We are not a company and lack money to fund the project. We do all of our work for free. We have card art for around 120 creature cards. We do however lack the artwork for all other cardtypes, since all the artwork we have is creature portraits. In order to get new legal art we need to hire artists since none are willing to help out for free. To hire them costs money, and this is where you can help out by donating.

If you don’t want to donate money and rather donate something else, like for example art, please contact us.

Via PayPal. Press the subscribe-button. It will donate the sum you choose on a monthly basis in order to support us. This is the best way to contribute to use economically, short of you paying an artist to work for us

The subscriptions are automated donations that you will give to this project on a monthly basis.

Whatever you feel is right for you and can afford should be what you choose. For most people it depends on if you have a job and a salary of your own. Ask yourself what you’d do with the money instead, and if you can be without them.

As an example, we can take the sum you would pay for a doughnut and coffee – are you willing to trade that in, once month, to support this project? We sure are and have spent thousands of dollars already on the project.

Ask yourself if you think a CCG that is open source/free/GPL is something you really want to exist or not and compare it with your situation without the money. Then decide the amount. Just remember one thing: Every single dollar counts. So even donating small amounts helps us out much more than donating nothing.

The relation between progress and donations is in perfect harmony: No donations, no progress, if such is measured in terms of the releasing of cards with new/original card art. Hence, as long as you see new original pieces of artwork, you know that the money the community donates get spent on the right thing: Every time we can afford to get new art for yet another card, we will do so as fast as possible and we will also announce it here on the site. If new material comes in, then it is likely it costed money.

All developers work for free. Nobody gets paid, even a cent, except for the artists that we are forced to hire in order to get the card art we need. All donations are also publicly accounted for. If you want detailed information please visit the thank-you list and/or contact us and we’d be happy to help you. Everything we do is official and in the open, as we believe it should be in a community driven project.

It depends on the artist, specific art required, deadlines involved, workload of the artist, how often we hire that artist, what kind of deal we make with him/her, detail level of the piece et.c. In round numbers: For each 100 USD we should in best case scenarios be able to create somewhere between 1 to 3 new cards. All of that money would also go exclusively to the artist as we do the designing for free and don’t keep a cent for our self.

Yes, you’d be welcome to contact us about such wishes and we could have a detailed discussion about it. We do however not guarantee that we will accept any idea without modifying it so the integrity & balance of the game is kept intact. We also can not beforehand show you the finished art for your card since that art wouldn’t exist until after it has been created for your card. In essence, you are welcome to donate for a full card and tell us what functions & themes it should have, how it should work and what the purpose of it should be, about it’s name, artwork et.c, and we’d do our best to deliver such a card which we’d modify so that it’s working with the rest of the game.

This means, as already stated, that we will be free to modify your ideas and most likely will to some degree. If you intend on inventing cards and sponsoring their creation in this way please make sure you contact us before you donate the sum. That way you will know to what extent your wishes can be met.

Please also keep in mind that if we approve your sponsored card it will be licensed under the GPL, as the rest of the game already is, and that it will be available for the rest of the world as an official part of WTactics. This means you don’t have any copyrights or any other special rights over that work.

All sponsors will be thanked on the site and made immortal on the thank you-section.

No, there are no re-funds. Partly because it complicates matters, and also because it could leave us in very bizarre economical situations if people could donate, we spend the money on art, and people later on regret their donation and want their money back. For us to operate seriously and keep the respect and trust of both the community and the people we occasionally hire it’s imperative that we always pay artist salaries et.c. within agreed time frames and without any complications. To be trustworthy and have a solid reputation is important in all projects, and maybe even more so in open source ones.

No, donate in whatever currency you wish. It is irrelevant. PayPal will give us the one we need anyway, so it’s nothing you have to think about. If you donate in a currency you are not familiar with please check it’s worth so you know for sure how much you donated.

Yes, you can, and it would be greatly appreciated. Before you do so, please consider subscribing though, as it helps us out so much more and we totally lack a stable source of income. For many individuals the subscription donations are hardly noticeable in their private economy due to them being low and on a monthly basis.

If you are sure you can’t afford a monthly subscription you can use the below PayPal-button to make a one-time-only donation of your own custom choosing.

We have, for the time being, very low server and hosting costs that aren’t relevant. What is killing us is our expenses for the new art – that is the projects main and only real monetary expense. A piece of art for each new card will cost us between 30 and 100 USD, depending on a number of factors. New art pieces that we order is often announced on our social media like Facebook & Twitter, and it is always publicly available for use using our open source licenses.

Of course it can: All you need to do is to find us an artist that is willing to create the artwork for free That would solve all our problems once and for all. Sadly we haven’t found him/her.

Frankly, it is also a solution we would prefer for several reasons. Some of these were pointed out in an excellent summary by one of the main artists & great contributors in the Wesnoth community, Kitty:

I think it’s a general problem to put paid for things in open source projects – the whole process of making them just doesn’t work out. For the one getting paid it’s nasty because s/he gets a bad wage and is thus less willing to invest enough time and go through revisions and stuff and for the initiator it’s bad because he paid money and thus feels entiteled to get approprtate results which s/he won’t get because the “empolyee” only feels like doing a favor… /../ I think contributions should wether be really free or be really paid for (with real world fees) in order to keep the mutual atmosphere fun and not ruin the general wages.

Another way we can create the full game without the need of donations is to simply re-use the creature art on the event/non-creature cards. By doing so we don’t have to spend a cent on finishing the game. There is however two very serious problems with this approach:

a) We would have a game that didn’t look as sharp as it could have done by using unique art on every single card. Today’s CCG industry is hard to compete with if you can’t present a visually appealing product. By using unique art and avoiding re-usage of the same creature pictures over and over again, we will push the game higher up when it comes to visual quality, also meeting the expectations from the player community when it comes to a pro CCG. Today a game seldom gets a chance if it doesn’t have a visual appeal, even if it would be the best game on earth the potential and normal community of the average players wouldn’t even try it out if it doesn’t look good enough.

b) Maybe more importantly, there are game design issues with art re-usage: The card art is used by the players to quickly identify which card it is and what it does. If card art is re-used this visual memorization/recognition/identification-process is made much harder for the player and (s)he’d have to read card texts more often. Please read a more detailed account for this problem and partial solutions to it in this more extensive blog post.

Yes, unsubscribing is done via your PayPal account, any time you wish, for free.