❖ Version History ❖

A Quick Note Before We Begin:

For those of you avid readers of this absurd Librarium Games Design Journal that I write, you will know very well by now that we have some interesting overlap between the dates and times of our various projects. As has now become somewhat of a tradition, I begin the very first entry of each game’s design journal with a quick recap of where exactly we are in the timeline, as, this adventure is started almost a year and a half before the end of the Phoenix Farm Design Journey!

So, what’s happening behind the scenes here…
Well. “Project Silkmoth” as it was initially called (for about one day or so) begins in the summertime of 2023. This is almost exactly one year after the publication of Calendra, about a month before we found out we would be a part of the Connecticut Renaissance Fair, and about a year or so before the publication of Phoenix Farm.

This, ironically, is the first game that we are intending to publish that we came up with AFTER we decided that we were going to begin the company of Librarium Games. The Great Chase, Calendra, & Phoenix Farm all began before I ever even filed for an LLC with the state… But don’t worry, we still have at least two games that we intend to publish some day that still come from our incredible pandemic catalogue of game ideas. We will be coming back to those some day, and that’s when the Librarium Games Design Journal will get really interesting with the dates and times!

But that is enough rambling backstory!
It’s time to begin a new adventure!
And this one is crazy…
(because you know, we’re always up to something crazy over here!)
~But seriously, we’ve never made a game like this & I’m excited to share!~

July 14th, 2023
Here I am… at possibly one of the worst intersections of the Librarium’s history. The imposter syndrome is… severe on this day. I specifically remember this time so well because we had successfully pulled off our very own Kickstarter for Calendra around this time the year before, but to be honest, other than our Kickstarter, and our visit to the Yule Festival, there were very very few sales of the game.

I had applied to several event spaces over the winter of this past year, and none of them had gotten back to me. I was starting to fear that we were going to really struggle on making any sort of income for the company, which was a massively depressing situation to face. This was especially bad, because Phoenix Farm was coming along so well in its design, but I was…. shall we say: “Absolutely Certain” that it would never exist unless we could somehow pull together a miracle of at least $10,000 of income (note: the ren fair would get back to us literally two weeks from now & change our lives forever, hence our continued existence as a company!).

And so, on this morning, waking up at my girlfriend’s house with a plan to take our dogs over to the dog park with the weight of the world on my mind, I was not terribly happy at first when I saw Ben’s name appear on my caller i.d.

The classic “Good Morning Mr. Wizard” came through my speaker, and I knew exactly what words were going to follow that: “I made another game, you see” in his classic ‘cigar smoking’ old timey movie voice. I pulled the phone away from my face & sighed, knowing full well in my depressive state of the moment that we are looking down the barrels of bankruptcy… but somehow I pulled myself together and let the ramble begin: “Hit me” I say, always unsure of where this will go next!

“So, I’ve been doing some research on Silk Moth & Silk Production history from China, and I think there’s a pretty good game to be had here”. ~ I am unimpressed. I ask him what exactly he has in mind… and he continues: “So, it will be exactly like Phoenix Farm, but different. We will take care of silk worms through different stages of their lives until they are ready to produce silk, then we sell the silk for clothes that we present to the empress of China… Most fashionable outfit wins!”.

Now, at this point in the chat, I am almost completely checked out (I am the worst… if you are going to pitch an idea to me, please understand that you will need maximum level patience as I tear the idea apart). I tell Ben that I find the fashion design idea interesting, especially because I am always immediately on board with clever color based mechanics… but I think that the idea of trying to replicate Phoenix Farm is a really bad idea, and the games would have to be dramatically different from one another if you want to impress me. I then went on to explain to Ben that I think we are going to bankrupt if we can’t come up with a plan to make sales this year anyway, get us both depressed and leave it at that.

Luckily, Ben is resilient.

He went on to make the prototype anyway, which is the image featured at the top of this post. I had already planned on seeing him for some reason or another later this week, so he wanted to try and impress me when he had the chance to swing past my house.

The first time we sat down to play this model of the game went comically bad and great all in the same instance. The way that he had the game set up was… almost entirely non-functional… but finally I was starting to see into the same dream that he had seen when he first called me up, and this is the miracle that makes Ben & my relationship work so damn well.

By the end of the first play test, I told him verbatim: “I see where we are going with this now, but I want to make about 1,000 changes”. And of course, Ben did that classic furled smile like the Grinch and said “Then my job here is done”. And so it was, that Royal Threadcount was born… and boy oh boy did my mind go off on a DEEP tangent for the days that followed this. Later that very evening, I started putting together my notes while I was at work, and though I have come back to write on this paper a few times since it was originally created, this was my very first set of notes on the game:

As almost a gift of this moment in the timeline, I do not yet know that I am about to embark on a crazy journey to survive becoming a part of the CT Renaissance Festival…. so at the moment I “think” that I have free time… especially since Phoenix Farm isn’t really going anywhere at the moment either.

This miracle pocket of time lasts for almost exactly one week from where we are in the history book right now… and what I get done in this week is going to take up the next 7-10 stories in the Librarium Games Design Journal. So, sit back, relax, and get ready for some wild & crazy narratives ahead my friends! I hope you are as excited as I am, and as always thank you for reading!