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

Compare 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 bit short compare to other chapters, which I agreed. 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 the 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 that to speed up the production. Render quality was kept at a minimum and the use denoiser was maximised to the extreme. There weren't much 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.

Story wise, chapter 3 served as more of a world building 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 fast-paced compare 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 amount of ideas I've since come up with is currently crowding in my google doc with rather frequent addition 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 be wrapped 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 in-between 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 a fried rice, you crack a few eggs, mix it, and add it 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 chill, 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 them 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 works, and what doesn't. Then, maybe I'll explore camera angles in general, and what situation calls 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 meant what I said. It's such a honor to be able to make something that close to two thousand people (or more?) 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.