Hello, this is Dan and Jacques, the two guys who make up Graven Guild. Its our one year campaign anniversary and so we feel its the perfect opportunity to share our company story and how we got to where we are currently. Think of this as a little introduction to ourselves, some insight into how/why we started our company and launched our first major project - Hexton Hills. I've also tried to sprinkle in some advice based on our experiences for fellow creators. I hope you enjoy reading our story/manic ramblings!

For those of you like myself with inattentive type tendencies, if there’s one message I’d like to deliver before you inevitably start thinking of giant apes fighting lizards:
The ongoing sales through MyMiniFactory and success of our crowdfunding campaign mean we can now create for a living, doing something we love and being able to support our families through it. Since we first started discussing forming a business this is all we’ve wanted so thank you for your support!

Graven Guild consists of just the two of us, we’re a duo of artists, each with a background creating props and environments for real time strategy games; we specialise in making high quality miniatures and collectibles for tabletop role-playing and war-gaming with a focus on 3D printing.

About Jacques: Currently living in Western Australia after moving from the UK in late 2018, Jacques is somewhat of a generalist when it comes to art with skills in 2D art and 3D art alike. His 10 years of games industry experience, working on mobile and PC games has given him skills and knowledge in environment art, UI design and illustration. You can view some of his work here.

About Dan (the writer of this post): I’m a UK based 3d artist from South Wales. I’ve worked in TV production: creating 3d assets and textures for children’s television, created characters and vehicles as a Freelance video game artist and contributed to the successful Total War series as a campaign map artist for The Creative Assembly. You can view my portfolio here.

It was when working on Total War: Warhammer that I met Jacques, a kindred spirit who put up with my nonsense and shared a mutual love for miniatures. Work breaks were spent either playing Shadespire, discussing fantasy lore, warhammer, DnD or whatever fixation we were currently obsessed with. Whatever we started discussing, it often ended with the same thoughts, ‘What if we took our creative ideas and tried to make a living out of them?’

How we started.

Over the next few years we developed many ideas; any spare time at work was often spent sketching out ideas for characters, writing about their society, history and beliefs. As it turns out world-building is an absolute blast and the fun and excitement we experienced then had subconsciously spawned the fundamentals behind Hexton Hills.

Back then our aim was to create a series of high quality miniatures based on the world we’d created. Affordable 3D printing was in its infancy and hadn’t yet appeared to us as a viable option. We learned a master copy of our model would be professionally printed by a specialist company, moulds created and copies produced. As artists with no prior experience launching our own products, lots of time was spent researching each step of the process. There are so many important aspects that need careful consideration, afterall many of these choices will reflect directly on your brand. For example: Did we want costly luxurious packaging that screamed high quality presentation or cheaper, less impressive, yet environmentally friendly boxes?

Despite all the time and resources we’d given the project, life caught up with us and our first endeavour had crawled to halt. In the end we decided to pause development to explore some exciting developments in the world of 3D printing. A large range of affordable DLP resin printers were now available and the technology had certainly caught our eye.

At this point we had both left our jobs at The Creative Assembly and were working as freelancers. I moved back to my hometown in Wales and Jacques to Australia. Having just bought a house, I suddenly had space of my own and with resin 3D printers now a reasonable option, it was inevitable I’d bite the bullet and purchase my own.

My first printer was an AnyCubic Photon S and while very much a love-hate relationship at first, 3D printing quickly became one of my main obsessions. Often the learning curve seemed steep with constant research and troubleshooting but after I passed those initial hurdles the ability to prototype high quality models became an invaluable asset.

The idea.

Although a little cliche, all good ideas come to me during a morning shower and this was very much the case with Hexton Hills. Whether I like it or not my day always starts with a good bit of daydreaming and providing your water bill isn’t too high the shower is a great place to switch-off for a bit. I always think of worlds, places, cultures and scenarios during this time. Perhaps a less chaotic mind might be able to form a coherent narrative from these ideas but the process of world-building can be so much fun that my priority is always wanting to draft a map so I can easily illustrate to others the worlds that exist in my head.

How cool would it be to have a physical version of that map, to have different pieces you could move around, to sit on your table or hang on your wall when you’re done? These were the questions that spawned the basis for the project that would become Hexton Hills.

At the time we were experimenting with creating a square modular tavern set which we ended up swiftly setting aside to start prototyping these new ideas.

Our aim was to provide others who enjoy world-building with a comprehensive easy to use hex-based tool set for testing and exploring realms of their own creation. As our plans grew in scope we realised the potential to use these tiles for RPG map planning and wargaming campaigns. As board game and miniatures enthusiasts, this consideration felt only natural. As a long time Warhammer fan I'm excited to use my printed tiles in conjunction with the Path to Glory ruleset outlined in the new Age of Sigmar 3.0 rulebook.

Research and Development.

To start we drew some initial inspiration from Mighty Empires, analysing what we did/didn’t like about those tiles to make sure they’d have similar appeal while being distinctly different. We took the same approach when looking at both board games and computer games that use modular pieces. As hobby enthusiasts it was invaluable to study these and come to a conclusion about what people interested in our product might be put-off by. As a rather niche type of model, this helped us generate a list of design rules to help keep the appeal of Hexton Hills as broad as possible.

For example, like many historical and fantasy maps we worked hard on establishing a slightly exaggerated scale to help represent points of interest rather than set any definitive scale. This doesn’t limit what the tiles can be used for, opening up opportunities to use them to represent a single city or entire continent.

It took about 6 months to develop our idea, experimenting with base designs, interlocking systems and optimal printing angles. Roughly 70 tiles were designed during this stage. This initial set would comprise of mountains, woodlands, rivers, hills, plains, roads, villages, towns, forts and unique centerpiece tiles.

The prints we’d posted online fortunately produced a fair amount of interest so we felt ready to take the next step and start researching crowdfunding options. Like all business related topics that deal with money, finding the right option was a headache. We settled on Kickstarter and spent the following month painting tiles, setting up fancy photoshoots and video editing content for our pitch.

Going live with the news you’ll be launching a crowd-funding campaign is always nerve-wracking. It's the first time you’ll see exactly what people think of your idea and whether you ask for it or not you’ll be messaged with suggestions, ranging from design to pricing. It's always good to keep an open mind and listen but this should always be balanced with your own well researched decision making. Everyones different and not all business owners are overflowing with self-confidence so while listening and implementing feedback it's also important to hold your ground and not compromise your vision. During this stage I’d often refer to our already established design rules, making sure that feedback I wanted to consider didn’t contradict those ideals.

Unfortunately no amount of planning can prepare you for some eventualities and you need to make peace with the possibility that things may deviate from the expected course. A certain spanner that was thrown in our works was the emergence of a certain global pandemic…How might this affect our campaign? Less said about COVID the better but It was a scenario we couldn’t research our way out of and through much uncertainty we decided to go ahead anyway.

The Campaign.

Naturally we're fairly reserved people so we needed to put our business hats on and really think about how we'd engage with the 3d printing community on the run up to the launch of our Kickstarter. To really work out the best way of getting there we believe it's important to take a step back and look at your business, acknowledging your strengths and weaknesses. For example, as Graven Guild we're both cave dwelling introverted troglodytes who'd instinctively shy away from a very direct sales heavy pitch but we're rpg/wargaming geeks who collectively share a lot of technical expertise regarding 3d printing and design. We found a lot of success posting prints in various stages and engaging with the printing community as fellow enthusiasts. It was enjoyable and came naturally so I believe there's something to be said regarding adopting a less aggressive 'in your face' promotional strategy.

While advertising in multiple pages/groups/channels over the internet may provide suitable exposure through sheer visibility we really wanted to avoid spamming our audience, afterall there are few things we find more annoying. While some level of repetition is unfortunately unavoidable it's important to respect group/page rules, especially when posting to social media. Alternating promotion location every other day.etc with images and info unique to each post can help break any tedium for you and anyone interested.

When the campaign launched, all our hard work finally paid off, smashing our initial funding goal within hours. It became clear very quickly that ideas we had for potential future tiles would now become a reality and we burnt the midnight oil to ensure campaign momentum was kept by promising this content in the form of stretch-goals. I can't write much about this period as it was so manic I honestly struggle to remember it properly! The campaign surpassed our best case scenarios and we're delighted we've been able to dedicate continued time and resources towards developing the quality and content of the Hexton Hills brand.

Not long after the success of our Kickstarter campaign we launched a late pledge service giving us the opportunity to make our campaign accessible for those that missed it. This was our first time working together with MyMiniFactory, providing us with the perfect platform to reach an audience of dedicated 3d printing enthusiasts.

Its our Birthday! (sort of)

We’re now celebrating our one year campaign anniversary, having worked hard to make Hexton Hills as great as we can! We always keep an open ear to user feedback and over the last year have released FDM bases, redesigned elements of the original resin base for optimal printing, optimised supports, added magnet compatibility, added serial numbers, pdf catalogues and optional tabbed/tabless versions. We’ve also more than doubled our amount of available hexes, delivering multiple stretch-goal sets with many still to come.

We’re always thrilled to see what our online communities are doing with our designs, the paint-jobs and maps already constructed are fantastic. As part of our anniversary celebration we gathered some of our favorite photos submitted by users through Facebook, Instagram and Discord. Please feel free to browse the gallery!

Whats next for us?

Looking towards the future our immediate priority is to continue delivering on our stretch-goal commitments. For example - we've just released a pretty badass Ruins set.

We’ve got plenty of great stuff lined up including and certainly not limited to: coastal towns, marshlands, destruction sets, dungeon entrances and a Dwarf mountain stronghold. You can view our planned stretch goals over at Kickstarter.

We’ll also be releasing components to aid with how Hexton Hills can be used for wargaming and hex crawl games. Setting aside plans for a second campaign, the thing we’re most excited for is our plans for a Hexton Hills map making web app. This is still early in the works but will allow anyone to plan a map using a 2d top down version of our hex catalogue. You’ll then be able to export a list of tiles used so you’ll know exactly how many of each tile to print. Exciting stuff!!

At this moment we're very pleased with our ongoing efforts to improve Hexton Hills. We feel the hard work we've dedicated mirrors directly into the quality of our products and are ecstatic they've been so well received. If you've read this far, thanks for your dedication and I hope you've enjoyed this article!

If you're a casual reader showing interest in Hexton Hills and want to try printing some tiles yourself, we offer a free sample set on our store. Print them, paint them and show us your work!