Modifying the scheme of projection state

Hello everyone. I just joined a project where they have a stateful projection. The state of the projections consists of a collection of strings. When they need a new property in the collection they just concatenated it on a string so they have a collection of strings of format string1_newpropertyvalue.

What I want is to make a state be a collection of complex objects so that when I need new property I can just add it to the object instead of doing a concatenation.

I prepared updated projections with a collection of complex objects, stopped projection, modified it (with a new scheme of state), and start it again. What happened is the state scheme has not changed. I tried to reset the projection on a test environment and it worked well, the state scheme was modified. Also, I can delete the projection and create a new one that will do the same but I want to avoid these options.

Is there any way to modify the projection state scheme without resetting it?