Hello, this is Garrett Thompson, sole member of Act-Novel. I've been pretty quiet about the state of the project around here for a little bit too long, so I'm writing this update to rectify that problem!

As of today, the upcoming character art update for Reality Layer Zero is complete! ... Well, mostly. I've still got some alternate expressions to do, some cleanup work on some of the new portraits, and at least 3 fullscreen illustrations left to complete, but the vast majority (i.e. recreating all of the dialog portraits) is now finished! This took a bit longer than I expected for, ah, a variety of reasons. Here's a bulleted list of the most important ones.

• As I got more into redoing the portraits, I started to give in more and more to my latent perfectionism, counterproductively extending the length of time required per-portrait and throwing out completed work.
• I started to miss programming, so I spent some time between August and September learning Vulkan. In that time, I managed to render a textured triangle, which is actually a lot more impressive and time consuming. than it sounds.
• Around October I could feel my motivation/discipline leaving my body, so I started slacking off late last year. (I'm 90% back to standard now)
• I started playing Europa Universalis IV in December. In productivity terms, this might be characterized as an unforced error-- but I had no way of knowing I'd find changing colors on a map so endlessly compelling.

Since I've got a lot of new art to show-off now-- and, secondarily, to maintain some manner of presence on various online channels-- I'd like to start publishing commentaries (over the next several weeks) on some (or all) of the new portraits, to explain process details or provide other insights-- and perhaps most importantly, to document (more intricately) the details of the development of this project... For posterity! If you're interested in that kind of thing, look forward to that!

No idea if this is interesting to anyone, but I've got a lot to say about it!

Some portraits have been significantly modified. Others have had minor pose adjustments or details added. Still others are virtually unrecognizable from their original incarnations. I have to say that overall I feel pretty good about the results, though.

With all of that out of the way, I'm now starting into the final stretch before the next update (v0.4). This update will not feature any "new" story content, but will contain various gameplay improvements and balance changes as well as some story revisions-- as discussed in the previous Development Notes entry. Replaying the Second Layer-- where the majority of these revisions are occurring-- will not be necessary for returning players, as the major events will remain identical, but I expect the reading experience will be improved for newcomers.

Version 0.4 will be coming out... Soon! I hesitate to give a hard date for it, since I've been wrong about that sort of thing before, but rest assured that it's close at hand. The next story update (likely version 0.6) will follow somewhat behind, with any luck before the end of 2025. Each subsequent story update (i.e. after v0.6) will very likely not take quite as long to complete as the first three, since at that point, asset creation requirements will be much lower for each subsequent part. In fact, it seems fairly likely to me that as long as I can push the v0.6 update out, the rest of the game will come out fairly easily as a matter of course. In other words, this is the last major hill to climb! ... Speaking optimistically, that is.

Thank you very much for your continued interest! Until next time.