❖ Version History ❖

5th of July, 2020
Previously in Calendra, we had just come to terms with the name and title behind our fifth season in the game: “Ferric”. We chose it for a variety of reasons, all in hopes to enhance the flavor and overall theme of our game. Some of the key points in this decision making process were:

‘Ferrous’ is Latin for ‘Iron’, and ‘Ferric Oxide’ is the terminology for ‘Rust’.

–::– The Iron is important to our theme because it is commonly referenced in fairy tales that iron is particularly poisonous / effectively damaging to faeries.

–::– The Rust is important to our theme because we wanted this term to refer to a special new season that falls somewhere between the real seasons of the year. We thought it was a cool idea to consider the Ferric season as the last stage of Autumn right before Winter, when all the leaves have fallen from the trees and begun to disintegrate into the earth, but before the world has become frozen by snow and ice.

–::– The concept of iron turning to rust is also the implication we wanted to symbolize when considering what a war against the other seasons would feel like to the inhabitants of this world. If suddenly iron/rusting faeries began an attack against faeries of winter, spring, summer, and autumn, they would prevail over any of them unless a unified front could be formed, which is what we want the end of the game to feel like fore the player.

To help symbolize this concept with text, I thought it would be a nice idea to write some sort of story about the Ferric season. This concept was originally a plan I had for another short book in the game (perhaps I will come back to this concept some day?) but instead of a full book, I wrote a small piece of fairy tale poetry instead:

Winter, Spring, Summer, and Fall,
But Ferric is the worst of them all.
An Iron season of rust and wilt,
between the Autumn Harvest and the Winter Quilt.
Prevent this war amongst the Fae,
By Balancing the seasons to save the day!

This was one of the first major additions to the theme in the game ever since the character names and other terms were selected for the prototype. But it still did not feel like enough…. so I began considering how I might turn to the artwork in this representation instead…. but we will discuss this in our next entry of Design Journal.