17/09/2025 Yap Session

Welcome to my fortnightly yap session! I got some development update and and some discussions about the future of the game. Sit tight, for the yap session is about to begin.

Development status:

Currently, the development is still at a writing stage. I've laid down everything on the scene board which provides clear directions for the dialogues. So far, I've written about 3,000 words of dialogues, which you could say is about 30% of the writing done. I plan to have the writing completed by the end of the month just so I could get it out of the way. Theoretically, it shouldn't be too difficult to achieve if I put my mind to it. Other than that, not much to talk about in terms of progress. I'll start producing renders as soon as possible. Let the yap session begins.

Animations... worth it?

There is an ongoing discourse about the use of animation within the AVN community. Often, it is about whether the implementation of animations carries any beneficial outcome for a game. Let's get this out of the way first – I love sex animations. I believe when an animation is done right, it brings a certain level of enhancement to an already well-established intimate scene. But that's the catch – "done right". No animation is better than bad animation; I believe that's the general consensus of the community, which I agree with. You can make the most immersive, intimate, legendary sex scene but all can be ruined in an instant by an awkward animation. So, here's the big question – is it worth it to make any more animations for Sort of Justice?

To answer this question, let's take a shallow dive into the different processes of creating animations. First and foremost, we must understand what is animation. Animation is a method of photography whereby a series of still images are manipulated in a way to create a moving picture. In order to create an animation, you will also have to capture/create images that will illustrate the movement. In my case, to create a 3D animation, I will have to render individual images, enough to illustrate whatever movement I want to present. But, how do you determine how many images to render? In animation, the measurement of the frequency at which images are being displayed is called "frames per second (FPS)". Simply put, the FPS of an animation dictates how many images are consecutively displayed during a second. Movies are typically shot at 24 FPS, while TV shows are usually shot at 30. Meanwhile, video games may often run at 60 FPS or above. There are reasons why certain media should use a certain frame rate, but I'm not going to dive into that this time. Now, why am I talking about FPS? Simple – more FPS equals more work. Higher FPS can mean a more fluid animation, but that's also more images required to be displayed. The usual FPS of a 3D animation is 30, which is also what I was working with. Rendering for an image takes up to minutes with my hardware, and with 1 second being 30 images, I'll have to render 150 images just for a 5 second animation. Sure, I can leave the computer on for the entire night and have all the images rendered by morning, but that doesn't take in the account of human errors or technical errors that may result in a catastrophically stupid waste of time. It happened to me way more than I could count for the animations in chapter 1. With that being said, production time is a huge factor in developing adequate animation and should be considered for the implementation of animation in my game.

Onto the next concern – technical abilities. For the animations shown in chapter 1, I have spent a tremendous amount of time just to figure out a viable workflow. I would first pose the characters in Blender, then export them to DAZ and render the images (so much troubleshooting went into this). Now, this workflow was actually my second option. My first option was to just export the scene to Blender and do everything there. Posing, lighting, rendering... everything. But there's just been so much trouble with morphs, textures, lighting, key frames, yada yada... Blender is a rabbit hole. And I don't have much time to dive into this rabbit hole just yet, but that's the plan. If I'm going to make any more animations, it's got to be in blender. Animating in Daz is impossible, and optimising DAZ assets in Blender is a pain in the ass. Do I really want to invest that much time in it? I mean... yeah... just not while I'm busy pushing out these early chapters.

Next topic, and it's a quite important one – what if I don't use animation? Having animations in my game is good and all but... do I really need it? There are cases of a successful game without much or entirely without animations. As mentioned before, animations act as an enhancement to the experience, instead of acting as a whole of the experience. But I figured, unless the animation is a god-tier heavenly production, at some point, this enhancement may result in diminishing returns; as in, it doesn't add much value. Not to mention that, my current skills as an animator is embarrassingly lacking. I don't plan to publish a animation that couldn't achieve a level of standard which adds noticeable values to a scene. Let's pretend that the animation in chapter 1 is a practice run (I'm not happy with them). Coming back to the topic: what if I don't use animation? Well, I'll just have to create scenes that can immerse the players into the experience as much as an animation could. I believe it's actually easier to do so than making awkward animations which pull players out of the immersion.

Here comes the conclusion. I believe I should hold off on creating animations for Sort of Justice, at least until I am sufficient in producing such animations. This could be late in the game, or you may never see another animation in Sort of Justice. Who knows? I believe this would be the best practice for the game for now. Let me know what you think.

Acknowledgement

Thank you everyone who supported the game and the usual 5 people who talks in the Discord chat. By the way, if you haven't joined the Discord yet, do it now. We do occasional polls for character renders, there's a channel for development status, as well as a channel for looking at my dumb rants. Also, thanks to my old and new patrons for giving me money to continue this project. Please accept my humble appreciation. Anyway, stay tuned for the next yap session. Catch you later!