience.

So far, we have two really great accessories designed that we have already talked about plenty with the “Magic Dice Jar” & the “Components Tray”, but this is not even remotely enough for what we need in our Kickstarter shopping cart to design a “deluxe package” for our customers. This of course begs the question: What else would we want? What else can we make? and why should our customers go for these things?

Well, one feature that I was particularly excited about chasing after ever since the creation of Calendra was a new set of collectible pins! These were not only a blast to make, but they were nice & affordable, and always make for a great eye-catching display in our store for cheap bonus items to shop for. Not to mention, the pins are such a good place to feature the design symbols that we create in order for the game to exist in the first place.

So of course, I got to the designing process, prepped our ideas for the pins & sent them over to the manufacturer to get some quotes on what we might be able to afford. Once the idea is submitted, they have to send us back a proof to see how the colors are going to work out for the final designs. Here is the first proof that we received:

Upon first glance, these look “Good”. They are not quite what I was hoping for in some ways, because some of the colors are off from my initial requests, and more importantly, there are some changes to the ‘black’ layer that I particularly don’t like. For example, take a look at the pin on the top left of the image above. This pin has a big black area in the top right corner of the nest area that would look terrible in the final print. Additionally, a lot of the line placements for this nest area & in the feathers are too thin & misshapen for the look I want in the final design.

So of course, we have some discussion with the people who prepared the prototype design, we worked on the kinks a bit, and then we got a second round of feedback. That one did not fix everything either, so we do a second round of edits & finally come back with a third set of schematics that ended up looking like this:

As you can see here after a few rounds of edits, the designs are looking a lot cleaner toward what we wanted. The colors are more vibrant, and the pins are much more clearly different from one another in color pallet than they were in the original design. Additionally, the line work is so much smoother and more natural looking than they were in the original prototype.

Personally, I was happy with how these were turning out. And, though we are still a few months away from the phase where we are planning to launch the game on Kickstarter, now is actually the right time to purchase the pins. Even though things very well might not work out with funding the game, the pins are luckily low enough in cost that we can afford the buy them at this phase in the process specifically because we can utilize this very heavily in our photography prep for the fundraising (see the featured image above).

This all being said, I made our purchase through the pin manufacturer. Amazingly, the turn around time on this is crazy fast… it only takes about a week and a half for the pins to be made & shipped, so before it is even the end of January, we have the pins in hand!

The next thing that I need to spruce up the design of the pins is to prepare some backing cards. Backing cards are an expensive process if you add them to your manufacturing order, so I try to make these myself. This can be such a great way to cut costs on the production of something like this, especially if you use the right tricks! My super special secret that I will share with you readers of the Design Journal today is that we actually print our backing cards in black& white to save a ton of money on ink… but we print onto colored paper to make everything stand out in a beautiful way when the pins & cards are combined! Here is the result of that process:

After everything is said and done, I am in love with these pins. They are so cute, and I am so excited to add them to the collection of Phoenix Farm goodies that we are in the process of assembling!

As another hilarious Design Journal secret that I will mention regarding these photographs above, I am personally very happy with the trick we employed to make these tiny cards look like they are floating above the background. Have you noticed how we did it? ~ We made a tiny stand to hold the pins out of a twig that matched the background foliage! hah! It was the simplest, stupidest idea, but it worked so well.

And now that is one more big ticket item checked off the list for our prep of Phoenix Farm. But this is by no means the end of our journey for designing more good marketing materials. We have at least three more ideas like this that we are going to expand upon in the coming entries of the Librarium Games Design Journal, so be sure to tune back in some time soon! And as always, thanks for tuning in!