IF you somehow manages to get funds and starts commissioning artists, what would happen to those of us who actually prefers AI art?
I'd make it optional. I put a lot of work into the art in the game so far, even if I did lean heavily on AI I still drew and manually edited many of the images myself, I'd be hesitant to just throw it all away.
Additionally if I did replace the AI art with an artist, there'd be a lot less art because
1. the amount of time it would take an artist to redo every single image in my game and
2. it comes back to money.
That said, I'm looking for an artist for another game I'm currently working on, not Demon Gods.
I've come to realize that Demon Gods is no longer in the realm of possibility to replace with an artist.
So, that leaves us with the scenario where you commission artists that delivers worse art compared to AI on top of the usual problems with dealing with commission work that being delays, miscommunication etc.
Well, I'm a big fan of Retro anime art like this -
So ideally if I do manage to find an artist it should be a lot easier to work on. I wouldn't mind continuing to do backgrounds with AI though, or there are a lot of stock backgrounds made specifically for anime visual novels that I can grab for free too.
But that's my aim for the next game, and like you said there are problems with commissions.
I've gone through 6 artists now, and if you've been with me since the beginning, I've even paid one of them and received nothing in return.
The others all canceled on me because they were busy or one of them who I wanted to work with more than anyone else (non-anime artist) on an erotic horror lost her love for art.
My wife's friend hasn't canceled on me but he also hasn't updated me and the other dev on any progress (though he still uses my discord channel to advertise his art...) so I've moved on until he has something substantial to show and put that game completely on hold.
The other game we're working on we are using AI art as placeholders until we get an artist. It'll look pretty bad at first though because I'm not taking the time to edit the art much more than making backgrounds transparent. (I would, but editing art for DG takes too much time for me to focus on something that's only a placeholder).
tl;dr: Don't worry. I won't be replacing the art in DG with an artist. I simply can't afford it and the quality of DG would suffer as a result if I did. Not because I'd hire a bad artist, but because there's no artist that would be able to work quickly enough to redo all of the art in my game in a sufficient amount of time, and there's no way I could afford to pay them for that much art either.
For future games, it'll probably be a mix. If I can find anyone reliable who can do art in my preferred style.