You hit me hard in the tender parts with this one.
While i can understand that big changes too characters art is impossible because of the budget constrains and limited time frame. But even avoiding such minor changes as tattoo on the crouch ? Srsly i'm not sure this is such a demanding task from budget perspective and work... many others indie devs actually implemented piercing and tattoos as easy and simple changes you can do to characters to show there character corruption.
Ofcourse you can rebuff by saying NO ITS HARD and that will be it. But let me have a suggestion.
On Patreon you have no stretched goal for a long time. The last one was Rein fanfic. BTW good job Rein!
And maybe just maaybe add a goal where some limited changes to at least main character could be implemented IF you reach certain amount of cash? After all this what Arioch is all about GROWTH.
I can't really see how corruption of the main character wont affect there appearance. If uncorrupted Alexia look exactly the same as corrupted one. i just can't buy it.
As for the Secondary characters as i suggested before they have arcs with few ending depending on your choices. Where you can show what happened to them in this ending arts without changing all the previous art for this character. Like with Delane left for orcs broken and pregnant. Or Helena had a dream what would have happend to her if Rowan wont save her from the twins.
Again im sure you have your own vision for the game may be make a poll ask patreons will they like it or not?
Simple answer. It seems fine in theory until you realize that this game has many more variables then most other games. One single variable is not too hard. But, how many does it take before you're doing 4 versions of each CG? Eight? What if Alexia can have a tattoo or some marking from Jezera? What if Rowan can change somehow too?
The problem, as with all works with multi-state, is exponential growth.
That's not to say that we will never ever do multi-state detail variables. But, if we do it, it's going to be for a good reason. Such multi-states are a very precious and very limited commodity.
We will have more latitude to do longer term physical transformations in later acts or areas of the game where there are more divergence. As a result, more of the scenes would be exclusive to that individual route and the risk of exponential expansion shrinks. Still, at the end of the day, this choice is up to Arioch (the guy who pays the bills) and Sommy (The guy who makes the art). The only promise worth a damn would be from either of them.
As for why not put it to the patrons. Well, that's obvious. Patrons have no idea how much shit costs and difficulty of implementation. You can give patrons choices between options of equal or near equal difficulty. You can get feedback on what optional ideas they value most, so you can consider how to spend resources. But, if you give Patrons a poll of "Do you want this thing that costs more resources that you'd like" the answer is going to be "Yes" regardless of how *efficient* those resources are. I'm not saying that to insult our Patrons. If I wasn't literally a game developer I wouldn't know how much shit costs to do either.
