I did not intend for this to go up so late in the day, but, well...
For context, there's a post over on Patreon (and Subscribestar) that you can read. You don't even have to join as a free member to get access to the post. It is kind of a long one, though, so here's a quick tl;dr:
I'm worn the hell out.
I'm definitely not calling it quits, but development news is likely going to be pretty slow over the next few weeks while I work on v0.19. I'm doing my best to recuperate so I can get back into development in earnest, but trying to "relax harder" feels like trying to incite either anxiety or depression, so I just have to accept that it'll take some time. Once I've managed to catch my breath, I'll get back to it.
Though I do want to be clear - I am still working on v0.19. I'm organizing notes, brainstorming events, and trying to keep myself caught up on other background work (and non-development work) that I've been neglecting. There's just not a lot to say about completing that stuff, even for someone like me who has a talent for using a lot of words to say very little.
The silver lining to all this is that I have a very solid plan for what's going into v0.19, and there isn't a lot of non-development work that needs to be done on it short of renders and animations for the new lewds that'll be coming with the new Freeze events for the new characters.
As a bit more summary from the post linked above, since there are only four new Maids for this Freeze compared to the last two averaging out at 8 each, the new content shouldn't take me a ton of time to get made and tested. That'll leave me more room than usual to bugfix and playtest, which is a very good thing, because the last few updates haven't gotten as much bugfixing as I'd have liked to give them. I've still got a list of things to address that I haven't had the time to give any attention to. All before the end of the year.
The last thing worth mentioning if you didn't read the post above is that after v0.19, it's hard to say how long individual updates will take to make from a sheer content perspective. v0.18 is the end of Act 2, with v0.19 acting as a sort of interlude before v0.20 kicks off Act 3. With what I want to do in Act 3, it would be bordering on impossible to cleanly split the arcs into smaller updates, so what's left of the story is likely to come out in as few as three updates. Obviously that's going to take me more time than usual to develop, so news may continue to be sparse as I move forward.
If you want to keep up with development news, both Patreon and Subscribestar have free options so you get notifications (even if you don't pay for access to all the juicy details), and I announce when posts go up in places like Bluesky, so you can also follow me there if you want to know when updates become available even when news is sparse.
And one last thing to mention from that post linked up top - thanks for being here. I really do appreciate it.