❖ Version History ❖
15th of May, 2022
As of right now, The Design Journal is still in a bit of a… simultaneous timeline storytelling mode. If you’ve been paying any attention to the dates at the start of these entries… well… I’m sorry. For a while we skipped ahead with the actual graphic design narrative of finishing out the final artwork for the Rule Book and for the Box Design. However, as we discussed in our last chapter, we were also haggling with manufacturers throughout all of March, April, May, and June of 2022.
So, after getting the box graphically designed, but before finishing the rule design, we had one last development phase to the box that was completely centric to the trials and tribulations behind the production conversation (which is why we have saved this post for now). But.. why is there a whole tale dedicated to the box as a part of the manufacturing phase you ask? Well, take a good look at the picture above and see if you can identify the issue before we continue…
Have you figured it out? Or at least taken a guess?
Well, if you happened to guess the divider shape placed inside of the box, you win today my friend! That little divider has been a hilarious controversy in the creation of this game, and today we are going to discuss why.
So what happened here exactly?
Well, in the outreach that I had to manufacturers, I had been describing the components necessary for Calendra as: a Deck of 124 Cards, an 8-Page Rulebook, and a Box. However, one detail that I started adding to my discussion early on in the price negotiations was a question about whether it would be possible to add some sort of tray to the box in order to keep the cards in place.
I had been so inquisitive about this detail in particular because I have been carrying around different versions of a Calendra prototype in my backpack for nearly two years now… and to be honest, unless the cards are all bound together somehow, it is really frustrating when you open the box and a bunch of the cards have meshed into one fat messy pile, since there is nothing to keep the two stacks of cards separated from one another.
Luckily, in the circumstances of manufacturing, adding components like this very doable. However, just because something can be done doesn’t mean that it will work out quite how you pictured. My big hurdle when it came to this was price. When I asked about adding a tray to each set box of the game, it was coming in at nearly .30-.40 cents extra in the manufacturing costs. And I know that doesn’t sound like much to you at first… but this is adding nearly 5% to the total cost of the production… like an additional $500.
While I definitely want the tray in the game to enhance the overall quality of the final product, I don’t know if I can legitimately justify the cost impact it would have on the game in the end. And realistically… I couldn’t wrap my head around the situation as a whole… why would cards be so inexpensive, but adding a piece of cardstock to the box design drive up the price so much??
Back and forth I asked about this cost, asked if there were any way to drive it down, and for literally 20 emails of discussion I begged for a solution where it seemed there were no better answers. That is… until I was finally sent a photo of the tray the manufacturer was hoping to charge me this price for:
When I was sent this photograph, I literally sat at my computer for a moment and laughed out loud. After taking a moment to compose myself, I immediately wrote back to my contact at the manufacturing facility to talk about this image. This plastic tray, while certainly nice looking (and definitely high quality), is completely not what I had been asking for, and was the root of a nearly two month long conversation/argument of “Telephone Confusion” just like we discussed in the potential issues of working across language barriers last time on the Design Journal.
Now. how are we going to resolve this?
Writing back to the manufacturers, I told them that there had been some miscommunication somewhere along the line of what I needed in the box design, and that we need to rework the skeleton of how this product will be constructed. I also relayed how it was clear to me that certain elements of this conversation simply cannot be translated via text, and that I would be getting back to them very shortly with some images to help explain my point.
Running downstairs in my home at this point, I grab the white prototype box, a stack of cards, and the rule book from The Great Chase manufacturing process (because it is identical in shape and size to the box we are designing for Calendra). I then also grab a stack of computer paper and start doing some serious measurements. I need to find out exactly how tall I need the divider to be, and I need to know how much width it will be dividing the cards by. I then also needed to assess what the total length of the unfolded material is, and make note of where within the lengths of the total material each fold must be made to recreate the item I am crafting. Once I get a halfway decent paper version of this concept made, I take a whole bunch of pictures:
This is the exact basic shape and scale that I need the material to be added as the floor of the box design, in order to keep the cards from shuffling while the box is closed.
This image is conveying how the skeletal divider would look from the side from “within the box”, with all of the other game components placed on top of it.
In this image, we are showing how the divider fits within the box, but also showcasing how the walls of the divider piece are taller than the cards AND allow the rule book to rest on top of everything else with plenty of space to close the box still.
When trying to predict the challenges of manufacturing a simple card game, these are definitely not the details I thought we would get stuck on… but in order to solve a problem like this, you really have to take every single aspect of that problem into consideration. I personally thought the description of a “simple cardboard tray to hold the cards” would be easily and logically translated, but even a detail as small as this can cost you weeks of turmoil.
Needless to say, in the end, the manufacturer and I had a good laugh about the miscommunication and then got back to the battle of crunching numbers. Though we had come to a perfectly better understanding of one another, the tray was still going to add a cost to the final product of the game, but this single set of images and the cost of 1 piece of printer paper just saved us nearly $300 in the overall costs of the game.
With that, one more problem is solved and we are one step closer to Calendra truly coming to life. From this point in time, the manufacturing process is nearly completely in place, the product is almost completely finished, and it is time to start talking about some other stuff going on in the background of the design process over here at Librarium Games! Stay tuned for next time on the Design Journal when we delve into the world of Muychandizin’ as Mel Brooks would say, about making supplementary products to support the main game in our future advertising campaigns.
