Law School Episode 2 - Progress update #14

Hey everyone,

I want to apologize for the delay in the update. I've been sick since Friday, and yesterday, after finishing my daily quota of scenes, all I could think about was getting to bed. I hope this render of someone's butt will make up for it!

Last week has been productive, despite the illness. I managed to hit my daily quotas each day, except for Saturday and Sunday, when I wasn't feeling well. I still worked, but I couldn't create as many scenes as I'd hoped.

At the start of the week, I spent Tuesday and half of Wednesday reopening scenes from Episode 1 to improve the lighting. I knew I could do better, and I think I did. Re-rendering the images and animations will probably take a couple of weeks, but it's worth every bit of the effort.

Here are some before-and-after comparisons:

None of these new images have been edited in Lightroom yet; they're straight out of the 3D software, so I believe there's still a lot of room for improvement. They may be less bright, but in my opinion, they do a much better job of capturing the atmosphere than their predecessors.

I've been focusing only on creating scenes lately, without any new animations. My rendering station has been dedicated solely to rendering animations for the past two weeks, which is a sign that I have enough for now. Not that there could ever be too much animation, but with a release date for Episode 2 in mind, I'm trying to be mindful of the time it takes to render them.

Yesterday, I completed the final scene of Day 4 in-game. I'm now working on Day 5, which is one of the biggest days of the episode, with 10 scenes and a Facegram roam planned. I believe I can tackle it in about two weeks. I have a clear idea of what needs to be done, and two weeks is a realistic timeframe to finish it. After that, Day 6 is coming up. Even though it only has two scenes, it will be as extensive as Days 5 or 3. One of these scenes is a big event happening in Stocklinburg, similar to the dorm party in Episode 1 .That scene alone could have 400-500 renders. I don't plan to make it a freeroam event, as I aim to keep it to one or two per chapter, and there's already one planned for Episode 3. I think Day 6 will also require about two weeks. Day 7, however, is just a few images and two animations, which I can complete in a day.

I'm aiming to finish all these remaining scenes before October 8th, when I'll be leaving for nine days. My goal is to come back after the holidays and focus on adding the remaining scenes for Episode 1 (as mentioned in the last update), creating the Facegram assets, coding, and then postwork. After that, I’ll be able to send the game to testers in mid-November and aim for a release in late November or early December. That's my goal, at least. I'm confident Episode 2 will be live in 2024. I'm seeing the end of this episode's development, and I'm still on track.

Now, let's talk numbers:

• 1,304 story static images

• 47 animations

• 29 scenes fully written

As you can see, I've made decent progress, considering I spent two days revisiting old scenes for modifications and spent much of the remaining time working while sick. I estimate that Episode 2 will have around 2,300 to 2,400 images, which is a solid number compared to the 3,000 images in Episode 1. But since I’ll be adding a few more scenes to Episode 1, we’ll see how that final count turns out.

Thank you all so much for your support lately! I'll keep giving my best, even as I work on getting my health back on track.

Wishing you all a great week ahead!

MisterMaya