Law School Episode 3 - Progress update #20

I am sick. Sick to my stomach.
Update 20.

This new dozen feels like I’m slacking off—but at least I come bearing good news: Law School is now in the post-work phase.

A few things happened last week.

First, I completed the statics for Law School – Episode 3. I was supposed to dive into a big 1-minute animated scene I’d been planning before I even started working on episode 1… but I had to face the music: I’m not good enough yet for that kind of animation. After hours of trying, the result of the first 4 seconds was mediocre at best, so I chose to go with a series of still images instead. It gives a different vibe, sure, but it’s much better than a choppy animation that could ruin the weight of that scene.

While that change bummed me out a little, I forgave myself—and on the bright side, it brought me into post-work earlier than planned.

About 2–3 months ago, my goal for starting post-work was late May to early June. We're now three weeks ahead of schedule, and I’m damn proud of that.

I began post-work like I always do: by checking every render in Episode 3 to see which ones needed fixing (clipping, lighting, skin issues, etc.).

From Day 1 to Day 6, I found 89 renders that needed to be redone (Days 7, 8 and 9 are still rendering as I write this, so I’ll deal with those later). At first, I thought, “Not bad, under 5% of the episode.” But then I remembered I hadn’t accounted for Sana’s skin issues and Rose’s eyebrow/eyelash fixes. Yeah… there’s been a problem. But it’s fixed now.

So in reality, it’s closer to 170 renders that need reworking.

It’s fine—that’s about four days’ worth of rendering. What’s more time-consuming (and annoying) is opening every scene and manually fixing them. It took all of yesterday and part of this morning to fix Rose. Next up is Sana, and she has more renders than Rose, so I’ll probably be tied up with that until at least tomorrow. The day after, I’ll tackle the rest of the renders I mentioned, and hopefully the following day I can dive into Lightroom and Photoshop.

It’s going to be a busy month. My goal is to have the first draft of the update ready for initial testing by late May. Don’t get too excited—that’s just the beginning. Each update goes through at least 2–3 testing phases before it's finalized. The first draft simply means the game has all the static renders loaded and displayable in-game, but it’ll still be missing many animations and the new phone apps I mentioned in the last update (those take time to render and integrate).

It’s a big update, and I want to give it as much time as it needs without stressing anyone for a release date. While it’s being tested, I’ll focus on coding on my end.

On top of all that, I’ve got a major event for Law School coming up in June on Steam. That means I’ll have to put the demo live again—but this time, it needs to be the reworked version. So I’ll be setting aside a few days this month to handle that.

Now, let’s talk about the (almost final) numbers for this update:

📸 3,845 static story images
🎞️ 97 animations
📝 57 fully written scenes

That’s a big chonky boi.

I say almost final because the number of static images might still change (some renders may not make the final cut), and I’m still missing a few animations. But it’s looking damn good. In fact, this is the biggest episode I’ve ever made, and it only took 5 months of active work to get here, in post work. I’m pretty happy with that.

Now it’s crunch time.

That’s it for this week’s update. I’ll be doing my best to get through post-work as quickly as possible.

In the meantime, see you next week.

Rose appreciation post:

MisterCrunch