I'm Fhiz (from Fantasy-Stockart)

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.

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.

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/