(Future Fragments) A poll about the "No Clothes Talia" Mode Goal (Patreon)

So a long, long time ago, back when we were at about a third of the funding we have now, and when the game was a lot less dense with content and cutscenes and such, we thought the idea of hitting $20,000 would be outright impossible.

At that time, people would ask from time to time about having Talia be able to be fully nude and run around; back then even, to have Triangulate hand-draw new versions of all of the sprites for Talia in the game, all the animations, etc. would have been a hell of an undertaking, which is why we set that goal at $20,000.

(For those who aren't clear about what we're talking about, check on the side of the front page of the Patreon; it lists the "No Clothes Talia Mode" goal. This is something we would have put into the game if we reached $20,000 in funding, and stayed there for a good while; it wasn't something we originally planned to include in the game from the start.)

As time has went on, we've added more and more animations, and realized the full scope of the game, we've been able to keep things under control and we're still generally on target with our vision of the game and how much content we want to put in it.

However, that doesn't hold true for that "nude mode" goal.

Originally, it would have been a complete rework of all the game's cutscenes, events, dialogue, databank reactions, meaning $30,000+ in re-recording voicework, and then thousands upon thousands of frames of animation redrawn and redone, as well as all the endings changed; effectively, it would have been a new game in many aspects.

Back when we first came up with this goal, it was one that we thought manageable with the content we had in the game at that point; now though, even if we stayed at $20,000, the time it would take to do a full fledged nude mode like that would be at least another year of development, if not longer, and that's not counting the high costs of it on top of developing the game as-is.

There's also translation costs too, which would be another $15,000-$30,000 per language, and as we plan to translate the game into at least three different languages (Chinese, Russian, and Japanese, more later if we can afford it), you can see where the costs would pile up fast.

The nude mode goal, if it was reached, was something we would have done after the game was completed, as free DLC; we would have worked on it in our spare time while doing Faye's game.

But that year long estimate up above is if we were focusing on it full time; if we were doing it as a side project, it'd be years before we'd be able to realistically complete that level of a rework. By that point, it's unlikely many people who originally pledged to support the game would be interested in even seeing that mode, as by then they likely would have moved onto other games in general. That time could also be better spent working on new games after Future Fragments, as well.

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(For a brief reminder, the reason why doing new costumes for this is much harder than most other games, is because we're not using a skeleton for Talia or any similar systems; that means that we can't just "drape" a skin over Talia like in most other games. The game is animated by literally drawing it frame by frame in Photoshop, so any costume alterations require pixel by pixel animation, frame by frame.)

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So the poll below is effectively to see what your reactions would be to possibly removing the Nude Talia goal, and going for something more reasonable financially and time-wise both; if people do majority vote to remove that goal, we would make another poll asking people what kind of goals they'd like to see replace it.