Devlog 17: Layers

Hi! Today's devlog is going to be about drawing layers and how tricky it can sometimes be to combine them in games.
If you read my last devlog, you know I wanted to try unifying all the girls in the game "Life with the tribe" to the same standards and sizes. This was needed so that each of the tribe womans could play the same animations as the others (including R18 scenes). But in my head this was much easier to pull off than it turned out to be in reality...
So what was the main problem? As you've probably guessed — layers. For those who don't know what layers are in drawing, let me explain: it's the canvas you draw on, and every layer higher up in the hierarchy will always cover up whatever's drawn on a lower one. So if you draw a nice picture on a lower layer and then decide to add a background on the upper one, you won't be able to see your art, because it's hidden by that layer. Let's get back to the problem.
Here's my attempt to split my test character (the one this whole game's development started with) into parts:
As you can see, everything here is pretty easy and clear — we've got a layer for each important part of the character: body, head, hair, arms, legs, breasts. Seems like that's enough to start drawing other poses for the legs, or different breast sizes, right?
 But here's where the main problem hides: different arm poses affect the body in different ways, and if — like in my case — the arms layer sits below the breasts, you won't be able to draw a pose like this:
As you can see, here the arms cover the breasts and are on the upper level (that is, the arms layer is higher than the breasts layer). Because of this, a problem comes up inside the game — I'll need to make an exception for this pose. But this isn't the only pose in the game where the layer order differs from the base character's.
 Take the hips and those same arms, for example. There are poses where the girl hides her arms behind her back, like here:
But if you look at the layers (the thing down at the bottom), you'll notice her hips sit much lower in the layer hierarchy. So even if I draw the arms and, say, give her big hips, the arms will cover the hips, which would look bad:
Yes, this is an exception, but the further I went checking what was already drawn, the more exceptions like this I kept finding. In a sense the idea is still doable, but at the same time it gets more complicated with every step. Most likely, if I'd stuck to this kind of approach from the very start of development, it would've worked out — but reworking an already existing project into a new type of animation is pretty tough.
So, unfortunately, I had no choice but to drop this idea. The amount of work it would take doesn't give the advantage I was hoping for. In fact, my plan already includes some poses that will be unified across all characters, and those poses aren't that hard to draw — so it'll be much easier to just redraw the pose for each character than to try to squeeze them all into one size.
For now the plan has shifted a bit, but each girl will have at least 2 unique poses and several unified poses for R18 scenes. This adds to my workload, but the poses I'm planning are actually about basic things like: oral, vaginal, anal. I'll try to make each of these poses available for every NPC, but we'll see how it goes during development.

Thank you for your support!