Working on renders, while finishing up parts of the script, has really made me appreciate how much work I was putting into a bunch of scenes that were hypothetically mutually exclusive (I know one of you deviants would just make a mod).  This kind of got me re-evaluating why I was making the scenes mutually exclusive.  There is a plot point I want to hit in the next release.  It's kind of the last big thing that needs to happen to fully frame some of the central points of the story.  I need to get that out of the way so I can brush off negative criticism about the story as a sign of poor reading comprehension as opposed to some fault in my writing.  I am perfect and so is my game.  

The original thought was that this update would cover 'first thing I'ma do when I get outta here', and this plot point would hit right after whatever that 'first thing' was.  Turns out, I'm the writer, I can push the plot point back a little if I want to.

So, what I'm thinking now is that the player will get the full buffet of options, and the plot point will hit once they're done with everything they want to do.  I was worried about throwing off the pacing, but this part of the game isn't supposed to move as fast as the beginning, so I think it'll be fine.  Probably.  I hope.

I do think there should be some extra significance to the player's 'first thing', and I'll need to make some tweaks to some scenes to capture who the player has already seen/fucked/thrown off a roof, but I'm not talking about any big rewrites or scrapped work here.  

I've got a lot of Ness's scene built and a decent chunk of it rendered.  Counting just what I've got rendered for her so far, there are already a few hundred renders.  Her scene is going to end up with more renders than most because I'm silly and decided to have different outfits for her depending on some earlier choices, but generalizing a bit, we're conservatively looking at a few hundred renders for most characters' scene.  That's Ness, Stella, Izzi, Xiang, and also maybe some other people that I either haven't fully committed to building a scene for yet or I'm keeping secret because I'm a dick.  Add in the 'mandatory' scenes bookending the update, and that's a lot of renders.  And words.  Way too many words.

I don't want to break the update up into separate releases since most of it will be optional, if some player isn't interested in seeing or talking to any of the characters I build scenes for, then they won't really have anything to do until I release the plot point I mentioned.  Depending on how long I spend working on this update, I might do a partial release to paid subscribers.  I don't want people sitting around waiting too long, especially if they're generous enough to support me.  We'll burn that bridge when we get there.

TLDR - Update's going to be big.  You'll get to play through the scenes you want to instead of being forced to choose just one.

I needed a break from building Ness's scene, so I've started work on another one.  She's long overdue for some screen time, so her content has been pretty fun to write.