Thanks. I guess I will spend a while searching around when the time comes to it. With art style being so important to a game like this's success, I'd need to find someone who can both do the load, do it well and have a very good looking style that people find attractive. I also suppose if I got 2 different artists to work on it, the art styles could clash, since we aren't making it in a typical game dev environment, but over the internet.
I figured such for the facial expressions would just be small edits, which is why I didn't factor them into my costs. But with panties, bras etc, to make the game not seem cheap, and to add to the fun I wanted unique designs for each girl, I also wanted some girls to go without panties, so during the early game, before you have unlocked remove underwear ability, if you tell them to take off their skirt for a contraband search, they get embarrassed and say they can't do it, and you have to press the issue until they admit to you they aren't wearing underwear. Then it's your choice to force them or not. But basically different colored panties wouldn't be as fun as not knowing if the Office Lady is wearing A G String, A Thong, Shimapan or Nopan today because I want panties and bra's to be randomized under the normal clothing too, instead of being tethered to the outer layer. I want as much variety and surprise as possible. I also wanted panties and bras to be separate items. So say if a girl has smaller breasts and is self conscious and it's an embarrassment point for her, you can get her to take of her panties and be bottomless, but leave her bra on. And that enables her to be in the unembarrassed state of undress and to be more cooperative for the rest of the ordeal. But if you expose their embarrassment point (which for some might just be being naked at all) I wanted the embarrassment to be more than a blush. One part of Imperial Gatekeeper which could be better, is when embarrassed girls blush and refuse to take off their underwear, you press the issue, and they take it off but they keep the same body pose and let you see everything. I understand because changing the underlying body pose means none of the clothing would line up, and that would double the artwork, but it's not so if she's nude. So if you force the embarrassed girl to get nude, she should have an alternative embarrassed body state where her arms and legs change to cover her bits, or she maybe squats down on the ground and hides her face and nudity and refuses to stand and becomes non cooperative, and she needs to be ordered, or even spanked to make her assume her normal pose state while undressed.
Well that's fantastic then if I way overestimated the cost. If it's less, or even only $100 per character then I feel like I could raise the character count more, and add more special types like more beast women types or alien women, or more body types like fit girls, thick women etc. Or maybe make the packages more expensive and add more outfits and hairstyles for existing ones. I want to have a lot of women in outfits considered to be authority positions in the game (Police, CEO's, Military Officers, Billionaire Heiresses, Politicians and Gov Officials etc) going through your checkpoint so you can have a chance to really ruffle their feathers. But having a full police outfit means one less top and bottom to put in a random generator. The police shirt would always have to go with police skirt. I want to have some shirts and pants be able to be mixed and matched to create more variety in the people you are dealing with, so it's not the same girls all the time. I think the one drawback of Imperial Gatekeeper is the very small amount of female NPC's. If doing clothes packages for each body could be put into a $100 bundle. Then 20 female characters would only be $2,000 and that seems fair if there could be at least 4 randomized tops and bottoms, and 2 special outfits like Policewoman etc per base nude model for each girl.
I think this is highly doable. Now I just need to spend a few weeks learning Gamemaker. Plus apparently I need to buy a license to release things for that too.
Edit: In regards to DLsite. If I get this made, I will try to get it put everywhere I can, so I can recoup the dev costs. I don't know if GoG allows adult content but I'd try to get it put there too. Anyways thank you both for your posts, they were very helpful. Also in regards to the kickstarter idea, I don't know if that would work since I am just a random nobody. From what I've seen most successful kickstarters seemed to be guys with years of industry experience. Maybe if I can get a working build of this up and running in a few months, maybe I could make a patreon to fund continued development and have new features, new art and new girls added every week. But I am probably getting ahead of myself.
