❖ Version History ❖

November, 2020
As a continuation of our discussion on the earliest art direction of Phoenix Farm from the last Design Journal entry, we are back today to discuss the first thoughts that I had toward the card layout.

This conversation, as akin to our last post, unfortunately concludes with unfinished work. During this time I had been juggling several different projects at once, and I was running thin on how much time I could realistically dedicate to Phoenix Farm. But! This means nothing about how much I wanted to work on the game. This post is here to show how deeply I had been scheming ideas behind the future work I would do when the time finally came that I could focus on this project!

So, even though I had been focused on The Great Chase at this exact moment in time, here are the few shreds of Phoenix Farm work that I could get in at the time!

At this point, I was almost certain that Phoenix Farm would be a game that we would one day publish, and I wanted to make it look a bit nicer than the totally unorganized prototype that we had been running with for the previous month or two. I genuinely love Ben’s artwork, but I literally cannot help myself from making this a bit more in my visual aesthetic! Additionally, it was becoming more and more apparent that we were going to need a second copy of the game (so that we could both be play testing it at home, since we live about sixty miles apart from each other).

In the featured image above, we see what is essentially my very first attempt at throwing together some graphics for the card layout. I built this image with two things in mind:

1. The only information on the card are the details that were currently written on the front facing designs of Ben’s prototype. These were simply: The Name, The Image, and, The Reward that you got for unlocking this phase of the Phoenix. I wanted to try and figure out what else needed to exist in this space, but I always start by making a direct translation of the original design to accomplish this.

2. I want the illustration and the color of the card to coexist. By this, I mean that I pictured the whole card would look like the heat and smoke of a fire, and the illustration of the bird itself would almost just be a wireframe. I very much liked the idea of the color bleeding through the design.

There was something else very important to me about the concept of the creature design though: The History of the Phoenix. This is what originally had me hooked on the idea of the game. I know for a fact that unicorns, mermaids, elves, goblins, and all manor of other creatures have a huge stemming origin in cultural mythology, but I don’t know many sources in media that highlight the phoenix the way that we want to, and I felt very inspired to explore that opportunity!

Many different cultures have shared these stories of mythological creatures for thousands of years, and the Phoenix happens to be one of these creatures that has been depicted in a huge variety of ways. Before I had even conceived of the doodle I have showcased above, I did an image search for hundreds of different phoenix images, just to see what was out there, and what physiological features seemed to be consistent. Here is a very small snapshot of what I had found along that journey:

As you can see in this gallery above, there are many many sources of inspiration on what a phoenix might look like… but there are also some magnificent similarities to these creature designs too!

Physiologically, we are working with:
Chickens, Turkeys, Pheasants, Peacocks, Hawks, and Eagles to name a few
(Almost always prominent Talons, Beaks, and especially Tail Feathers)
(Also very typically a flying bird, or in flight. Never Young…)

Color Scheme:
Warm color pallets to reflect fire (though there were many blue examples too!)

Environment:
Almost always shown with some depiction of the sun, nature, or fire!
(Frequently on destroyed trees interestingly enough)

The photos above are mostly from old books, coins, statues, or other ancient references. There are also a large variety of modern depictions of Phoenixes… but I want to be super clear in mentioning that the objective here was to find these origin depictions as the source for our inspiration, because we want this game to feel like it is from a time long long forgotten.

As mentioned at the start of this story though, this is a bit of an “unfinished” piece in my production notes. I say this because, at this point in time, though I had done all of this research and got myself particularly excited, the featured image at the top of this post is as far as I ever got in the art design at the time!

While it may not feel like much though, this lead us in a very important direction. When I hit this point, I sent the doodled image over to Ben alongside a big slice of my source images, and I had told him about how I wish I had the time to make a second prototype of the game so that we could both be playing it! This set off one of the most unexpected outcomes in the designing of Phoenix Farm: Aimee Hudon’s art inspiration! ~ tune back in for our next installment of The Librarium Games Design Journal to see how that played out!