Evil Justice (WIP) - Updated 3/31/24: The Fourth Trial

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Now this stuff scratches the detective itch

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So glad I finally got the chance to play the new chapter! It was nice to learn more about the world; it’s clear you’ve put some thought into the mana cycle/King Evil’s role in it. And the new characters are cool, like Tibia and Holmgang. With that name alone I knew he was going to be a badass.

As for suggestions, I feel there should be more interactivity/choices in the lead-up to the second trial and afterwards. For instance you could ask the player how their MC responded to the also brutal second execution, or the MC might have different reactions to eating food for the first time. Without those things–I hope this doesn’t come across as harsh–I felt like I was in a series of cutscenes where things just happened to my character without me being asked what they felt or thought about the situation. So more interactivity would be great for character building and roleplaying.

I have a question: the trials can be watched by the public, right? If so, it would be strange that no one at Blacklung has heard about the MC, or at least suspected that they were the homunculus from the recent trial. It’s an undead shelter so I think it’s more likely to keep up with news about the undead if that makes sense. This might be nitpicking on my part lol.

And I found a pronoun typo:

“Now, now, workman,” Holmgang interjects. “It’s only fair to allow her to search for clarity. Please, answer hers questions. You can be brief.”

Overall it was a solid, well-written trial, and once again I’m eager to see more :smiley:

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I see! I was wondering whether less interactivity would be okay. This section had fewer choices in it, partly because I was checking to see whether a more linear structure would still work based on feedback from Chapter 1. Maybe I should pivot back a little bit? Either way I can always ask the player how they’re feeling. Thank you for the feedback!

For your question: yes, the trials are open to the public, but it’s only been one day, and fewer people show up when Xenon is running things. Only a small fraction of the population would have seen or heard about the trial so far - and it’s possible someone who has isn’t making themselves known just yet.

Oof, thanks for letting me know about the typo. I’ll fix it up and upload it. Hopefully that doesn’t break saves - I’m still not certain how that system works.

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I think it would help to distinguish between “reaction” choices and choices that alter the course of the story to an extent. I can’t speak for other players but I understand if the story has to be more linear; this is where reaction choices can help to give us some agency and still make us feel immersed, a part of the story. Glad the feedback was helpful!

Ah, okay, thanks for clarifying that.

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runs in so fast I fall over and faceplant TRIAL UPDATE?!??@!?

ANYWAYS AHHHHHHH IM LOVING THIS CHAPTER… I replayed the entire game and I never told you how much I appreciate being able to just be SO stubborn and abrasive during the character creation process like. YEAH!! THE MC DESERVES TO BE ABLE TO GET MAD!!!

Also really like how you handled the aftermath of the first trial- changing that choice was a good call, and I’m really excited to see where this goes!! (Akira is so cool…) AND THE EXAMINATION BAHAHAHAHAHUDSNHDSJ…

OMG MOTHMAN!!! WE FINALLY GET HIS NAME!!! I have a love for bug characters (as well as robot/metal/material construct characters) and. AHHHHHHH… I don’t wanna have to choooose… they’re all so good…ahg.

(also I see you took my suggestion on him saving you from getting mugged euhsnrfihekndifjefkdsc…-)

AAAAAAA Tibia’s such a sweetheart… and this other “gaunt” dude… I wonder what his name is…

(also forgot to mention I am LOVING the naming game here. True AA style-)

WAIT OH GOSH THERE WAS A MURDER. I WAS HAVING SO MUCH FUN READING THE WORLDBUILDING I FORGOT THOSE WERE GOING TO HAPPEN OH GOSH-

ooooo we get to have investigation scenes too!!! You’re spoiling us forreal…

seriously this game is everything I could want and more-

OH SHOOT HOLMGANG… THATSTHE GUY!!! FROM THE PREVIOUS TRIAL THAT THOSE TWO GALS MENTIONED!!! OMG!!! wait this is very bad actually-

WHWHWHW WAIT WHY DOES HE KNOW OUR NAME DHSBGYUSNUEDS… I suppose he would wouldnt he… if the trials are public and you could go back and check records of previous ones… or maybe he ATTENDED the previous trial… (DOES THAT MEAN HE KNOWS WHO WE ARE??? I MEAN LIKE- WHAT WEVE DONE??? I dont think hes intimidated but still thats. Bad. For us.)

HE DOES!!! HE DOES!!! hes so smug about it too… I love him…this is amazing… (also Tibia honey no… sigh… it wouldn’t be an AA-style game without the client admitting guilt… :sob: :pensive:)

oh my gosh hes amazing… why are all of your characters so GOOD??? the decapitation… (both of them-) chefs kiss

ALSO EIGHTEEN. EIGHTEEN!!! EIGHTEEN… EIGHTEEN MY BELOVED… Ive mentioned my love for material constructs before and AHUWAGYDNWDJS… eighteen… please tell me we get to see eighteen again later in the story…,

WE GOT HIS NAME!!! BOB!!! AHH!!!

aaaand mothman meeting for next time… gosh… im. I just. Ahg. I feel like I wrote WAY too much to be honest- this is gonna be a pain to scroll past- but UHM!.. I really don’t know what to say. Its perfect. Its amazing. Its everything I could ever want. You legit got me to finish the rest of the trilogy and I’m currently on the last case of Apollo Justice, like. This is amazing. I’ll probably write up something else thats actually coherent and has yknow. critique and other stuff, but I just needed to get my excitement down-

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Geez. Thanks for the kind words, it means a lot.

Nice to hear you beat the Ace Attorney Trilogy too. It’s still kinda niche so the more support the series gets, the better. If you’re still interested, the recent Great Ace Attorney Chronicles was really good too. The two Edgeworth games are also top-notch if you can find them, especially the second.

I’ll take whatever criticism you got. Progress continues slowly but surely. Excited to try and complete a full game.

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I like the mechanics, even though I struggle a lot understanding what is challengeable and what not esp with my poor memory.

And as usual, I ask for more save slots. Many unique scenes need many savepoints, pls give at least 6-9 instead of 3 plss

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:musical_note: I’m BAAAAACK!!~ :musical_note:

AAAAAAAnyways, just some lil tidbits I’m gonna touch on within the game so far! I didn’t notice any coding or grammatical errors, at least on a gender neutral MC run. I ALSO wanna say, that like I said before, the game’s already kind of perfect, at least to me, and I had to wrack my brain to find anything I thought that could be improved. A lot of this is probably gonna be me going: “btw this part was really smart/cool” sshsvddshsdbd-

WITH THAT OUTTA THE WAY, SOME small notes;

  • I purposely got a loss to see what the deathscreen would say, and DAAAAANG… you wrote that so well- especially with the whole

Faintly, you’re aware of the Inquisitor making a snide remark at you. That’s fine, you think, as you collapse. I deserve worse.

Tying in with the fact that the MC lost all confidence… I wonder if the beginning of it about the “you’ve failed at everything” part has to do with the death by confidence loss, or the fact that the MCs purpose and reason for even being created was to do justice, and the failure of such an intrinsic part of them (because yknow. Creator guy did the thing with the stuff.) made them sort of internally collapse? (mentally, I mean).
If it’s the latter, that has interesting connotations for the entirety of the race (if that’s the right word, considering they have to be MADE… would they just be called Undead?) of Homunculi. (Homunculuses???) In any case, this is likely me just reading WAY too into it lmao.

  • I also love the slow reveal of more about the MC… like the blue eyes… I have no idea what implications this has but it was such a specific detail to add…, it also may just be you wanting to let the reader know more about the MCs appearance, but I wonder why the eyes are blue. Did MCs previous body (when they were first alive) have blue eyes? Does MCs creator particularly like blue eyes for some reason? Will we get to explore MCs previous life in any way… so many questions.

  • Eighteen is REQUIRED to show up later because of how cool they are- but seriously, Eighteen my beloved, , , , , , , I love the use of the capital letters for their speech. I know it’s a really common thing for robotic characters, but like… its underrated and needs to be called out more. It makes reading so much more… lively. Similar to how you used bold for the King of Evil, and also made all of his sentences separate pages. That had a lot of impact, and I’d love to see more… speech quirks? Writing quirks? In other characters later! (Not only to do with font and capitalization, but accents, etcetera. Don’t be afraid to do cool stuff with r3pl2c!ng L3tt3r$ [that was a bad example sfgjsdfdjksnfhsd])

  • @Kshatriya touched on this earlier, but it’d be nice to have a bit of MC building choices too! A linear narrative is completely fine, at least with me, but I’d like if we could flesh out our MCs likes/dislikes more as they learn about the world. This doesn’t have to be within a choice, either! I just want maybe some more touching on like… for example, MCs first reactions to eating food. Of course, they’d know what spicy is because yknow. They have knowledge of how the world works and also are a past soul, but they’ve never TASTED anything in this body before. It’d be nice for there to be a bit of; “Oh shoot i forgot this was what eating actually felt like when you. When you do it-”

  • very cool game I liked it a alot :heavy_heart_exclamation:

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This is all so nice. I hope to be worthy of your praise come release time!

I’m definitely planning on putting more choices in earlier sections, there are a few obvious spots where input would fit. For now I’m pressing onward, but it might be a good idea to go back and edit once the next chapter’s ready.

Also considering how to use those choices. Even if the input doesn’t make a huge difference, it would be neat to have a postgame summary, a sort of personality-quiz result type of thing. I was originally planning on small decisions affecting the MC’s personality, which would eventually alter their regular dialogue - I decided against it, since that’d be complex and restrict dialogue choices, but the idea still has some appeal. I’ll tie something meaningful to these choices if I can come up with something appropriate.

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I really love the concept of the game and the way you have done it so far is fantastic. I really look forward to seeing where the story goes and also learning more about the characters and the heart. I really enjoyed the cases and playing on challenge mode was fun and frustrating as well :sweat_smile: thank you for sharing it, i hope that in future updates there will be a chance to bond with fellow undead or other characters.

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~slides in~ So I’m just gonna replay and note things that I liked or musings I have, because this is probably one of if not my favorite IF and I wanted to do something productive in my thirteenth replay!! (Also finally look at all the failtext)

Don't look at this if you haven't played
  • I DIDNT SEE THIS BEFORE BUT THE RESPONSE TO ASKING if gaining extra confidence makes you extra strong just being “No.” and “Rats.” IS SO FUNNY TO ME seriously the writing in this IF is astounding…
  • Going to, again, highlight just how much I love the non human creatures here, and just how unique they are and how much you can tell of their appearance by the subtleties in your descriptions… grhrgshresneijrf,
  • the preset name of the MC being “X” because of their scar is perfect and I love it so much… (Esp love the trope of characters being named after attributes they have and this is just… aughf…<3) I was super tempted to just go with the preset name because I liked it so much but in the end I chose “Pebble” instead to reference the convo you can have with your creator in the character creation process :] (Also because pebbles are drab gray rocks. which fits the MC I think.)
  • The titles for Inquisitor Xenon’s testimonies getting increasingly uncertain :rofl:
  • Questioning the “They assumed he had been sleeping, but he’d actually been poisoned to death.” part of Xenon’s third testimony gets you “All of that seems to make sense, unless the Inquisitor is lying. That would be fatal for you, you realize. If the ringleader starts inventing his own facts, how would you even know?” I wonder if something will be done with that concept in future cases? … :thinking:
  • You’ve mastered the AA-style comedy… being able to grammatically correct Xenon is the greatest thing shdfnsjdfuijfj
  • Just gonna touch on how much I LOVE the worldbuilding here. Like the convo between the harpy and the fishwoman after we get out of the Ring tells us SO much about the world… aghr. It feels so effortless but we get so much information in such small amounts of writing… i’ve never seen anything that flows like this does
  • Also kudos to you for taking AA and making basically every plot hole nonexistant serins9ufeserkf. The pros of having a fictional universe is that you don’t have to worry about clauses IRL sjdhfdssdfkls
  • love love LOVEEEE the little descriptions for the monsters we get as we explore and walk around… the dude with wheels for hands… just. Argh. there isn’t many IFs that allow for this level of unrestrained creativity, because, yknow. A lot of em are focused on making things palatable shdfidsnejjf. But i really love it.
  • the mana system here is FASCINATING. I wonder if we’ll get to interact more with King Evil, I’m really interested in where that may go.
  • The prospect of tea with Akila is hilarious to me for some reason- I wonder if we’ll ever meet her spouse…
  • Another example of the superb worldbuilding here; the flash of an argument we hear when we first enter the Royal Evil Academy with Akila… augrhremkfmsioek
  • I wonder… is our creator perhaps part of the Liberty Group? This is just empty musing on my part, but considering the timing and what he told us to do…
  • was the Preserved Meat anything specific or should we not worry about it?
  • the eyes are one thing; they could be easily explained, since our body was created; our creator could have just… given us blue eyes. (It’s probably for a better reason though)- but the X scar really interests me. He crafted the body, so why was the scar there? Deliberately?
  • Tera’s first testimony just being called “Shut Up” is hilarious
  • ASAKHADSF ONE OF THE FAILTEXTS DURING SCOLOS TESTIMONY HAVING HOLMGANG JUSt drop all pretence like “Stop. Just stop.” I cANT-
  • Speaking of Scolo, poor guy :frowning: I still feel bad
  • EIGHTEEN ENTERS THE RING!!! (my beloved…)
  • I noticed Eighteens “i”'s in their speech are sometimes lowercase. Is this intentional?
  • WHEN YOU TRY TO PROVE EIGHTEEN WAS WORKING AT THE TIME HOLMGANG REALLY JUST GOES "Lmao sike"JDSbFUIJhfnEKWF
  • I really love this game :] You’re a really great writer!!
  • What i wrote is way too long. Huh.
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Thank you everyone for your kind comments!

Sorry for the radio silence. I think I burnt out pretty hard - I wrote all that stuff in just a couple of months, after all. Since then I’ve been working on building a writer’s portfolio. I’ve been doing articles for The Hard Drive, which is pretty cool. It might have been too much writing all at once though.

But this feels like a good time for some Evil. Let’s see what I can do. I don’t want to update unless I have an entire chapter to add, though, so give me a minute.

Uh oh. It’s not. I’ll check that over real quick.

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I’ve got something to show for the holidays. It should be out around the 23rd. Keep an eye out- this one’s going to bring my total word count over 80,000.

It will probably break all the save files, but there’ll be an option to skip to the new stuff like usual.

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Happy Holidays!

Chapter 3 is out! Includes another Judgment and an expanded Confidence system.

Let me know if you have any feedback or issues to report. With this chapter, the story is starting to branch out based on player choice, and it will branch even further in future chapters. I’m wondering about good ways to let players skip to the parts they want, taking into account meaningful choices they’d want to save.

Sorry for the delay, but I really did need the break. I hope you enjoy Chapter 3 - I can see a clear path to the end now.

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I can’t stop laughing. I’m having too much fun in this new update :rofl:

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This update was top notch!! How do you one up that case? It was just the perfect length to be challenging enough. And the responses for the wrong accusations are excellent

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Are we going to get half our face/body horrifically scarred and go criminally insane by any chance?

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Only if it would advance your career. It’s all about that grind, baby!

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I really like the humor here, and I like how your writing is simple yet makes me hang onto every word. I have the tendency to skip long descriptions, so needing to read and analyze everything in order to win made me focused, and before I knew it an hour has passed.

The most entertaining part tho is getting the smug look off of Xenon’s face. Poor guy is rethinking his entire career after that third trial lol

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Hey there! I think there’s a problem with the coding? This was when Maggot Girl asked me what I wanted after speaking to her. I chose wanting to help others but it showed what I assume is the responses for all the options.

Full Passage

“I want to help people,” you say. “I’ve seen some terrible things in my short time here. It’d be nice if I could make things less bad, if I could.”

“Yeah.” Maggot Girl nods. “That’s what I wanna do too. Mothman says the same thing. Something like…” she taps the side of her face, thinking. “If you have the power to do good, you have a moral duty to… do the good.” She frowns. “It sounds better when he says it.”

“That’s okay, I think I get it.”

“Ask him next time you see him. He’ll give you the hour-long version.” She smiles, puts her goggles back on, and returns to her bomb. “Back to work. Good talking with you!”

You wave goodbye and get up to leave the workshop. That had been nice, you think.

You gained 10 Confidence. Now you have 200!

You take a deep breath and let it out slowly.

“Honestly? I just want to be able to lie down and feel secure. No worrying about basic survival, or dying in an alley, or getting killed by some bloodthirsty Inquisitor. Just being able to rest would be fine.”

Maggot Girl nods. “Yeah. I think that’s what most people want. That’s why we do what we do, y’know?” She gives you a sad smile. “Sorry you got roped into our business. I know this wasn’t really your choice.”

“It’s alright,” you say, shrugging. “I could have said no.”

“Well, we’re glad you’re on board.” She smiles, puts her goggles back on, and returns to her bomb. “Back to work. Good talking with you!”

You wave goodbye and get up to leave the workshop. That had been nice, you think.

You gained 10 Confidence. Now you have 210!

“Ever since I climbed out of that ditch, I’ve felt lost,” you tell her. “I don’t know where I’m supposed to be. Who I’m supposed to be with. I hope, maybe, if I keep looking, I can find out.”

“Oh wow.” Maggot Girl’s eyes seem to get a bit watery. “I hope you find it too.”

You smile at her. “It’s only been a couple days, though. I got time.”

“Yeah! You’ll find it, I’m sure!” She smiles, puts her goggles back on, and returns to her bomb. “Back to work. Good talking with you!”

You wave goodbye and get up to leave the workshop. That had been nice, you think.

You gained 10 Confidence. Now you have 220!

Your two-day life has been a big mess of crazy happenings. You can’t say what your ultimate goal is…

…or, at least, you’re not going to tell Maggot Girl about it.

“No idea,” you tell her. “I’m just trying to find my footing at the moment.”

“Yeah, i gotcha,” she replies. “I guess it was kind of a weird question. Oh well!” She smiles, puts her goggles back on, and returns to her bomb. “Back to work. Good talking with you!”

You wave goodbye and get up to leave the workshop. That had been nice, you think.

You gained 10 Confidence. Now you have 230!

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