Posted May 18, 2025 by Act-Novel
#reality layer zero #development notes
Hello, this is Garrett Thompson, sole member of Act-Novel.
Many of you may be wondering about the status of Reality Layer Zero Version 0.4, the character art update that I first introduced a while ago. As of today, my development to-do list only contains a small collection of bugfix- and testing-related items, which would seem to imply that the update is... Imminent! I still don't have a release date set, since it's possible that, during testing, I'll uncover some hideous manifold tarbaby that delays things further while it gets sorted out; however, at the very least, the vast, vast majority of work has now been completed.
In the meantime, I wanted to write this update to serve as an answer to the obvious question of what I've been up to these past few months.
In the previous development notes entry, I mentioned that I had "3 fullscreen illustrations left to complete". During the actual work phase, that number expanded to 5 and was then cut back down to 4. I think now is a good time to share these, to demonstrate how the updated visuals have been applied to areas of the game other than character portraits. If you'd prefer not to view these illustrations outside of the context of the v0.4 update, mind the spoiler tags!
While I've certainly improved as an artist in some key areas for this project, that improvement has not been uniform. The last several months have revealed to me (and, consequently, demanded the address of) several core weaknesses in my artistic skillset.
Specifically, I discovered that I'm still miserably terrible at drawing backgrounds! To explain what I mean, let's dig into what the creative process behind Fullscreen Illustration #1 looked like.
... But at any rate, it's over now! Until the need to draw more fullscreen illustrations emerges again... For the next major update!
A few other nice things incoming for v0.4 are the gameplay improvements and story revisions I mentioned two development notes entries ago, which are all implemented and (mostly!) verified to work. I've also added a fancier "Bad End" screen-- it's not just white text on a black background anymore!
This also comes with a new musical stinger... But you'll have to wait for the update to listen to that, since you can't listen to an animated GIF! Feel free to send me suggestions for sentences to show up in the leadup animation. Currently it's a selection populated at random from about 20 options.
Once v0.4 is ready to come out, I'm probably going to need to remake some of the store assets (screenshots, trailers), since the visual style of the game has changed from what's currently on display. This... could be somewhat time-consuming, so I haven't decided yet whether I'll do that before or after the update releases! In either case, the current version (v0.3.2.1) will remain available with the old artwork preserved, for posterity, either on this page or on a new "Reality Layer Zero Beta" page, depending on which approach makes the most sense.
Thank you very much for reading.