Welcome to another devlog! Like my every other devlogs during the the start of a chapter's development, there will be very little details on the progress update, since I'm still grinding on the script. But let's see if I can find an interesting topic to talk about this time.

Progress Update

I haven't finished constructing the chapter, so I'm just juggling between planning and actual dialogue writing. Looking at the currently available scenes so far, I can say that it will be comfortably longer than Chapter 3. There's going to be quite a bit of content packed into this one, so my main remaining concern is how long it'll take for the rendering process.

Plot Convenience

A very huge part about this game is the writing, as with every other game. Truth be told, I'm not a very good writer, but that doesn't mean I'm going to stay being one. There are a lot of things I still don't understand about good writing, but I'm just going to have to discover them one by one as I develop Sort of Justice.

First things first, lazy writing. Let's be honest for a second, the start of the game is not well-written at all. Dare I say, it's pretty bad. I won't dive deeply into the issues at the start of the game, but I'll use it as a base for my analysis.

Lazy writing is a category, and there are a lot of different types, one of them being Plot Convenience. In my understanding, plot convenience is when something happens in a plot that is highly unlikely or wouldn't make sense otherwise, but happens anyway for the sake of convenience. Basically speaking, the plot is moved along with the lack of common logic because the author says so. Every story has it, and it's pretty hard to avoid. So, it is essential to not fall into the trap of convenience, or at least, make it more believable even for just a little bit.

An example of plot convenience can be something like this: The main character is in a battle with the villain and had fallen into one of his deadly traps. Somehow, the main character managed to pull out a device out of nowhere that could disarm the trap. When the main character got out of the trap, the villain hits him with a spell so powerful it could kill most in seconds; but somehow, the main character is able to overcome the spell by sheer determination and will. That, is plot convenience.

The big problem about plot convenience is that, most of time, we as authors do not want it at all. Sometimes, we have to include plot convenience unwillingly. Stories can suffer from established facts that we've placed; we already know how the story should go, but past events and characters begins acting more as an impasse than a gateway to solution. In other words, we've written ourselves into a corner. Then, scenes begin to occur not because it needs to happen, but because the author desperately needs them to keep the plot on course. Every time something that is not organic or authentic to the story happens, the narrative loses credibility. If your audience always thinks to themselves, "Oh, that's convenient", while reading your story, chances are they will lose interest very quickly.

One way to fix this, which I've discovered, was to ensure the story you write is driven by characters, not by plot. Allow the characters to make choices on the situations you've thrown at them, based on their experience. If you're trying to write compelling characters while forcing them into a predetermined plot, you're basically confining the characters in how they will react to a problem. This also means that characters have to exhibit logical behaviours. A character's later actions need to be justified by their past actions. Not saying that characters shouldn't do any unexpectable things, but characters need to earn that believability for their unexpectable actions. Simply put, the more unbelievable or unexpected something is, the more logical the story has to be for it to work. In other words, if you want something unbelievable to happen later in the story, you will have to set adequate ground work in earlier chapters to convince your audience that this happens because it is the only way that it could've happened.

Acknowledgement

Thank you for reading this devlog and the mini yap session. Thank you for all of my supporters and players. I feel like I'm slowly gaining a better traction on this whole game development thing. As the community continue to grow, I want to make sure everyone has a good time and can have fun playing and discussing about the game. And of course, thank you for giving this amazing community. Anyways, I'll see you guys in the next dev update. Catch!