❖ Version History ❖
July-August, 2024
By now, we have about 90% of the plan completed with our official publication of Phoenix Farm. We have successfully Kickstarted our missing budget, we have initiated our printing process & manufacturing process with the game & its accessories, now all we have left to do is create this lore book that we promised our backers for crossing over the $10,000 mark in our campaign.
If you have been following along the Phoenix Farm Design Journal journey for a long while now, you may recall back to episode #19 :: “Secret Cipher Origin”, where we discussed our first attempts at designing a lore-based language cipher for Librarium Games. The purpose of this secret script was to initiate our plan to slowly but surely leak lore about Phoenix Farm through our website and our social media throughout 2023 to keep our audience engaged while we figured out the rest of the game design process.
The result of this crazy Easter-Egg idea resulted in a short story that Ben & I composed that slowly but surely grew every single one of the 52 weeks of 2023. By the end of December, we actually had a full-fledged 60 page book. Our goal now was to officially produce this book as a small hard-cover fairy tale with a secret scripted epilogue for our most engaged fan base. But this is a lot easier said than done. Publishing a book is a huge process that is very time consuming & expensive. So, today we embark to tell the epic narrative that was completing this side quest!
To begin, let’s first recall just how crazy we must be to create the font necessary to even make this book possible! The Librarium Lore Text Font design includes 200+ ligatures and specialized symbols to make the text look like it was written with the flow of a magic hand. Here are some spectacular images to help showcase what I mean:
Designing this font to be capable of being not only typed, but also legible when printed was a huge effort to undertake. However, I consider it to be a truly necessary step to making this book the way that it should be made. It should look & feel like a genuinely unique magical tome when flipped through by any normal person, and ideally, draw their intrigue enough to entice them to keep a copy for their own archives. And frankly, it was so worth it to make the font in the end, because it is simply fun to type in once you get familiar with it for a bit! Here are the showcase of images that came with the font once we got it ready to be sold:
Truly, the hardest part about making the book was making sure that this font was going to turn out okay. Once the characters were working in a way that we were satisfied with, we simply needed to implement the font in the correct places to fill out the book with all the fun and beautiful sideline illustrations. The end of each chapter could happily feature some of the illustrated symbols from the text in a much larger size so that they may more properly be enjoyed, but each page number could also have tiny versions of the same in order to make the book more fun to read!
But of course, nothing would top hiding a whole entire small chapter for our customers to wonder about for years to come! Of course, not everyone is invested enough in the secret cipher to do the work of translating the book, but those who are carry the extra special bit of the story that they know they have earned, and that is something I yearned to offer our fans. It was my greatest pleasure to add these pages into the book:
And as you may have noticed, we used the same illustrations for the book as were featured on the website when the pages were all being released in code. This was done entirely on purpose from day one, because, the illustrations were meant to be represented as if they were being drawn into the book by the protagonist of the story throughout its duration (like a journal being told as a story). When the images were being drawn for the first version, I truly tried my best to have them ready for the final publication as well. And, as a bit of an interesting secret I will share with you here, these doodles were done on the receipt paper used for the printers at the restaurant I work for. I drew them on this paper because I love the way that the ink smudges. It creates many, if not most of the details shown in each drawing. And to me, they look like my own journals and notebooks, which is why I was so excited to share them in this way (rather than the perfected style of digital art used for the card and game designs).
Though this was an almost entirely break-even sort of product for us that was primarily a labor of love, it was so completely worth it. While making the board games is truly an unforgettable experience, and seeing them published is an incredible achievement, there is nothing that strokes the sensation of the soul than having your own hard covered book delivered to your home for the first time. and with only a few weeks left before the day to mail the games out to our first customers, it was simply the best day ever when the books finally arrived:
And once everything was finally settled with the Phoenix Farm Kickstarter process, it was a privilege to finally offer our remaining stock of this book on our website for future friends to find & enjoy. If you happen to be reading this post and wish to shop for the book, be sure to check out this link to the Phoenix Farm Hard Cover Lore Book!
And so, this will conclude today’s storytime for the Librarium Games Design Journal… but be sure to check back soon, because we still have one crazy & bumpy ride to make it through before our journey is finally complete with the Phoenix Farm Kickstarter! And as always, thank you for reading!
