In terms of support, everything will be set up the way it was before. She does good lighting and posing. We've traded best practices and shared tips and tricks so it's a good approximation of what we had before. The biggest difference is she doesn't want to fuck around with environments. Which from personal experience I completely understand.
She did this a month or two ago along with some other work and her style uses royalty free stock images for backgrounds and then she just blurs them to make it look like some depth of field effects.
View attachment 1999379
It's attractive and it works rather well. But the game in its current state has a different style.
And this leads us into the current negotiations we're circling around. She's insisting that if she's going to own 50% of the game and be 100% responsible for the art, then she wants to redo all the art in her style and make it hers.
I'm also not entirely convinced that this method of doing the art is conducive to really good sex scenes. I think about the scene with Cassie in the pool and I'm trying to figure out how you'd achieve all the richness of that scene with such a simplified style.
So I'm only half sold on the approach. But she does want to do animations for the sex scenes so that is a plus.
But her simplified style lends itself to faster production and quicker turn around.
So there are so many pros and cons I'm trying to weigh out while also seeing how much I can get her to flex on the details.
And let's be real. After hunting for an artist for so long, I'm so very close and tempted to say fuck it and just let her do whatever she wants because in the end it's better than the nothing I have managed to produce for such a long time.
At least this way the writing stays in tact, the story is still mine, and the art remains attractive in it's own way.
The other upside is I've known her for a few years and she's local, so I don't have to worry about some internet artist ghosting me after three or four months of work. So I have confidence that if we can work out our creative differences, it would be a long term solution.
So that's the conundrum in a nutshell.