Hello, fellow netrunners.

In the finale of Chapter 3(B): Contrafact, Ravy discovers that the bones of old stories never stay buried, and that consequence is a monster he can never escape.

We Need Your Support (Really)

If you’re enjoying any of the String Zero media (visual novel, podcast, and soundtrack), please consider subscribing to our patreon so we can continue to fund development.

As mentioned on our social media, sudden housing instability has limited my ability to entirely self-fund the project for the foreseeable future. It was always my intention to taper my contributions over time until the project was fully self-sufficient, so there are budget safeguards in place to allow the game to continue for awhile without my full investment.

But not forever. So we need your support. If you enjoy and appreciate what we’re trying to accomplish and the stories we’re trying to tell, please support us however you can. Otherwise, long delays are inevitable.

• Patreon
• Ko-Fi

Thank you, friends and fans.

Update

Our Anniversary Event is complete! Thanks to ey0ne for hacking CSC funds to provide us four YCH art raffles. We’ll share all of those in a post on our social media once they’re complete. For now, please enjoy this promo piece of Tarrolf by Shockjaws (18+ X / BS; full resolution and adult alt available on Patreon).

Also a new logo banner from our in-house artist Kensuke (18+ X / BS).

We appreciate everyone who entered and are glad we were able to put this event together to give back to our fans a little bit.

Looking Forward

A quick note on timelines: Presently, we have one artist doing sketch/design/linework (Ken), one artist doing backgrounds (Allie), and one artist doing sprite color design, background paintovers, and CGs/Illustrations (Lision). To help with accelerating future timelines, we’re discussing adding a fourth artist to assist Lision and also leaning on guest illustrators to take off some of the CG pressure. This means our CGs won’t have a unified style (which we were trying to move towards), but we prefer style inconsistency over further delays.

Our current timeline is to have the next Bringing the Heat out in January, and Chapter 4 out in February.

Chapter 3B Changelog

Chapter 3B Content Update:

• Added Chapter 3B script, assets, and LOOM entries (second half of chapter 3)
• Approx 10k words of new content
• 1 new CG
• 2 new animations (1 in 3A, 1 in 3B)
• 1 new song and 2 new song extension (for “Dire Static” and “Listen”)
• 2 new sets of character sprites

Other Content Updates:

• Various small continuity tweaks across all 3 chapters.
• Various small bug fixes and typo fixes.
• “Past Prologue” has been remastered with new instruments.

General Updates:

• A reminder that LOOM notifications are customizable in the Preferences menu. (There is an option to turn them off completely for those of you who find them distracting.)
• The game now supports definition/pronunciation hyperlinks. These will appear as blue text in the text box that can be clicked for a pop-up to provide pronunciation guidance and a short definition. Sometimes these will include small bits of information that don’t yet warrant a full LOOM article.
  • This was a Patreon request. Thank you patrons!
• There is now a Hide UI button in the quicktools icon bar.
  • This was a Patreon request. Thank you patrons!
• Podcasts can now be accessed from the Extras menu. For now these will just link to the youtube channel. We will investigate if the videos can be embedded.
• We now have integrated Spanish language support. This will typically always be one build behind, so presently the translation is only up through Chapter 3A. Thank you to Dray / TheSeventhWonder for working with us so closely on this.
  • Edit: We’re aware there’s some missing translated text. We’ll remedy that in a hotfix over the next couple of days. Also, since we’re applying a hotfix, we’ll apply the translation for 3B earlier than expected as well!
  • Note: Some items are challenging to translate and will not be included for now. Notably, animations and illustrations with text.
  • We are looking for Russian and Chinese translation teams to work with closely. Due to the complexity of this game, we are not looking to outsource translations. However, we have no issue with fan translations.
• Updated credits and patreon supporter slides.