Dev Update! 4/8/24

Hey, friends! Sorry for the late update today. Been a bit under the weather of late, but I'm on the upswing. 
Here's a quick state-of-things update: Chapter 9's currently over 800 renders. This week I've mainly been working on scenes featuring Alex and Risa. Alex's scene is over half-complete, and one of Risa's ero scenes is about 60% complete. Still got a little more work to do there, but I'm hoping to wrap that up in the next couple of days.
All in all, things are rolling along pretty well. I expect to top 1200 renders by the end of the month. Alex's scenes are just about there. Risa's scenes are just about there. That really just leaves some content with Gabby, Madison, and Mason to finish up.
So, I'm just going to keep grinding it out and see where I'm at by the end of the month. After informally polling people, most seemed to agree they'd rather wait for a bigger update, even if it delays the release by a couple weeks. I'm still hoping for a late April release, though. As always, I'll keep you folks abreast of any developments.
By now, most of you should have had the opportunity to play the recent Special Release, so I'd like to chat about it for a bit. First of all, I'm just really glad so many people seemed to enjoy it. It was a big change in format, obviously, and with that comes risk. I kind of expected to be drawn and quartered for dilly dallying about with something that's not really within the main narrative. But, the overriding sentiment was that it was cool to see a bit more of the world, outside of the player's POV.
For me, it was just fun to experiment with a new setting. I got to use some new assets, as well as experiment with some different stuff in Photoshop. I think it's some of the best-looking stuff I've done in the game, honestly.
With this little side-story having been a success, I think it opens the door to doing more. With such a large cast, there's plenty of characters to explore. And since I was able to turn around the update pretty quickly (3-4 days of rendering, plus 1 for writing) that means I could theoretically drop mini-updates between updates, giving you folks a bit more content.
Could be fun! I'm definitely excited by the possibilities. 
My stomach's gurgling and I'm running a slight fever, so I'm going to leave you with that for now. But as always, thank you for being here. It means a lot. As always, take care of yourselves, and thank you for your support!