Sort of Justice

Sort of Justice is a casual game driven by plot and player choices. Players take on the role of an MC who, framed by a colleague, has served seven years in prison. Upon release, you embark on a journey of revenge against the betrayer. During this time, you'll encounter a series of unexpected events and challenges, using your excellent shooting and combat skills to defeat enemies in your path and gradually uncover the truth behind the frameup. You'll also meet beautiful women with diverse personalities, building strong emotional bonds through correspondence and enjoying indepth conversations with them, unlocking a series of alluring animated scenes. Note that your choices in different worlds will profoundly affect your relationships with the girls and whether intimate scenes are unlocked. Ultimately, will you be able to successfully complete your revenge?

Features of Sort of Justice:

Kinetic Visual Novel: Fully narrativedriven experience with minimal gameplay distractions, focusing entirely on story and choices.

Crime and Revenge: Follow a protagonist navigating a dark, treacherous world after being wronged.

Complex Characters: Encounter a variety of friends, foes, and morally ambiguous personalities.

Adult Themes: Mature situations, erotic encounters, and graphic violence integrated into the story.

Storydriven Experience: The game emphasizes narrative over gameplay, creating a deeply immersive adult novel experience.

Changelog:

Finally, Chapter 3 is out. Took me quite a bit of time but I think it turned out alright. So, now is the time to talk about what I thought about the release and what I hope to accomplish in the future. I'm going to divide this in sections just to make things more organised.

What I thought about Chapter 3

Compared to the other 2 chapters, Chapter 3 didn't progress much into the story. I think most of you might think that chapter 3 is a bit short compared to other chapters, and I agree. When I wrote the script for it, I already expected a shorter chapter, just not as short as it turned out. In the future, I would like to keep the play time similar to chapter 2, which is about 45 minutes, or 1 hour if you play slowly.

Truth be told, chapter 3 was actually kind of rushed. I didn't spend as much time on the script as I did with chapter 2. I originally had 2 more scenes included in chapter 3, but ended up scratching them to speed up the production. Render quality was kept at a minimum, and the use of the denoiser was maximised to the extreme. There weren't many background elements either, which is why you can often see empty streets and unpopulated areas. Part of the reason is hardware limitation; if a scene has too much stuff going on, it's going to take forever to render.

Storywise, chapter 3 served as more of a worldbuilding chapter. I am mainly trying to use this chapter to introduce more characters that will potentially bring changes to the story down the line, as well as world settings that will contribute to our understanding of the story. There will be more characters as we progress, so it's pretty important that I slowly explain each important character's background to keep you oriented. Given this information, there's another question most of you have or already have, and that is "how long will the story run for?". The original concept of the story was short and quite fastpaced compared to what I have in mind right now. In my mind, in order to fully utilise the world in Sort of Justice, I'll have to further expand on many different areas of the crime genre. The number of ideas I've since come up with is currently crowding in my Google Doc with rather frequent additions to the list. I don't plan to endlessly expand on the story, but it's quite clear to me now that the story will take a while to wrap up. Don't worry, I'll make sure to keep everything neat and tight.

Visual Quality

Since the start of this game's development, I have never once stopped looking for ways to improve the render quality. Some of you may have noticed the shift in quality between chapter 1, chapter 2 and chapter 3 (I hope you do), and I'm not planning to stop any time soon. As mentioned earlier, in Chapter 3, I was focusing more on rendering everything quickly, so I ended up having some very simple lighting and visual elements. But now, I feel like I'm ready to move on to a new, better standard. Moving forward, I would like to try adding more complexity to the renders and hopefully elevate the overall visual experience for you guys. I think it's evident that I can do so much better based on the wallpapers I made. The only question is: how much more time will it add to the production if I use my wallpaper style for all of the renders? Either way, I'm excited to see what I can do in chapter 4.

Rendering Workflow

So, after 3 chapters, I finally came up with a somewhat efficient workflow for rendering. Before, I would pose the characters, position the lighting, and render the image 1 after another, which means I only move on to the next render after the previous one is completely finished. Well, I'm not doing that anymore. Now, I divide my work, kind of like an assembly line, and finish the required process one at a time. What do I mean by this? The work required to produce a scene includes: setting the environment, posing figures and props, setting up lightings, positioning the camera, and finally, rendering the image. So now, here is my workflow:

Setting the environment

Posing the figures together with positioning the cameras (because camera work is easy)

Set up the lighting (make sure it looks good in every frame)

Render

It really is like how a factory would work. You have a bunch of people doing only one task, and a bunch of other people doing another task. It's inefficient to let one person do each and every tasks in one instance, and to only make one count of product in the end; instead, you form an assembly line to maximise the output. Except, in this case... I am, in fact, the only one working on every tasks. But an assembly line still helps a lot as I'm able to solely focus on one task at a time. Bouncing between processes creates a lot of unnecessary steps inbetween tasks, which adds to the development time.

Try it for yourself if you don't believe me. Let's say... the next time you make fried rice, you crack a few eggs, mix them, and add them to the pan. Cook it, but then realise you didn't prepare the other ingredient, so you take the eggs out. Cut the meat, cook the meat, then take it out because you didn't prepare the veggies. Cut the veggies, but we're not ready for cook yet, because you forgot the rice. You cook the rice, take it out and let it chill. And only when the rice is cool, you can then start cooking, but then you forgot about the seasonings, so you have to walk back to the pantry to get them. Do you see what I'm trying to express here? You don't prepare the ingredients as you go; you prepare all the ingredients first, and when you start cooking, you have everything you need already. So, what you should've done is: cook the rice beforehand, let it chill, cut the meat and veggies, grab all the seasonings, and then start cooking. Simple.

Yap sessions

I think it's time to bring back yap sessions. Every once in a while, I will share some of the knowledge that I'd learned throughout the development of this game. Though only about things that would inspire me to write a yap wall. I would probably also write up some of the discoveries in the Journal channel in my Discord. The reason why I wanted to do this is so that I can come back in the future to read what my knowledge about a certain subject was, and compare it to current knowledge. I think it would be fun to witness my own evolution. The first subject I want to talk about is probably action. I want to take a deep dive into what makes an action scene work, and what doesn't. Then, maybe I'll explore camera angles in general, and what situations call for what type of angles. Lighting is another good topic. So yeah, I've got a lot to yap about.

Acknowledgement

Since the release of chapter 3, I've been seeing an influx of members in my Patreon, both paid and free members. And I'm also seeing a lot more activities in other platforms such as itch and gamestorylog. I can't express how excited I am to see that my game is now reaching a wider audience, and that people seem to have good things to say about it. Every time I say "Thanks for playing the game" or "I'm glad you enjoyed it", I sincerely mean what I said. It's such an honour to be able to make something that close to two thousand people would enjoy. Thanks for supporting this journey of ours, and I hope you have a wonderful day. I'll see you in the next devlog. Catch. 

Player Comments of Sort of Justice:

The fight scenes in this game are awesome, also all the LIs have been interesting so far. I also love that this game got good male cast as well.It's still to early to judge how story is gonna be, but it seems promising. Audio and Visuals are great without a doubt.MC is well to be honest , I have not idea to make of him and what exactly is his personality.Though I still don't understand how the fuck game like this is free? I have played so many shit games that cost money. But for some reason this high quality game is free currently.Seriously play this game and if you can do support the dev. So far game got 3 chapters + really short prologue and it took me about 4h to complete it.

Man, this game would've been way more fun if it wasn't a kinetic AVN. Honestly, none of the choices matter anyway, so the MC just ends up looking like he's dumb. Especially during the prison arc. I get that it's supposed to build his character, and it does... but the execution just didn't really click for me.Maybe it'll improve once more chapters are out, though. It's only on Chapter 3, so I'll give it the benefit of the doubt.That being said, the game definitely has a lot going for it. The renders are gorgeous, the heroines are all pretty unique, and the fight scenes are actually hype. My only real complaint is that it's a kinetic AVN. I'm just a sucker for VNs where your choices actually matter instead of sitting there like, "Yep... guess I'm watching a movie now."

I'm getting John Wick vibe from the development of the plot even though the protagonist is not anything like the famous movie character. There are few scenes where a John Wick fan cannot but get hooked to those. Also, the fighting scenes are rendered very efficiently. However, some might say there's a scarcity of lewd scenes but the story is much more engaging. I hope this Visual Novel continues to grow and become worthy of becoming an actual novel which is visually appealing.

I wasn't expecting to get so invested, but the writing completely pulled me in. It's refreshing to play a game that focuses on delivering a compelling narrative instead of recycling the same predictable plot that so many other titles rely on. The characters and pacing kept me interested throughout the experience.The adult content is fairly limited at the moment, with only one explicit scene, but the quality of the story makes it easy to overlook. Even so, I'd be excited to see more intimate content added in future updates. Overall, this has been a great experience, and I hope the developer continues building on it. Wishing the team all the best with the game's future!

Conclusion:

As you delve deeper into the underbelly of society, you encounter a myriad of colorful characters, each bringing their own story and motives to the table. Gunfights erupt, highstakes chases unfold, and handtohand combat becomes second nature in this turbulent realm. With each moment, you'll come to realize that not all is as it appears, and the line between ally and enemy grows increasingly blurred.