❖ Version History ❖

January 1st – February 1st, 2023
After the few major brainstorms that had taken place in the month prior to this moment, I was left with an absolute wealth of work that must be done. I now needed to: redesign some of the cards we already have, add new features into the layout of certain cards, and begin preparation on an entire new batch of designs.

In addition to new content needing to be made for our prototyping, I also wanted to take some time to edit existing features on the cards, like touching up the color layout of some pieces. Though the color concepts are in the right place for many of the designs, the vibrance on the printed side of things is not turning out the way that I wanted.

So, conclusively, today’s topic for the Design Journal is all about art and graphics! Let’s start things off by looking into the color touch-ups, which happened first and were a relatively quick process. Take a look at these examples:

As you can clearly see in the display above, a lot has been changed even though so many details remain exactly the same. I was happy with the layout of the cards, so almost nothing has been touched in terms of the frame or line work here. The color scheme of the cards was not where I wanted them after I had seen the printed versions though. Despite my best efforts, the screen color was just so much more vibrant than the printed media this time around and that needed to be fixed.

When making the first phoenix design shown on the left up above, I had been very happy with how colorful and vibrant it looked on my iPad. The colors felt rich and warm, they appeared vibrant, and they felt very different from the browns of the tool cards… but unfortunately, the colors you see on your screen are rarely the same when they come out of the printer.

As a result, when the full batch of cards came in for my order on iteration #6, I was quite sad to see that the colors of the phoenix cards and the tools were almost identical. Everything looked brown and flat. So, I went back in on my computer and I made some serious edits to the vibrance of both sets of cards. The tools were much closer to accurate browns, so the changes there are fairly subtle. The Phoenixes however, received a lot of love in this transition, and they came out infinitely better after.

This same level of vibrance also needed to be added to the “Player Mat” cards. They had been a mix of browns and oranges just the same as the other cards, and they too were coming out flat. But, these cards also needed some new details and rules added to them too. Before I explain, take a look at the old vs. new design:

The New and Improved Player Mat

The player mat in Phoenix Farm has many roles that it must play at all times:

•It tracks the Tools players have in their inventory
•It organizes Phoenixes players are taking care of
•It tracks a player’s wealth in feathers throughout the game
&
•Now it also needed to hold on to a couple of new rules.

We had decided over the course of the last month of brainstorming that the player mat cards could be made more interesting if they came with upgrades as the player becomes more and more wealthy throughout the course of the game. To do this, we had been adding “locks” to the card, making a player pay to improve their farm space.

This concept helped diversify what a player chose to do with their opening turns in the game, and it really made for some interesting new decision making to change the flow of the gameplay / interaction with the mechanics.

When it came to redesigning this card, I first made sure to arrange it better so that the tool slots appeared at the bottom & left a space for the coops to still exist along the top of the card. This was just a simple and needed touchup to keep things more organized and looking better in the gameplay.

I then also drew a little lock design and added the simple rule text. This helps make things very clear when trying to interpret the rule, and it was a relatively easy graphical addition that cost us nothing new in the overall layout of the product. Though it doesn’t seem like much, these were major and critical changes to this part of the game.

New and Improved Game Mechanic :: Firefly Jar

Beyond the improvements that we have already discussed here today, we have one other major concept that we haven’t even talked about yet: The Firefly Jar.

This concept originated in response to our previous discussion of the rule changes during our last entry in the Design Journal. We had many ideas behind how to improve the player experience by giving them more options in the gameplay, but we didn’t just want to verbally include them in the rules… so we landed on the idea of adding a special new kind of card to the shop that the players could interact with! The concept behind how this would work was simple:

A player can now also purchase a special tool called a “Firefly Jar” from the shop for free (helping to eliminate financial lock). Each jar would feature a slightly different & random bonus on the reverse side of the card (like rolling double dice or making it more likely to succeed).

In order to see what your firefly bonus is though, you would need to willingly skip the second half of any turn after purchasing the jar, to “Forage for Fireflies”. Then, any turn after this has been done, the bonus could be applied to a future turn for that player by returning the jar to the bottom of the pile in the shop.

It took us some time to figure out what all of the bonuses would be for the firefly jar, but the ones displayed in the image up above are about as close as we could get by this point in time. Before trying to come up with more rules, we wanted to start play testing the card layout and designs.

It would still take me a bit to make new card layouts on the graphical side of things here, so we will return to the concept of the Firefly Jar in our next entry to the Librarium Games Design Journal. Be sure to check back in some time soon to see how that turns out!