Hello, fellow netrunners.

Chapter 4 is now publicly available!

It’s been a long wait since Chapter 3B, and we thank everyone for their patience. You can see the full changelog for all of this build’s updates at the bottom of this post.

Chapter 4 is about the size of 3A and 3B combined, so expect a fair bit of content. Further, this chapter draws to a close all of String Zero Arc 1. To that end, we wanted to make this chapter a little more flashy, visually, so we hope you enjoy it.

Arc 2 will begin with Chapter 5. If Arc 1 saw us come to understand Ravy’s setting and situation, Arc 2 will see us follow Ravy actively participating in events and beginning to reshape the politics of Nu Lios (intentionally or unintentionally).

The first “season” of String Zero will end with Arc 3. The game will end with the conclusion of “season” 2.

We also have a new trailer!

Quick Rundown

Along with the Chapter 4 content updates, we’ve also done some additional work.

• FMOD integration with Android.
  • Trying to get FMOD to play nice with both Ren’py and the Android OS has been a quandary that our programmer has finally cracked, barring a few bugs that might crop up here and there. This means the dynamic music PC and Mac users enjoy can now be experienced on Android (and we don’t have to support two different music archives).
• General FMOD track improvements.
  • There’s an art to getting all the flagging correct so the dynamic music is appropriately flexible with reading speed and skipping. We spent some time trying to smooth this out. Please let us know if you encounter any bugs.
• Composite Sprites.
  • For purposes of time, our sprites were originally all merged into a single layer. However this is limiting in a lot of different ways, so we decided to take some time and start the process of fully compositing sprites so their expression elements, clothes, etc. are all layered. This affords us a greater breadth of expression options (three times as many in some cases), and will reduce the game’s filesize.
  • Presently about 30% of sprites have been updated this way.

A Quick Note On “NSFW” Scenes and Censorship

I feel strongly that the general disclaimer you must click through whenever launching String Zero is sufficient warning for violence or scenes of a sexual nature, so there are no plans for further content warnings. We will also not be providing skips for scenes of this nature, as the intention is for them to be consistently necessary for character development and plot.

If enough streamers request an “NSFW Mode” that auto-censors the relevant CGs (with something like black boxes; not content rewrites), we’ll consider addressing that. However, after speaking to several streamers, who noted to me it’s pretty trivial for them to censor CGs during their video editing passes, we’ve decided to not spend development time on this right now.

Moving Forward

If necessary, we’ll drop an intermediate build 4.5 for fixes and refinements.

As mentioned, Chapter 5 is presently about halfway through its writing process. I hate making promises about release windows because I’m invariably wrong, but we’re going to try and not take 6+ months this time and aim for an early Q4 release. That said, it will include more composite sprite updates and that takes a fair bit of time.

“Bringing The Heat” episode 3 paused production earlier this year, but is about 2/3 complete. We’re restarting production soon and hope to have that released in the coming months.

We’re in the process of collating all of the String Zero music so the full OST for Arc 1 can be made available for streaming.

Complete Changelog

Chapter 4 content implemented.

• New animation from Gumdrop Studios.
• New backgrounds from AllieKatArt and Ruckusleaf. Touchups and paintovers by Lision and Ruckusleaf.
• New character sprites from KensukeTheCat and Lision.
• New illustrations from Dangpa, Graysheartart, HYENABLOOD, Lision, and Remusuki.
• New music tracks from Anthemics, Frozen Measure, Gojii, HYENABLOOD, Ian Martyn, and Slate.
• New SFX from Dieselsaurus and various royalty free sources.
• Updated script and LOOM entries.
• Updated Spanish Translation from Dray.

Added global content and fixes.

• Squashed CTC bug where the indicator would overlap words (hopefully).
• Subscribestar support added.
• Title card graphics updated and illustrations added to gallery.
• Various adjustments to sprite display. This is a complex and ongoing project.
• Various FMOD music and scripting updates.
• Various small bug and typo fixes.
• Various UI/UX adjustments.
  • Ravy’s HUD display has been redone to use custom assets.
  • Portrait mode UI portrait locations adjusted.
  • Windowed UI added to provide support for “off-screen” sprites.
  • Memory UI mode added to make more clear when the prose has shifted in time.

Known Issues

• LOOM notifications that appear during the memory UI have not been updated to accommodate the change in UI sizing. (This will be updated in the next post-public fix release.)
• Due to changes in our FMOD script, some saves from previous versions captured during dynamic music sequences will not be compatible with this newest version.
• Crashes during FMOD/dynamic music sequences when the back button is pressed too many times.
  • Pressing back sometimes causes FMOD flags to override each other in incompatible ways, causing a crash. Usually, you can simply ignore the script warning; the music just won’t play for that sequence.
• Crashes on Skip.
  • Skipping is known to cause occasional crashes when Ren’py is not allowed to fully render portions of the script. This is especially true on slower machines.
  • Report these issues, but typically, moving through these sequences at normal speed will resolve the problem.
• With different composers and different mix/mastering, there is some volume variation in SFX and Music. This is something we hope to fix over time.
  • Please do report any wild variations in volume, however.

Thanks for your support, everyone!