❖ Version History ❖

1st of April – 26th of April, 2022
If you were following along in our last entry to the Design Journal, you would know that we spent a small eternity talking about the development process that went into the beginning of the box design for Calendra. We covered just about everything that one could imagine, but we concluded our journey when we hit the midpoint of finishing the box’s top half. Our story now continues onward into the landscape of the bottom tray designs.

Before we begin, you should note that the featured image up above was quite literally the only detail that existed upon the bottom of the box when it was first designed. There were not even side wall elements other than a single date stamp and company title. By this point in the process, we have already taken this box of text, the game’s date stamp, and the company title and added them into the box’s top design. As such, an entirely new formatting will have to be brought to the bottom, so let’s get going!

First. We need to assess what else needs to be shown on the box that we have not already covered. Additionally, we should question what we are to do with the interior walls of the box. Let’s start once again with some bullet points of necessary details that have not been covered as of yet:

❖ The game needs a UPC code, allowing it to be entered into retail store databases for inventory tracking, and possibly used by my own P.O.S. system in future sales situations.

❖ I need a QR code that links it to somewhere on the Librarium.games website

❖ There should be more content that helps describe the game itself

❖ There must be a label somewhere denoting that the game will be made in China

❖ The internal panels must draw intrigue about the game before play

It feels like a lot to start off with… but luckily the most important elements on this list are also items that can be made quite small, allowing us to hone in on more art development to catch the eye. However, unfortunately, almost every detail about the game needed for customer management (like the price codes and web links) must all appear on the bottom of the box somewhere, because these must be seen when the box is closed.

I consider this element the most important thing to get correct, so I begin the process of designing the box with these in mind to make certain that I don’t mess up the necessary spacing when including them. To do this, I need to acquire a barcode. So, I went shopping for a package of labels and also made the needed QR code as well (which I decided to link to the ‘About’ page for Calendra, which I will be working on from here forward.

These scannable logos look a little strange at first with respect to how they are spaced along the bottom of the area for the design (because they are different sizes, heights & widths), but I decide to fix this by throwing another small Librarium Games logo on the bottom tray here to help draw the eye away from the codes. In this same area, I threw in the “Made in China” necessary text for publication and found that we had a great deal of packed info that rounds out the needs of the box in a mere 1″ x 3.5″ area.

So now what do we do with this huge 4″ x 3.5″ area that we are left with? Well… time to start making some more of my classic note doodles:

After making the top half of the box contain the ‘fable lore’ about Calendra, which is merely a single sentence nursery rhyme styled statement, I felt that there could be an expanded version of this somewhere in the game design… like a short story from which the other lore statement is merely a paraphrase or a quotation.

I also felt that showing a table of gameplay on the back of this box goes against the grain of how I want this box to be seen on a shelf. My goal here is much more about getting something visually beautiful and intriguing in front of the customer’s eye, and much less about trying to be visually similar to the rest of the industry, which has a “business / sales” initiative behind their shelf representation more than an “art” representation.

I essentially want the customer to see this weird magical looking item on the shelf, see the depth of story that it has to share, and be drawn into buying the product just to see what lore is still undiscovered inside of the box. I want the same feeling to be evoked as when one first holds the Rider-Waite Tarot box in their hands… knowing that there is a world of mystery behind these cards.

But yes, in any event, though the above doodle is merely a rough draft of the concept I am interested in, I love the direction it is heading and spend the better part of the next week or so converting the designs over to digital until I land upon this:

As an underlying bit of subtle lore that went into the design of the box bottom tray, I specifically wanted the color pallet of the top of the box to be more warm colors and rainbows, but I wanted the bottom half of the box to almost feel toxic and rotten in color to represent the ambitions of the Ferric uprising.

Also, for anyone who is wondering, ‘Fado’ is the Irish word used at the beginning of a fairy tale, like the English rendition of “Long ago”.

At this point, I am very happy with the progress on the bottom box design. We have almost everything we need the customer to see down here, and beautifully in place to boot! But we still have the four internal walls to sort out… and to be honest… I am starting to run a little bit dry on inspiration for what else I can do to decorate this box. You know what this means though, right? Time to start reaching out to the other fun creative people in my life in search of inspiration!

I start by getting on the phone with Ben in the second week of April and we have a good long chat about the direction and progress being made on Calendra. I also call up many of the other people who have been involved in the play testing with the game to see if they have any interesting ideas or input as to what should go on with this 4-wall landscape.

There are a lot of interesting and cool ideas in the air. Some people suggest just having the whole area dedicated to art, like hieroglyphics style with all of the rune symbols and logos from the game all sprawled out. Other people jest having descriptions of the rules or the powers in the game to showcase how some of the features work. And other even still have made points about spreading even more lore into this area of the design.

I love all of the ideas and all of the suggestions, but I don’t know how to make it all work or fit. My ideas are too big for the space. Then something interesting occurs to me, for, when considering the rule text suggestion I realize that there are only six powers that exist within the game… and I am pretty sure that I can find some way to divide the longer lengths of the box into two smaller areas, creating six total similarly shaped boxes… So I once again grab the doodle pen and start jotting down some ideas:

Quite literally as soon as I start jotting down notes for what I would use for text in these areas, I am starting to see the imagery of the design form in my head, and I am starting to get hyped about how this might look when decorated a bit better. To explain the goal that I am now shooting for, remember that though there are 11 different rune shaped cards in Calendra they all share one or more of 6 basic powers. What I want to do now is essentially explain each of the six powers in the game… but not in how they are used in the game necessarily.

In stead, what I am hoping for is to create a lore-history behind why these powers appear in the hands of such different characters in the game, from the perspective of the story telling rather than the way that these powers act in gameplay. My notes above are the initial ideas behind how I will achieve this, but I takes me another week or so to get them graphically included onto the box and balance having the text refined as well.

After some serious effort, we end up with these six beautiful designs:

I don’t know what it is about the concept of telling story’s like this about the game that quite literally nothing to do with the game play that draws upon so much of my love, but I am so very happy with how these have turned out. Overall, the narratives are in tact, they help support the meaning behind everything, but they don’t take away or distract from the experience of the game at all. I love that it feels almost like there is a whole realm, or storybook that is the origin of Calendra, but really it is all told through ten really short sentences. It’s perfect.

Of course, I am saying all of this after nearly an entire additional week of releasing every single word of these descriptions and making tiny adjustments until I really am happy (and then even a few more after that for good measure). But yes, I think at this point we can consider Calendra’s box design officially complete.

This leaves us with exactly one major unfinished task that will be going into the graphic design side of Calendra: finalizing the Rule Book. So be sure to check in next time on the Design Journal to see how the process refining those horrid rule pages to perfection goes!