Obviously, faster work can be done if you develop a technical pipeline, as many artists have, by committing to a more singular style, but that isn't how Alis has ever operated - look through our gallery on, say, hentaifoundry, and you'll see that she approaches most of her pictures using different techniques and styles, and always has. It also absolutely takes longer to correctly compose a picture involving two or more people having sex, which has been most of our pictures recently (though new character designs have their own challenges and typically involve even more revisions).
Why must it be that way though? You are developing for ONE game. To have a sense of continuity and coherence, a game must stick to the same themes and methods as much as possible.
I'm not sure what your mindset is while developing this game, but whatever it is, it is not the right approach to game development in my opinion. When making a product, the goal is to stick to the
fastest processes, while maintaining the quality that the audience expect and enjoy. And as far as I can tell, most people were already settled in, in terms of art quality, by sometime last year, when I was still subscribing to you. At that point, most people cared less about how much the artworks have evolved, and more about expansion of content.
Of course, like all other artists, you'd want to improve and get better, but experimental works should be done
outside those which are intended for the game. Then after you completed the game and want to utilize your new skills and styles, you either remake the game from start to finish with this new and improved style, or you develop a new game entirely(which I know you had publicly admitted to having desire to, and it was in bad taste considering the current state of the game).
In terms of development time, this game was long overdue. I understand how it would be unfair to compare you two to the Japanese doujin devs because they have been doing this far longer than anyone else and they have their own community to back them up, but losing to the Chinese of all people is especially painful for us observers to look at. Sword Maiden of the Azure Dragon and Latex Dungeon Advance are already complete experiences even though they started much later than you.
This is an honest advice from me, not flaming or raging or trolling;
1. You two need to get your shit together. Prioritize doing what you
need instead of what you
want, or even what the patrons want. The patrons will surely get their favorite character done in time, but if you jump everytime someone throws a tantrum and want his fringe fetish implemented A.S.A.P., NO ONE'S FAVORITE CHARACTER WILL EVER HAVE COMPLETE FEATURE SETS.
Of course, you have no choice if someone paid big money to have you implement their fetish immediately, but keep in mind that other patrons might not be so pleased. If they band together and plot to ditch you en masse, you're fucked.
2. Get the characters done one by one, and don't jump from one character to the next. It will be less jarring to watch one character have a set of artworks with similar style and quality, than to see the artwork quality being so different from one scene to the next(continuity).
3. Set in stone the features of the battle system and animation, work within that plan and make sure they are all implemented for
all characters. For example, there's no good excuse for you to keep that assfucking animation exclusive to Brigand; people who followed the game from 2016 expected that feature game-wide for all characters, yet here we are today
Keep in mind, you can still survive developing this game how you're doing it until now because your subject matter is niche and you have no real competition in this niche. But one day, when one of the Chinese decides to pick on this niche as well and do it better than you, you will lose all clout you have today. Hell, if my day job magically less busy for at least a year from now and someone is willing to co-develop with me on the programming side, I might be competing against you too.