What is the best way to handle a lot of variations/layers?

[GammaBreak]

I'm not overly familiar with visual novels yet, but I do know that some games feature things like multiple character outfits in addition to their things like sprite expressions and/or poses.

So my question is: is there any particular 'best' way to handle these? I'm sort of putting together an idea for a scene that would likely need one 'base' CG scene and a bunch of variations and layers for it. Not only that, but some variations would need to be tracked to separate CG scenes, resulting in even more variations. I'm fairly confident in my coding skills that I could pull that off, but my concern is the price.

Going off of my last game, finding a quality artist is not cheap, but not something you should skimp on because the art is one of the biggest appeals of your game. For just this one scene, giving conservative estimates based on my previous artist, the cost already exceeds my current game, and this is just one scene. Granted, it's probably the biggest scene in the game, but there's still a lot more game to go. Is there any way to shave price off sprites and variations, or is this mostly up to the artist(s)?

[CatPalismia]

For artists it's easier to make expression variants than outfit or pose variants. To cut off some costs it would be better to shave off pose variants and explain the change of pose in text. If that's still not enough, then you need to think if the outfits are so important that there need to be variants for those. The question you should ask is "will this scene work even without the thing x" and be honest with yourself if that one thing could be explained rather than shown. Of course showing is always better, but due to budget and time we have to take short cuts.

Do those planned CGs include a background drawn by the artist? If yes, you will get it cheaper by only asking a CG drawing of the characters and then editing behind that a background image you use in the game. If you don't trust your own editing skills, you will still get it cheaper if the artist agrees to edit the already existing background image behind the CG (like blurring and zooming it). Of course this only works in scenes with simple angles, but that's something to consider too.

[GammaBreak]

Those are some good ideas.

To cut off some costs it would be better to shave off pose variants and explain the change of pose in text.

I can definitely work with this. Don't need a lot of different posing, but what I will need is to have one character move around as part of the different variants. So if the scene has 2 characters in it, character 1 wouldn't move, but based on the options, character 2 would be in one of 3 spots. So not really much to do in that regard, but I can at least make it so the other character remains in an almost entirely fixed position, which I imagine would help cut down the cost.

Do those planned CGs include a background drawn by the artist?

Kind of what I said above, I think I could get away with the artist doing the background only once. My previous artist did very well with background work, and I think that would add to the scene. Plus I don't trust my own editing skills beyond very simple things.