AHE September Illustration (Patreon)

We have a while yet before our background artist catches up on the July and August poll winners and I feel like environment polls somewhat lost their suspense after we got the basics covered, so—from here on out, monthly polls will be for special character illustrations.

I've already paid for our first special illustration; Megan and Stephanie standing together in cosplay. This'll be our first look at Megan, and a new posing for Stephanie. In-game, it'll be the first introduction for the characters. Because the base Brian and Emily designs are both going to be going through at least one more round of changes, I'm somewhat limiting our options for our first illustration poll.

Soon as we have basic designs down for more characters, poll options will open up quite a bit more. After a ton of consideration, I've decided to not include really raunchy NSFW options because A), they would win each poll without contest, and B), because I don't want to spoil them before the game's released—it's better if players can discover the really special ones for the first time when they actually play.

So, I'm gonna apportion maybe a third of the monthly character art budget to secret illustrations that no one's gonna see for a long time. Probably not a popular decision by any means and it makes the monthly polls a little less exciting, but... it should be a call everyone can agree with, right? I'll still be ordering more backgrounds after the bg artist works through our current list, it'll just be down to one or two a month instead of batches of three so that I can focus more of the budget on character design sheets and illustrations.

( AnimeCon Harem Eroge )