The idea

You’ve walked a whole life that wasn’t yours. Now you’re on the far side of the bridge, holding the scroll you’ve carried since the beginning. What’s written on it, and how much of it you managed to fill, decides what happens next.

The game has three endings. This image is one of them.

Reading the image

• Colour, at last. Every chapter so far has been painted in a single ink tone. This is the first time the world is in full colour: the nine threads of light that scattered on this bridge in Chapter 1 are flowing back into the scroll.
• The lilies that shattered like glass in Chapter 1 are in full bloom.
• The bridge holds the lantern-bearer, a figure in white, and behind them a long line of travellers waiting to cross. Look for faces you might recognise from earlier chapters, like the child in red.
• The hand of mist that followed you through every chapter is opening up and dissolving into the clouds.
• The frame is the Life Scroll itself: its rollers at the edges, its stitched panels across the sky, and a row of seals collected along the way. Each seal is a story from an earlier chapter.

With this, every chapter of Dear Z. has its key art, from the mist of the first bridge to the colour of the last. The next step is turning these pictures into places you can walk through.

The idea

You’ve left the house. Out here there’s only grassland, wide and quiet, and for the first time there’s no hand. Nothing is chasing you.

Walk a little further and you start to find graves: no names, just small carvings. Then more of them. The sun goes down, the grass turns gold, a meteor falls. Somewhere on the horizon, someone with a lantern is waiting.

Reading the image

• The palette is faded straw-gold and ash, a sunset over a sea of grass. The only other colours are a ribbon of green aurora, the white streak of a meteor, and the thin red line of wildfire far away.
• The graves in the foreground are carved with butterflies, silkworms and cocoons. Two are shaped like open hands. Beside some lie masks that were finally taken off.
• The traveller, old now and leaning on a stick, walks among them in the same white cloak.
• The miniatures are the whole journey so far, small enough to hold: the rope bridge, the boat with its glowing door, the cocoon on the pine, the teapot mountain, the red-roofed house. If you look closely, there’s someone by the lake watching the fish.
• The bonsai pot is the frame: its glazed rim curves along the bottom of the image, and the great pine leans over everything.

On the far right, at the edge of the fire, a single figure holds up a lantern.

The idea

Halfway up the mountain there’s a grand old house. By day, its servants work the fields as oxen and horses, with ploughs strapped to their backs and chains on their ankles. At night, they come home and put on their masks.

Inside, everyone looks the same and walks the same way, in one long line. Before the sun goes down, anyone still walking alone is put outside, where the hand is waiting. So people keep offering you a chain: just tie yourself to someone, and you can stay.

Reading the image

• The palette is aged cinnabar lacquer: oxblood, rust and dark umber, with the last of the sunset bleeding across the horizon. Home is warm here, and it’s also suffocating.
• The courtyard is built around a grave. A grassy mound and a stone stele sit at its centre, and the household moves around it as if it were nothing unusual.
• The procession circles the courtyard in masks, many walking in pairs joined at the ankle.
• The traveller is the only figure in white and the only one unmasked. They’re holding a mask that someone has just handed them, and haven’t put it on yet.
• The stage on the left shows a shadow-play, two figures from an old story leaning toward each other.
• The box is the frame itself: carved red lacquer walls at the edges, and a lid propped open overhead, letting in the final light.

On the right, beyond the gate, the hand of mist rises out of the storm. It’s waiting for sundown.

The idea

At the top of the mountain there’s a golden hall. Everyone wants to get there, and everyone is climbing: for knowledge, for work, for a place to belong. The stairs go on forever. Some people stop to rest and never start again, some shove each other out of the way, and some just keep their heads down and climb.

Getting to the top isn’t the hard part, though. The hard part is the door, and who it lets through.

Reading the image

• The palette is a deep cobalt-blue ink, cold and dreamlike. Against it, everything warm burns orange: the hall, the lanterns along the stairs, the low sun, and the trees that seem to glow like embers.
• The gate at the lower left spills light, but the pale hooded figures crouched outside it aren’t going in.
• The traveller in the white cloak has just passed through and starts up the steps, leaning on a branch.
• The stairway of lights winds all the way up the mountain, a thin thread of gold through the dark.
• The hand of mist is back, reaching toward the gate. It can’t follow you inside.
• The sky is the inside of a porcelain teapot, cracked like old glaze, with light pouring in through the lid and mist drifting from the spout at upper right.

Look for the smaller shrine on the right-hand slope, lit by a few candles. It matters later in the chapter.

Updated October 1 with a revised version of the key art.

The idea

The desert from the end of Chapter 2 goes on. Far ahead, a city of white domes floats in the sky. The people who live there are born with robes that let them fly, and they come and go as easily as breathing. You can’t fly. Neither can the traveller who offers you a ride on their camel, and who turns out to be a lot more like you than either of you expected.

Getting up there means finding out what you are, and then becoming it.

Reading the image

• The palette is bleached sand and ivory, a single warm ink tone. The only colour is the muted green of mulberry leaves, and this chapter’s light is green.
• The silk tunnel on the left is the inside of a cocoon: thousands of threads spun into a passage, with more cocoons hanging like lanterns. A tiny figure stands deep inside it.
• The riders in white robes cross the dunes toward the city, leaving a long line of footprints behind them.
• The curved wall of glass is both the barrier at the edge of the desert and a hint that this whole world sits inside a jar, lit from its open mouth above.

After the night-blue sea of Chapter 2, this is the brightest place the journey has been so far. That’s deliberate: adolescence is full of light, even when it’s hard.

The idea

A child drifts in a little boat across a sea that seems to go on forever. They can go anywhere — or so it seems. Pairs of glowing doors rise out of the water, and each pair offers a choice: this garment or that one, these shoes or those, this toy or the other.

What the child doesn’t see is the hand. It has been there the whole time, just beyond the mist, quietly steering.

Reading the image

• The palette moves from Chapter 1’s grey-green ink to a single deep indigo, lit by moonlight. The only warm color is the amber glow of the doors.
• The doors come in pairs and shrink into the distance, a row of choices the boat has yet to reach.
• The hand is made of mist rather than flesh. It feels less like a threat and more like the weather: always there, and hard to argue with.
• On the horizon, a single tall, narrow door blazes white with a figure waiting inside it. Beyond that, the sea is already turning to sand, and a ship lies stranded. That’s where the chapter is headed.

The same small figure in the white hooded cloak carries on from Chapter 1. Every chapter will be painted in its own color, but the traveller stays the same.

This site will grow alongside the game. Here’s what you’ll find:

• The world — what the game is about, and how it plays.
• The chapters — seven stages of a journey, each a miniature world of its own.
• Gallery and soundtrack — concept art and music as they’re made.
• Progress — an honest look at what’s built, what’s in progress, and what’s next.
• This devlog — short notes and clips from development.

The game is early: grey boxes, capsule enemies and a lot of ideas. Thanks for being here at the start.

The art

The chapter is built from a few images I keep coming back to: a mountain gorge thick with mist, a lantern-bearer who never quite shows their face, a field of red spider lilies — the flowers said to grow along the river between worlds — and a rope bridge across the water.

The palette is almost entirely grey-green ink. Color is rare in Dear Z., and when it appears it means something: here, the red of the lilies, and the nine threads of light at the far end of the bridge.

The music

Two pieces for the chapter so far — the main theme and a longer remix. Both are on the home page, or here:

Bridge to the Afterlife — main theme

Bridge to the Afterlife — remix

• Enemy AI & combat. First-pass enemies patrol, notice the player and deal damage to health bar A. They’re red capsules for the moment — expressive, I know.
• Green debris heals. Debris now comes in more than one flavour. The new green type restores health — the first step toward debris of different colors doing different things.
• Fixed camera trigger. Walking up to an anchor now switches the camera to a fixed, composed shot. This is the seed of the more cinematic, movie-like camera the game needs for its big moments.

Unity gotcha

Every UI element has to live under the CanvasUI object, or it simply won’t render. Cost me a while to figure out; writing it down so future me doesn’t repeat it.

Next up

A BornPoint: when either health value drops to zero, send the player back to the last checkpoint instead of leaving them stranded.

Added a dialogue system made of three parts: a sequence (the lines), a system (the UI) and a manager (who’s speaking, and when).

Adding a new conversation is now a repeatable recipe:

1. Drag a dialogue trigger into the scene.
2. Create a dialogue sequence asset (under projectDearZ/dialogue sequence).
3. Assign the sequence to the trigger.
4. Register it with the dialogue manager.

The dialogue UI itself lives in the dialogue system, so styling it later is a one-place change. The first speaker is, fittingly, the Doctor.

Health × 2

The player now has two health bars. In the game they’ll be Physical (pink) and Mental (baby blue) — some things hurt the body, some things hurt the mind, and you’ll have to look after both.

Workflow note

A small lesson from working with Cursor + Claude: don’t @-mention the whole Scripts folder when asking for help. It burns far more context than mentioning nothing at all and letting the assistant search.