❖ Version History ❖

June, 2021
In-between our last entry to the Phoenix Farm Design Journal and this day, six months have passed. One major reason for this is that my every day life for that timeframe was completely consumed by The Great Chase. Another major reason behind that timeline was the creation of the Librarium Games website that you are now enjoying!

Throughout the entire winter of 2021, I had been learning about how to develop this website, and I was trying very much to think of what services it might be able to provide to our customer base. I knew that information about our games was going to have to live here on the internet… but I wanted very much for the Librarium Games website to have a function that was fun for our customers as well.

I didn’t want to be an information-only boring husk of a ‘company website’. I want this to be a place you would want to come to! A place with interactive options, a place to read this journal & learn, a home for other resources like videos & rule books, and overall I wanted to make this a fulfilling community based experience!

Well. While I was in the process of doing all of that, something amazing happened. I discovered a way to create a player-to-maker experience with our game titles! An option where a player could submit scores and game notes about their game nights, both for themselves, and for us to enjoy together! Today, we are going to hone in on that creation, how it happened, and how it works!

So, as you can clearly see from the featured image of this post up above, today’s topic is the Librarium Games Score Calculator for Phoenix Farm! Last time we were here, we discussed our (slightly confusing) new process for scoring a game of Phoenix Farm, and we highlighted the fact that it was frustrating that we couldn’t have a dedicated ‘calculator’ to tabulate these scores for the player and make it easier to track everything.

In the weeks that came after that last brainstorm, I had been learning about how to add a ‘contact form’ onto the website so that customers had a way that they could reach out to us. When I was researching the options for contact forms on WordPress, I made the very interesting discovery that the contact form could literally “Do Calculations” for you based on information submitted to the form when it is filled out.

The moment I made this discovery, I completely stopped everything that I was doing. My very first thought was that I could use this to track the Phoenix Farm scores Ben and I were generating, AND I would be able to post this publicly on the website, so that we could both use the calculator, and have the scores emailed to us both.

Unfortunately, I ran into many issues. I didn’t think it was going to be possible in the end, because the calculation is 1-step more confusing than the forms would allow me to make. As a result, I actually developed the score calculator for The Great Chase in this timeframe, because the calculation is one step easier, and completely functional. But by the time that June had rolled around, I had run into new problems with my contact form and needed to build a new format. This is when I finally found Forminator (an upgraded plug-in for WordPress that allows you to make better contact forms).

This, my friends, was the missing ingredient. Forminator allows you to do slightly more advanced calculations with the data in its form, and this was the key that I needed to make the official Librarium Games Website Score Calculators. The front-facing user interface is shown above… but how it works is infinitely more complicated! So, let’s take a peak under the hood, and see how this whole thing works!

The Phoenix Farm Score Calculator

So. What does this thing do, how does it work, and why?

1. This form uses Player Data, organizes it, and turns it into an email that tells a small story about the game that you just played!

2. It is set up to be modulated based on how many people are playing, and every possible variable that matters in each players score. It then uses this data to send you an update about the game you played & emails me on the back end so that I can track the data as well. The data that I track is meant to specifically track score tabulations over large periods of time. (basically larger format play-testing information).

3. We want this to exist for a few reasons: It helps us make the game better, and allows us to track our own data in an easy way. It also allows players to be an interactive part of our design process and gives us a better interface for play testing data to be tracked! But most importantly, in every game that I ever played growing up, we kept a small score pad in the box of our gaming history together, and I want our players of the future to be able to keep these same kind of cheesy notes, because they are so much fun to look back on in the future.

So, here are the guts behind the scenes of how it works!
First off, the equation:

When I really set out to make this thing, I truly needed to revisit the mechanics of basic algebra. The order of operations is so important to the success of this tool! The concept is easy, but the execution is a little bit more confusing.

(Player 1: Feathers/(6- Player 1: Phoenixes) = Player 1’s Gold Buying Power.

This is the hardest concept for the score calculation.
It tells us how many feathers a player would have been able to spend on their final turn to buy gold. This number is then added to that player’s total number of gold pieces and phoenixes that have been raised through maturity.

But beyond the calculation itself, we need to collect all the necessary data from the game as well, so that numbers can be plugged into the equation. This requires four fields of data per player, up to possibly six total players.
As a result we get this dizzying chart of data:

This slice of the chart gathers the player game-data necessary…
but this is not the end of the road. We actually need a couple other ingredients too…

Ideally, we want to allow each person to be named in the game
(Rather than player 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, & 6)

And if possible, we want each player to get the email from the game if they want it!
(Rather than just the host getting the email & needing to forward it to everyone)

And finally, we want the chart to be modified based on player count
(Rather than expecting every game to be a 6-player game)
This allows us to reduce the number of fields shown based on total players, and makes it a much nicer chart to look at / fill in when you need to use it!

Because of this, we now have to add 13 other fields to the chart:

Once all of this was built we just needed to test it all out!

It took about 100 tries of resetting the data and the calculations to get all of the numbers to be be aligned correctly… but luckily we finally got it to work exactly as needed!

The final, most exciting piece of the form, are how the results are processed. When the form is submitted, anywhere between 2-7 emails are sent out, based on how many players were in the game.

One of those emails goes to each and every player who played the game (if they opted in to have the score sent to them when the form was filled out)

And one email is sent directly to my business email address. This email is used to help us track all of the final results in the game in a quickly digestible format, where the individual player emails are a bit more thematic and fun!

here are the two results:

It is amazing how such a small idea can work out to being such a complex result! I never imagined how difficult it would be in the end to score this game in this way…

But as we had discussed at the top end of today’s post, the whole purpose of this project was to bring all of us a little bit closer together. To give the player the ability to track their score in a fun new way, and a chance for us to utilize those experiences toward something that could truly benefit the function of this and other future games!

I am sure that only a few people will even end up using this calculator by comparison to my expectations, and even fewer of you will take the time to read these notes on how it all got created, but I hope that those of you who like this stuff get the very most out of what we can produce for you over here at Librarium Games!

Be sure to tune back in next time for our next update on the creation of more prototype artwork for Phoenix Farm! ~ It is finally time that I myself made a prototype of the game!