Attention, Bladesters! Welcome to an exciting, excellent, and extraordinary update for Millennium Blades Again! On this day, we’ll talk about our Art Initiative, the reasoning behind it, and the amazing things in-store for you.

What is the Art Initiative?

Cardine by Rinnellie

These past few months, our team has been commissioning multiple real-life artists to draw your favorite Millennium Blades characters relaxing, interacting, and dueling in all sorts of situations. This is an artist-first initiative, so we gave the artists a lot of creative freedom when it comes to the pose and composition. We even let them pick which characters to draw for the work! All that to say that each piece will show our characters through the artist’s unique perspective and style. 

We’ve asked the artists to start posting their works on social media. All of them will be collected under the hashtag #ByTheBlade, so feel free to check out the works that are live now (with more to come)! Each week, we'll be showing off arts on our blogs as well!

Why even do this?

For a modern Kickstarter campaign, a large portion of the money is used in advertising. For reference, we’d spend around 15-20% of a project’s funds just on ads and marketing alone. Usually, we do this through ad campaigns on platforms like Facebook, X/Twitter, and Reddit. However, we at Level 99 Games have grown tired of these platforms continuing to make the world a worse place for all of us. As a result, we decided to take action.

Rather than directly invest ad budget into these platforms, we’ve just used a majority of it to fund the Art Initiative commissions. Being a modern artist is tough and often unappreciated work. So we're supporting the real people who bring games and ideas to life by hiring over 70 artists for this initiative!

There’s a load of advantages to doing things this way:

• We don’t line the pockets of these exploitative platforms.
• We get to support these talented artists, who are deserving of the opportunity to be paid for their great work.
• We get to work with artists and support them which lets us meet fans who are excited to support and share their content. This will create more chatter and engagement, in a more passionate community, than any normal ad can manage.
• We get to highlight the amazing things human artists can do!
  
• We get to see the Millennium Blades characters in all sorts of different awesome art styles!

What else do we get?

If you’ve been out of the loop, you might not have heard of a game called 99 Heroes. This is a quick and simple game that uses a standard deck of playing cards. The more important part is that 99 Heroes features giant character cards that double as collector’s pieces that you can display AND play with! 99 Heroes allows us to feature some arts from the Art Initiative on a premium collector’s product for you! One way to do that is with 99 Heroes Showcase Packs, which feature a specially-made set of arts with a specific theme. Our Millennium Blades Strike a Pose Showcase, for example, is available FOR FREE if you participate in the Millennium Pose Challenge. You can check out what one of these poster cards looks like below!

Deques by niceglitch

In addition to themed showcases, there are also artist showcases that feature an entire set of poster-cards made by a single artist! It is with great pleasure to announce that we are offering another 99 Heroes Showcase pack featuring the adorably cute art of MINA Watermelonie! Here, you can see the piece she made for the Art Initiative. Aren’t Deques and Lettstrade just having a grand old time trading cards?

Deques and Lettstrade by MINA Watermelonie

Sounds risky though?

Astute. This strategy isn’t all sunshine and rainbows. There are definitely risks involved. There’s a reason most companies decide to pump money into social media ads: they work. They’re low risk and don’t require a lot of effort on the part of the audience. 

But we trust you, dear fan. We trust that you are as excited for Millennium Blades Again as we are. We trust that you care for artists and wish to commend them for their hard work. We trust that together we can create an ecosystem where creatives support and care for each other.

Where many publishers and companies are doing everything in their power to lower costs and use generative "art" to cut out artists, we are doing our own thing and putting money back into our communities in an effort to lift everyone up!

How can I help?

You can help by sharing your excitement for the Millennium Blades Art Initiative! Go to #ByTheBlade, look at the arts, then like, comment, and share them with your friends! Engage with the artists and show them your love and support by giving them a follow or a nice comment for the great work they’ve done! 

In April, we will be launching Millennium Blades Again on Kickstarter. Tell your friends, family, and rivals all about it! Hopefully, this strategy will work for Millennium Blades as it did for Bullet Universe. If you’re on-board, check out the project here! See you then, Bladesters!