Friendship and Betrayal

Well, well, well! It’s finally here; the long-awaited June 1st build. You can grab it from the Downloads page!

The highlight of this build is a new way to eliminate your rivals. As always, I’ve prepared a video that explains and demonstrates the newest elimination method:

It’s finally possible to eliminate your rival without ruining her life or killing anyone! If you become sympathetic towards any of the rivals, now you’ll be able to eliminate her without harming her at all.

Kokona is the “test dummy” rival, so it’s easy to make her give up on Senpai; she only exists for testing and demonstrating features. The other girls probably won’t be willing to give up on Senpai so easily. After you have earned a girl’s trust and respect, she might give you a “challenge” of some kind, in order to make you “prove” that you are the most worthy girl for Senpai.

Here’s a full list of everything that is different in the latest build of the game:

Friendship and Betrayal

• It is now possible to become Kokona’s friend by performing a task for her.
• If the player listens to Kokona’s conversation with Saki on the rooftop at lunchtime on Monday, befriends Kokona, and then leaves a note in her locker asking to meet her on the school rooftop, the player will have the option of speaking to Kokona about her personal problems on the rooftop.
• A new student has been added to the game.
• It is possible to become friends with the new student by performing a task for her.
• If the player kidnaps the new student after discussing Kokona’s personal problems, new options will become available in Yandere-chan’s basement at night.
• Added two new text message conversations.
• Added a cut-scene with a degree of interactivity.

Other Additions

• The player is only allowed to report a student to the guidance counselor once per day, but there was no way for the player to know this. The counselor will now speak a voiced line when the player is not allowed to speak to her.
• Added a real easter egg – an audio clip that will only play if the player is standing in the right spot, with the right item in their inventory. I wonder if anyone will ever find it?
• The guidance counselor now has a more lively idle animation, and occasionally performs a different animation to make her feel more alive.
• If the police discover a student who died from falling off of the school roof, the school will now erect a fence around the roof.
• Added the ability to remove the Cyborg Ninja’s helmet by pressing the “P” key while the Cyborg Ninja easter egg is active.
• Added a voice clip that will play when the player tries to buy something from Info-chan when it is unavailable.
• Restored Oka’s shy/nervous animation. I just realized that it was missing! How long was it missing for?!
• Added the Cyborg Ninja’s hair as a hairstyle that can be worn by pressing the “H” key enough times.
• Added a wood-chipper to the gardening club that allows the player to dispose of corpses.
• In the Student Info screen, changed “Strength” to “Self Defense”.
• Added stockings and arm-warmers to Oka Ruto.
• Touched up the Student Info screen.
• Added a new easter egg costume.
• There were also a bunch of really minor changes here and there, but I don’t want it to seem like I’m inflating the changelog, so I won’t mention the minor stuff.

Bug Fixes

• Attempted to fix the bug that would cause the player to become unable to drop the cello case. This bug was turning into a rabbit-hole of time-consuming problems, so I simply disabled the “check for obstacle” script that was running whenever the player was wearing the cello case. Now the player can drop the cello case anywhere, even if it’s clipping through a wall. One day in the future, I’ll fix this bug, but right now, it’s not high-priority enough to justify the amount of time that would be required to fix it.
• Fixed bug that would cause Kokona’s Monday “talk on phone” event to fail if the player instructed Kokona to distract someone shortly before the event would occur.
• Fixed bug that would cause the “End of Day” text sequence to break if the player kidnapped a girl on the same day as reporting Kokona to the guidance counselor.
• Attempted to fix bug that would limit the number of corpses in the school to 37, even though there are 38 killable characters at school.
• Fixed bug that would cause a “panicking” student to be unaffected by Ebola-chan.
• Fixed a typo in one of the social media cyber-bulling social messages.
• Fixed a typo in the description for the pink panties.

Hey!! Wait!! Where’s the other stuff?!

If you’ve been following this blog for the past 17 days, you may have gotten hyped for a bunch of features that you expected to be in this build, and you may be surprised to learn that those features aren’t actually in this build. So, what happened? I’ll explain:

The May 15th build was delayed because I had to wait for an animator to create some animations for the befriend/betray cut-scene. I said that, while I was waiting for those animations to arrive, I’d pass the time by adding other features to the game. However, the animations arrived much sooner than expected, so I didn’t have as much time as I thought I’d have to add other features. It took me several days to fully implement the cut-scene, followed by several more days of hunting for bugs, fixing bugs, and adding polish to the build. For example, I spent the majority of today fixing bugs with the new woodchipper instead of adding new features to the game. (Trust me, you would have gotten pretty frustrated if you had tried to use the woodchipper before I fixed those bugs.) After all that time had passed, there was simply no time remaining to add any other new content to the game.

You can’t bury corpses yet, you can’t wear a raincoat yet, you can’t summon a Stand yet, etc. I never meant to imply that those features were actually going to be included in the June 1st build; I just wanted to assure people that the game’s development hadn’t come to a halt, and show off all of the awesome things that would be implemented soon.

Didn’t you say that you’d be releasing a launcher on June 1st? Where’s the launcher?

I’m sorry! I decided that the game’s launcher and the game’s official website should both be launched to the public at the same time, because the launcher links to the game’s website. On the plus side, the website will be ready very soon!

What’s next?

Here’s what I can tell you about the next 30 days:

• If the current build has a bunch of new bugs, the next few days might be about fixing those bugs.
• If the majority of the fanbase was actually expecting this build to have burials, raincoats, and teacher routines, and are angry that those features weren’t in this build, then my next objective will be to put those features into the game as soon as possible.
• I really want the game’s official website and launcher to be released as soon as possible, so those will probably be launched at some point within the next two weeks.
• E3 is happening from June 14th~16th. I want to attend E3, so the next update might arrive shortly before June 14th, or shortly after June 16th.
• Anime Expo is happening from July 1st~4th. I want to attend Anime Expo, so the July update might arrive shortly before July 1st, or occur shortly after July 4th.

As always, thank you for following the development of Yandere Simulator!