Hello, fellow netrunners.

We appreciate all the patience for the extended development cycle. As I hope you’ll be able to see, the quality of the assets and multilayered editorial process demands a fair bit of extra refinement time. (Not to mention many of us on the team have full-time jobs and live in vastly different time zones, so collaboration can get a bit delayed.) So full disclosure, until our need for new assets is less demanding, our dev cycle will continue to trend towards a 3-month release cadence.

Regardless, we’re proud of what we’ve put together in this chapter. You can look forward to:

• a fair bit of length in the form of ~20k words including new LOOM articles
• 1 new CG by Lision and an illustrated map by me via Inkarnate (cool program yo)
• 1 new HUD animation by Gumdrop Studios (art by Coffeline)
• 9 new songs + some variations (Starkeeper, Civ Valian, Slate, HYENABLOOD)
• 4 new sprited characters + extra Aerran variations
• 2 new title cards
• 2 new portraits
• 8 new backgrounds
• a bunch of quality of life updates/cleanup thanks to programmer black magic (for real Thrashe, tyty)
• completely redone pre-chapter 1 introduction with 2 new animations (also by Gumdrop Studios); additionally pruned some unnecessary sounds from CH 1
• tbh there’s a lot so I’m sure I’m missing something

Things We’re Working on But Haven’t Figured Out Yet:

• FMOD on Android: Nope, we still haven’t solved this. What you’re hearing on Android is a workaround Thrashe manhandled, but resolving this persistent issue is a pet project of his.
• Dynamic Linking in the LOOM Like a Wiki: OK, so, Thrashe created the LOOM’s back-end programming from scratch because he’s really smart, so adding in linking as has been requested is something he’s thinking about but hasn’t resolved yet since it’ll likely require more custom coding work.
• File Size and Memory Use: We’re keeping an eye on it. We have several initiatives planned to keep the file size manageable and scripting efficient. We’ll sneak those in as we have time.

On navel-gazing philosophy and the risk of sounding like a pretentious poopy head OR why I changed the introduction:

It’s kind of a Cyberpunk (and Science Fiction in general) tradition to lean into indulgent philosophical musings, and I’m at my worst when I decide I want to get especially poetical about it. Wyatt (bless him) is good about reigning in my worse tendencies, and I appreciate my many test readers who sit with me to clarify what is and isn’t landing. Figurative language is an art.

However, I think trying to communicate challenging messages is important despite the difficulties. I truly believe FVN readers are hungry for heady topics and can engage with complex material. That said, I do think a certain level of trust is necessary for this to work, largely so readers don’t feel like the author (me) is lecturing at them, or acting in bad faith, which is not the intention here. This is why being transparent about feedback receptivity and illustrating clearly how that feedback is being incorporated is important (to me; I do not speak for other devs).

My hope is simply to give readers something digestible to think about, spark conversation, and for readers to let me know when that isn’t working. There’s always going to be some level of compromise, of course. Some topics can’t be distilled into simple language without divesting them of nuance, and also for the sake of narrative tension: Mystery has to be maintained. Not all detail can be expressed immediately. Readers need to be given time to wonder, speculate, and form their own opinions about things. And frankly, sometimes it’s just best to leave holes for readers to play with and fill on their own.

Hence the aforementioned trust; so just know that we’re listening. To that end, I continue to ask for your patience, grace, and good faith feedback. Let’s build something great together.

In other words: “Let him cook.”

Additional Plans:

Sprites: One of our goals is to have a large diversity of character poses and expressions, so we’ll be revisiting major characters over time to add extra posing as we’ve done with Aerran in this chapter. When we do this, we’ll also be revisiting older chapters and adding in the new posing/expressions where appropriate. This has the benefit of offering readers a reason to return to older chapters to see greater nuance in character personalities.

Title Cards: This is something we thought would add to the game’s ambience and help elucidate some themes with visual storytelling. We’ll be adding this going forward. (Adding them to the image gallery requires some extra programming. We’ll do this for the next build.)

Custom Music, etc.: I’ve mentioned this in the past, but it’s been important to me for String Zero to have a fully custom soundtrack, written with the games’ story beats in mind. Because we don’t source royalty free music (though we do use adjusted royalty free sounds), there’s a certain amount of development time and expense that comes with that. In fact, we have several exciting collaborations on the horizon. Which leads us to…

Patreon (alternatively, Ko-Fi)

Please consider backing us! I cross my heart promise we source the String Zero patreon community for thoughts and feedback regularly, and do our best to keep content flowing for the extra content tiers between major releases. Development is expensive, so your contributions truly allow the project to become self-sustaining, supports all of our artists and contributors, and allows us to continue reaching for that cinematic experience and integrated community we’re trying so hard to achieve.

On that note, again, thank you so much for your collective interest, feedback, and support.

– Reo