Edit: Please keep comments civil <3
First off, we'd like to thank you for supporting indie games and developers, even if Speakeasy didn't end up being a game you loved.
We didn't want to limit the creativity on the art and wanted to create something fun that leaned more toward fantasy than strict historical accuracy. It might not be for everyone, but it reflects our vision as the developers.
Regarding the critique on the skin tones, we're sorry to hear that the skin tone choices weren't appealing. This is a comment we've seen in another review, so we'd like to take this opportunity to talk a little more about it. (The following discussion isn't directed at OP of this comment, just some information for anyone who would like to learn more about the MC customization and how it was developed.)
Cora was originally written as her own well-defined character and wasn't intended to be a self-insert character (not even her name was changeable in the beginning!). After receiving many requests to have more MC options available, we put in a Kickstarter goal to create a customizable MC. That goal was never reached, but with the small amount of extra funds that were pledged, we tried our best to provide some options with the limited budget available to do this.
Unlike some indie studios, Open Late Games doesn't have an artist as part of the dedicated development team and we use paid outside artists, so making updates to the art is very much dependent on our budget. We would have loved to do completely redrawn character art with a wider options of looks to choose from, but there was only so much we were able to do at the time.
What we had to work with was the base art for the original Cora character. From there, we had to choose tone options that allowed us to use the original line work and would retain the same look of the shadows, highlights, blushes, and all the different coloring variations within the expressions without losing all of those details. Because again, we didn't have the budget to do completely redrawn art for multiple MC options. Going too dark with the tone wasn't the only issue that made the details in the art get lost, using tones that had too much yellow or too much red also produced the same effect. So we had to compromise and find some variations that would be general representations of different types of tones, but didn't make the MC's face lose all the detail that was shown in the base art.
A lot of care and effort was put into making the base art work without making the other skin tone options look flat or like caricatures because they lacked detail and definition. The absolute last thing we wanted to put forth was options that looked poorly executed or offensive.
With Speakeasy as our first game, it's definitely been a learning experience navigating player expectations. And the conclusion is that we won't be able to please everyone and the games we make won't be universally loved, for a variety of reasons. We aren't sure what the best course of action to take would have been, whether it was sticking with our original concept for the MC that was her own defined character without customization, or to choose the path that we did.
We hope that this provides some insight into the challenges faced during game development, especially the very real relationship between art and budget constraints.