❖ Version History ❖

August – November, 2024
At last. The nightmares of accomplishing our third game release with Phoenix Farm has come to an end! The game has finally gone out to all of our Kickstarter Backers, and our seasonal shop at the Connecticut Renaissance Festival is finally open for business!

Now that we have finished the narrative of running our crowdfunding campaign, let’s send Phoenix Farm off with one last spectacular narrative about how everything went at the ren faire this year. Because, let’s be honest, we need one last happy ending tale full of fun designs and stories to close this chapter of the Design Journal!

So, of course, what design elements actually went into the setup of the shop you might ask? Well, for starters, we needed to step up our game this year a bit from how things went the last time we were here. This being our second season at the Renaissance Festival, we are lucky to know some things about how everything works here and what to expect (and of course, we now know our shortcomings from comparing our year one shop to others last year!).

One of the biggest differences that I had hoped for was to establish better signage for our shop. We at no point in time during our last visit had a sign telling people walking by what we were up to. This isn’t the greatest for hitting sales (though I do suppose it adds quite a bit of intrigue). Long story short though, we needed a banner for our store, and much more importantly, a banner for Phoenix Farm of course! This is our debut game this year after all! So, with some quick work earlier in August, we got some very nice new banners made to hang at the shop! Check them out! (bed used for scale):

Though these were a bit of a rush job, the banners came out absolutely wonderfully! The store name banner was literally 1’x7′ long and was looking great for what we might need to drape along the front end of the shop. The Phoenix Farm Banner looks as good as it does because it is a direct scale up from the original size! The initial design was 3.5″x5.5″, and it was scaled up to 3.5’x5.5′!

When building the store, I made sure to highlight the Phoenix Farm Banner nicely framed in the back of the shop, with the store banner up front above where all the merchandise would be, but still under the protection of the roof, to help prevent damage from the rain! After everything was thrown together with the walls & our old banner set from the Calendra release, here is how it all turned out!

Don’t those banners look great? (and comically smaller now that they are in the space they belong in!). From far away, with how the light hits the Phoenix Farm Banner, it literally looks exactly like the game box. We got many compliments on the stained glass look of this banner hanging in the background, and it was a definite eye-catch even for people who had no interest in the games we were selling!

And, as you may have noticed in this image above, we also had a major upgrade to our shop menus. In the year prior, these menus were simply black and white, with little to no eye catch whatsoever. They were simply there to give people an idea of the prices in the shop and that is it. This time around I made sure to get them much more colorful, with much nicer designs, and a more interesting font. Here’s a more clear image of the menu:

It was all coming together, but then there was one more surprise design element that we got offered by another vendor at the fair! The fellows over at the pewter smith shop sent out an email to everyone else who was planning on participating as a vendor for 2024, and offered up their services to create a custom set of metal badges for each employee of shops that wanted to buy them.

Personally, I though this idea was spectacular. As soon as I heard about it, I was in. The badges were pretty affordable as well. They were going for $25 each, and you could opt in for gold backed ones (for store owners) and silver backed ones (for store employees). This would make you very identifiable as one of the vendors to other vendors at the fair, while also maintaining a stylish look that suited the aesthetic of the medieval times.

With some conversations back and forth between me and the pewter team, I managed to send them our logo, and the font we use for our store name so that we could get these made:

With the banners, the badges, the menus, and the inventory all finally assembled, we were absolutely ready to go… and what a time it was. This 2024 season at the Renaissance Festival was officially the moment in the Librarium Games History Book that I began feeling successful as a business owner. We had incredibly good reception, people loved the games, our store was ransacked every day with new customers & returning customers, and there was plenty of love to go around.

There were a few incredible moments that took place this year that I will never forget, and luckily we got some great images to share these memories:

First up, ON OPENING DAY we had our favorite reviewer team come to visit us! This blew my mind. They saw that we were going to be at a Renaissance Festival near by (and they had literally just moved to near we live from the other side of the country), and they said ” we gotta go meet them in person!”. Talk about honorific moments in business ownership!

But that’s not all! In our third or fourth week at the fair, we were visited by a lovely lady who had shopped with us the year before and purchased one of my hand made “spell books” which contain the original content for the Librarium Games Lore Font! In the time between last year and this year, she had started documenting her DnD campaign in the book and specifically returned to the fair to share the results with us!

And then to put some icing on the cake, we also had another visit from a whole group of people who loved our shop from 2023. They had gone home with a copy of Calnedra, and they loved it so much that they came back to the fair in 2024 DRESSED AS THE FIVE SEASONS FROM THE GAME!!!! I promise you, I had never blushed harder than I did in the moment when this group came running up to get my attention and show off their incredible garb. THEY EVEN HAD A FERRIC COSPLAYER!

Needless to say, between the success of getting Phoenix Farm finished with only 48 hours before opening day, the incredible interactions we had, and the overwhelming success of the store this year, I can only be completely content and proud of Ben, of Aimee, of Aya, of all our friends & family, and of myself for making it through this. Phoenix Farm had a journey unlike anything else in my life up until this point, and it was a dream bringing it to life.

While I am of course sad to be writing the very last tale for the Phoenix Farm Design Journal entries right now, I am also so excited to be finished though. We have even more incredible game design coming your way real soon my friends, and I cannot wait to share it with you! So, for today, I hope you enjoyed catching up on the last of the Phoenix Farm adventure, and please please please stay tuned for our next epic adventure in the one and only Librarium Games Design Journal! Thank you so very much for reading!