Alright, I'm going to say it as no one else is. I don't think chapter 8 is ever going to come out. It's been 4 years, nothing but a hobby for the creator, while having a good career outside the game, this moves at a snails pace, and I don't expect it to come out anytime soon. I've been following him since flash was still running, it's clear that when that went down he lost motivation.
The 4 years gap is more than justified.
Like you said it's a hobby and despite that he release another project during that period of time, took around 2 years mostly because of the learning process of getting used to a new engine and the genre change midway (was supposed to be an action sidescroller when it started but then it was turned into a 4x4 Rpg).
Moving CK from Flash to Unity also required a long period of time to do as you can't simple ctrl+c/ctrl+v the code from one engine to the other.
Introspurt is still giving us updates after each phase is concluded and there's even a tracker of the current task on the works.
Currently there's only one animation left to be done, then there's still the cutscenes, maps, lewd statics, music, ancillary codding and finally the Closed Alpha Test.
The project is still following the very same process than before, but now the Unity engine allows more complexity than Flash did, the animations for example will have multiple variations and loops, different from what happened in previous chapters. The previous chapter with the longest development time took 7 months to be finished, and that was thanks to the fact that it reused the code and assets from the previous one different than the current one.
And if there's something I can assure you is that he didn't loose his motivation, every time he talks about the game he does it with the same excitement and joy than the early days and sometimes it's even necessary that he contains said excitement to avoid saying too much and forcing moderators to delete +500 messages to get rid of spoilers like happened a few times along the years.
He has a job for a long time and is now taking things slower to avoid "burn out" since he never stopped working on these projects since at least chapter 3 when someone created the discord server for the game. So it will take some time but I have no doubt that people will be able to say "We got CK8 before GTA VI!" for certain and that by that time your message will have aged really well.
