Wow, it almost scares me now lol. Don't get me wrong it would be great news, but I hope even in this case you won't rush things for this game, and that you will develop what you wanted to develop. Well I sound a bit bossy now, not my intent. Once again it's great news, I'm also amazed you're willing to give more than your entire monthly patreon money for it.
I understand your reservations. In fact, they were the very hesitations that have stalled me from hiring anyone until now. I wasn't convinced the art would be the same level or style that I have produced up until now. It wasn't until I devised a process by which I would still maintain complete control over image quality and that I finally pulled the trigger on hiring outside artists.
I think this method is going to help a lot because at the end of the day, nothing gets into the game without my approval. And since I'm doing the final render, I'll have a chance to make any changes to image that I feel are necessary to maintain the level of quality I'm demanding for the game.
I'm only doing this because I think I can do it without a loss of quality. I"m still doing all the character design, clothing design, etc. The artists are just taking the assets I build and setting poses, lighting and environments.
If this trial run with outsourced art works, then I'll actually feel freer in my writing. As it is now, I sometimes reduce or cut scenes knowing that producing the art is going to take me too long. Scenes like Nanami's strip club chapter that were long, complex and had multiple paths, I swore I'd never do again because of how long it took to render. But if I have multiple artists working, then I'd feel much safer producing complex scenes like that (in truth I love them because they add lots of options for players and the story is richer for it).
I'm also thinking in terms of, if I don't have to create so much art, I can spend more time developing custom assets for the game in Blender. I've already got a country club scene for which there simply are no assets. If part of my job was just making the environments as I picture them when writing, and then passing them off to the artists to use, the visual quality would increase ten fold.
I'm optimistic that this process is going to produce more art, faster, and at the same quality or better that we've enjoyed so far.
For those interested, I've outlined the process
here. As you can see, the artist's job is to just get me 95% of the way to a finished render, and then I"ll put on the final "Roman Hume Touch" before finalizing the art for the game.
I'm putting my own money in though because I have a lot of confidence in this game. I think once I'm able to roll out consistent content on a regular basis, and people get to experience some of the other fetishes I've promised, I know this game will be a big win.
In fact, that only complaints I get are related to a lack of content or production speed. I think if I can get a production line in place to crank out the story I have written, this time next year I'll be a full time dev.
Of course, this whole experiment could be a colossal failure, but time will tell the tale.
Salute mate!
