First we created the first poster for the NotYourShield ArtProject which is featured above. It depicts @lizzyf620 as Link.



Lizwas a well-respected member of #NotYourShield until she was driven out by a vicious doxxing. She had a strong interest in the Zelda universe and we choose to depict her as Link from the Zelda franchise. This was a reaction to what happened to her. You can pick it up from our website and of course we’ll be sending Liz a copy.



You can pick up yours at http://the-fine-young-capitalists.myshopify.com/





And than the bad news.

Generally speaking helping a first time developer work with a group of developers to make her first game is difficult. It’s even more difficult when various writers have decided to use you as a Boogieman in their articles. But I have to talk about something that we aren’t having the best experience with and thankfully it’s not After Life Empire.

When we announced the #NotYourShield art project what we were doing was two things.

1.) We were trying to get #GamerGate and the gamer community in general to support diversity initiatives by focusing on the development of games and not changing existing titles.

2.) We wanted to show how diverse the #NotYourShield community was to remove the stereotype that both Gamers and GamerGate members were all white basement dwellers.

We understand that Kickstarter has made it possible for more games to be made, and it certainly resonates with certain projects. Explosive Kittens has apparently reached over 5 million dollars and while that is certainly amazing (And makes our accomplishment pale by comparisons) it really shows the importance of exposure when it comes to crowd funding. It’s important to understand that while Explosive Kitten is a neat idea for a game, the fact that everyone involved already has a known media presence act as a force multiplier for it’s idea.

What we really wanted to do was give a student who believes in creating games with diverse characters a bit of money to start their career and then eventually after doing a couple projects try to get a following so they’d be able to do a Kickstarter.

Our issue is ironically the same issue that we would have with crowd funding, which is getting people interested. We’ve been selling posters for a while now, and if you factor in the cost of creating the art we are running a negative.

Now while we love creating artwork, it’s important to understand that our first goal was to actually raise money for a diversity award to be administrated by a Video Game program. And our first goal, overrides the second. I.E if not one is buying, we ain’t raising money. We’ll see how it goes after we release the first poster from the community. But if there isn’t interest we might just give the money that was going to the artists to the school.