Here's a glimpse of the character stats & appearance screen in Crusaders of the Tinfoil Hat.

The appearance customization feature is not bad for an indie RPG, but it's limited by our stingy 12-slot inventory (with only 6 slots for wearable gear).

We could certainly pack in more slots - 16 by eliminating the yellow labels, 18 by reducing the maximum party size to six, or both for 24 slots. We could use a free-form system, which allows an endless variety of clothing and accessories without necessitating a dedicated slot for each one. However, the ripple effects on item creation, artwork, tweaking and debugging would set us back by months. We can't justify that on the basis of shirts and socks.

We shelved that idea and moved on to more important tasks.

Months passed.

Then we started making NPCs inspired by memes and internet personalities, and we soon encountered a challenge: Styxhexenhammer666. We already had a suit jacket, shirt and necktie as a single "ensemble" item, with customizable colors for all three parts. Could we add a button to make them transparent? Yeah...!

That solves our dilemma: any clothing item can be an "ensemble" with a couple of optional components. A suit with jacket and tie, shoes and socks (short or long), pants and belt, skirts with options to show more leg or hip, t-shirts tucked in or hanging out, tactical gear with non-functional accessories. Now we have the character customization and NPC creation tools we need, without bloating the game with useless items.

Before release we'll add a color selector with a checkbox to turn off the optional components in a non-kludgy way. One slight complication: for decency's sake certain layers are required or either-or. There's nothing to see but we have to keep it covered up to maintain the illusion! (hmm... sounds conspiratorial - we're saving that line!)

UPDATE 5/3/19 - bit the bullet, coded the color selector... just add a custom color popup and we'e done!