Law School Episode 4 - Progress update #15

Morning everyone, this is going to be a big one.

TL;DR:

• Finished DAY 4, the biggest one of this episode (1k+ renders). Super happy with how it turned out.

• Doing a quick pass on an older scene that felt incomplete before moving on to DAY 5, the final day of the episode.

• Current stats: 2,617 renders, 46 animations, 42 scenes (33,625 words).

• One rendering PC’s PSU is dying, and my queue is huge (606 renders), so progress is slower than I’d like.

• December 4th release might not happen, but I’m still aiming for December.

• Post work starts end of November if all goes well.

• Season 2 will bring UI upgrades, code rework, and visual polish (thanks to new Lightroom skills).

Overall: huge progress, a few hiccups, but I’m feeling great about where this episode is heading!

Full update:

Last week's update left a bit of a bitter taste in my mouth. I really don’t like showing up to you all with weak progress reports, so I decided to lock in last week and push hard. It worked. My goal was to finish DAY 4 before moving on to the last day of the game, and I did exactly that.

DAY 4 is by far the biggest of this episode, with just over 1,000 renders. I might go back to add an animation later, but otherwise, it’s complete. There’s a lot of character progress in this one, and I’m really happy with how it turned out. I’ve spent more than a month on this day, and because of the path system, there are so many variations in dialogue and scenes that it felt like I was stuck in there forever. So finally being able to call it done feels amazing.

Before I move on to DAY 5, the final day of this episode, I’m going to revisit another scene that felt, well, a bit incomplete. I made that one back in August, and even then, I knew it should have gone in a different direction. I just couldn’t figure out how at the time. Now I know, so I’ll be adding more content to make it feel right. Once that’s done, I’ll dive straight into DAY 5.

Here are the numbers:

• Static renders: 2,617

• Animations: 46

• Story content: 42 scenes written (33,625 words)

Since last week, that’s an extra 284 renders, which makes it a very productive week. I probably won’t hit the same numbers this week since I have more animations to make, but I’m happy with the momentum.

Now, about renders. Having a large queue sounds great on paper, but it’s been a bit of a headache. I currently have 606 renders waiting to go, which looks impressive, but my PCs are really feeling the pressure. Rendering times are longer than I’d like, and I had to tweak some settings because I was worried about missing my release window. I’m really looking forward to moving into my own place since having to turn off the PCs at night costs me hours of rendering time. Based on the number of renders and animations left, this queue is starting to look a little scary.

To make matters worse, one of my rendering PCs has a dying power supply. It keeps restarting, so I’ll need to order a new one soon. That machine has been with me since July 2021, when I was working on The Entrepreneur and decided to build a rendering rig, so the PSU has served me well. I’m just glad it’s not a GPU or CPU issue. Still, the slowdown is frustrating.

Now, my goal was to release this episode on December 4th, just like LS Demo and LS Episode 2, which also happens to be my birthday. I wanted to keep that tradition alive, but this year it’s not looking likely. If I stuck to my original goal for the renders count of this episode which was 2.k renders max, it would have been easy. But as you can see, it's going to be much more, and the current bottleneck makes it tough. I’m still aiming for a December release, though.

Here’s the rough timeline: I plan to spend the next three weeks finishing all the renders for this episode, then take another week for animations and any extra renders that feel missing. After that, I’ll move into post work. If everything goes right, post work should start in the last week of November.

It’s an ambitious goal, but I believe I can make it. If I do, a December release is still on the table.

Since this episode kicks off Season 2, I’m planning a lot of UI changes, which means I’ll need to redo quite a bit of the Season 1 code. It’s going to be a big task. I also want to improve parts of the phone system and give the menus a fresh look. On top of that, my friend Batman_Sid (the dev of Moonlight) taught me some new tricks in Lightroom, so I’ll be spending more time polishing each image than before. The post work phase won’t be easy, but it’s going to be worth it.

Anyway, that’s enough rambling from me. I just wanted to share where things stand right now. I’m really excited about how this episode is shaping up. Time to get back to work, but I hope you all have a great week ahead.

– MisterMaya