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I'm Fhiz (from Fantasy-Stockart)

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Fri, 08/07/2020 - 04:32
Fhizban
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fantasy-stockart.png

Hello BGDF community,
I would like to re-introduce myself. If you take a close look at my profile you can see that Im a member of BGDF for more than a decade. It's time to return after a long break...

Hoping that nobody will mind this shameless plug, I would also want to promote a little project of mine. The current pandemic situation thwarted my plans of releasing a game.

In the past years, I consulted, commissioned and paid more than a dozen artists for a board-game project called "Gods & Minions". After the projects cancellation, we now offer the high quality artworks for sale on our website. It should be noted that Im still recovering from the investment, so the whole thing is more of a "hobby" instead of a "business".

Nonetheless, if you guys require high quality, fantasy game artworks for your projects, feel free to check out our portfolio. All artworks have been exclusively created for the "Gods & Minions" project and are now available to the public as affordable "Stock Art".

What you get is art usable in both personal as well as commercial projects, the size of the images is big enough to be used in print projects (card art or quarter page) and has been tested using a print-run from "The Game Crafter" already. Furthermore you can easily use the artwork in digital projects (like a game) as well.

Check out hundreds of fantastic artworks and thank to the admins for tolerate this shameless plug after such a long downtime.

BGDF.com forever!

cheers
-Fhiz

https://www.fantasy-stockart.com

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Fri, 08/07/2020 - 12:18
#1
questccg
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Welcome Back!

Hello Fhizban ... Long-time you have posted a thread on our humble Forum! Glad to see you are still involved with your TableTop games... Always nice to see how things have evolved and how you are doing with your projects. In any event, Congratulations on finding a way to "re-coup" the monies your invested in ART. It's a costly venture and anyone who goes through it knows that there are no guarantees when it comes to launching your own game.

In any event, welcome back and I hope you enjoy your stay on BGDF.com!

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Fri, 08/07/2020 - 12:53
#2
Fhizban
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Ty for the hearty welcome

Ty for the hearty welcome questccg!

You are now the admin here right?

As i see the place is still the same as when i left years ago. Its good to see familiar faces (or better: avatars) in crazy times like these.

Hope to have something new to show later this year, still busy uploading the remaining images to the online shop. As bitter as the experience was, at least the illustrations serve a purpose now.

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Fri, 08/07/2020 - 14:33
#3
questccg
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Thanks for your patronage

Fhizban wrote:
Ty for the hearty welcome questccg!

Np ... I always found your ventures to be "fascinating" and original!

Fhizban wrote:
You are now the admin here right?

Admin, Host and Moderator. Keeps me busy with all the NEW account activations... I'm the last month, I approved over 30 new accounts! Plus our number of daily visitors is over 500+ unique visitors.

Fhizban wrote:
As i see the place is still the same as when i left years ago. Its good to see familiar faces (or better: avatars) in crazy times like these.

Well we do have a partnership with "The Game Crafter" and we are hosting their exclusive "design-related" content. It's way better than the Blog they had in previous years.

We also have the "Ad Program" which is public banners to help promote products and services in the "Game Design-world" of things...

Fhizban wrote:
Hope to have something new to show later this year, still busy uploading the remaining images to the online shop. As bitter as the experience was, at least the illustrations serve a purpose now.

Glad to hear that you are still around "designing"... Can't wait to see what you have create most recently and how you plan to launch that baby!

Cheers and welcome back.

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Fri, 08/07/2020 - 20:58
#4
Juzek
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What went wrong?

I'm glad you are still connected here!

Not to intrude (feel free to not answer) but so that I can learn from you, what went wrong with your game? the art looks amazing, and just imagining the factions I envision a really cool game concept. Could you tell us more about it, or it's pitfalls?

Is a good game idea ever truly dead? Perhaps even without a completed set of art you could keep developing it and get it kickstarted, or published later?

I am super new at this, so I'm just trying to absorb information.

Thanks!

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Sat, 08/08/2020 - 15:55
#5
questccg
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I think ... from what I recall...

He was wanting to make a Collectible Card Game (CCG) called "Gods & Minions". But somewhere in the process, I believe he could not find anyone willing to publish the game. Everyone says: "Don't develop a CCG or TCG! If you want an LCG is the better route..." And the reason a Living Card Game (LCG) is better is because there is FIRST a "Game" players can play and later IF they choose to buy more Editions, that's more like a Game + Expansions business model.

CCGs and TCGs are notoriously expensive to produce. For example, my own Quest Adventure Cards(tm), if I was to make a 2nd Edition (and I would love to do that)... It's going to cost just on art alone about $20,000 USD! And that may be Fhizban's situation... Commission all kinds of art for a game that nobody wants to Publish (You can correct me if I am wrong)!

And then there is PRINTING... A batch of 100,000 cards is NOT unheard of in the CCG and TCG worlds. My first game Quest Adventure Cards(tm), cost me $20,000 CAD to produce ... And kind of blew away an entire Nest Egg! But you live and learn from different experiences, I'm much more smarter when it comes to MAKING "New" games... Because quite honestly, I can't affort to invest so much in projects nowadays.

My goal is to fund some smaller projects, build up some capital and then re-invest everything back into Quest Adventure Cards(tm) - Second Edition. However this is still a long time away... Maybe 5 years in development time...

Anyhow (if I am incorrect) please feel free to correct me! I'm just under the suspicion that this was the reason for producing so many art artifacts and the reason you aborted the project ("God & Minions"). Cheers!

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Sun, 08/09/2020 - 03:29
#6
Fhizban
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So, quest summarized it quite

So, quest summarized it quite well already. The main problem with projects like Gods & Minions is that they are simply too big. That means the development time is too lengthy, the amount of art is too much, the learning curve is too high and the project would have required an ongoing story-line and release schedule (expansions). Thats simply too much for an indie.

A few more notable points:

1. The art took ages to create and was quite costly as well. For some of the factions i had to wait almost a year to get them all done because the artists shoved my commission in-between their regular jobs / better paid commissions. That makes it very hard to plan ahead. In addition, due to the pandemic, several artists simply stopped replying to my eMail. I still have a few work-in-progress factions on my drive that are missing essential center-pieces of artwork. It would require another artist to complete them, which results in clashing art-styles.

2. We also thought about self-publishing the whole thing. Thats something that is perfectly do-able using "modern" publishing channels and a combination of regular purchase options and crowd-funding campaigns. You can also offer your projects for free as print-and-play just to get more people interested. But all in all, the amount of sales you can generate as a indie-developer is simply not enough to justify the amount of work, time, money (art) put into a project like this.

3. Finally a few more pandemic, personal, RL related and time related issues: The lengthy development time made me lose connection to my fan-base (it simply took too long and we lost the momentum). Artists stopped answering, publishers stopped answering (or where simply not interested right away), kickstarter and several other social platforms stopped working (at least for me), as the general interested in projects like Gods & Minions dwindled. Also, I got drowned in work during the lockdown (IT business) contrary to many people out there who had less work in general. That would have been a good time to restart marketing efforts but i simply lacked the time (and there is no end in sight yet).

A side-note on this: We do not have so many games-shops around here in my country (EU) and the few ones closed-down during the pandemic and did not re-open their gaming-tables until today. Thats also true for the (smaller) conventions and expos we have around here (not many anyway). That makes it very hard to communicate to your local community - and i guess it will continue to be that way for at least another year - keep that in mind!

And a personal resumee:

I learned a lot from the project and the art is not "lost" or "obsolete", there are a lot of ideas floating around using the art for a non-LCG type of game (like a wargame where you use cards instead of miniatures and the unit images as card-art), but this has to wait for now. In the meantime Im doing my best to recover from the financial expenses, because I have to. The project did not break me and it supported the right people (most of the art was done in eastern countries, some of it in third world countries), but its still something I have to fix up in order to go on.

What i can say is that it makes much more sense creating and publishing several smaller games instead of one big one. I would even go as far as saying that it might be best to self-publish a few games for free and/or on the Game Crafter before even trying to make a 1k print-run for a bigger project. It helps you to get your name out there and establish a fan base. Its also much more relaxing and rewarding (to have a finished product) instead of a epic lifetime project.

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Sun, 08/09/2020 - 17:24
#7
questccg
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^^^Some wise advice there^^^

Fhizban wrote:
What I can say is that it makes much more sense creating and publishing several smaller games instead of one big one. I would even go as far as saying that it might be best to self-publish a few games for free and/or on the Game Crafter before even trying to make a 1k print-run for a bigger project.

Indeed making a TGC product and selling it is a WISE idea. And smaller projects with smaller goals is also a very smart idea too! They don't have to necessarily be FREE, with TGC it's not possible to make FREE games...

But you don't need to worry about warehousing, fulfillment and of course the biggest, manufacturing... It all happens via a few TEXT Files you upload to TGC for them to process BULK orders.

Free would be some Print-aNd-Play content (PNP) ... And if you need some help with that ,"PNP Arcade" can help manage your prototype and get you some more visibility for your prototypes and future PNP games... They are in one of the banners... Just click on the BGDF logo to refresh and when you hit their banner ... "You'll know!"

However I would cautiously add, don't bother with "pointless" games. If it doesn't excite you to MAKE ... It probably won't be much more appealing to the gamers who play the game itself. So make sure, even with small projects, you have sufficient interest and content to keep all gamers happy.

Cheers!

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Tue, 08/11/2020 - 03:34
#8
Fhizban
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Just added a small blog post

Just added a small blog post about BGDF to my site (including 2 do-follow backlinks) - hope thats OK !

https://fantasy-stockart.com/what-is-the-bgdf/

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