July 1st Progress Report

EDIT: Uploaded a new build on July 2nd. Changelog below.

A bunch of miscellaneous things were fixed/changed while I was in the process of putting the final finishing touches on Osana, so I’ve decided to upload a new build that contains those fixes! However, I’m not ready to release the official demo just yet.

You might be thinking “Gosh darn it, YandereDev! How much longer is it going to take?” and I honestly don’t blame you. Scroll down past this artwork by glitterstqr to hear my candid thoughts on the matter.

Whenever I attempt to estimate the date when something will occur, I try to imagine the “best case scenario” and the “worst case scenario”. For example: “If everything goes smoothly, the Kickstarter will happen in August. However, if a bunch of unexpected obstacles appear, it could happen in September instead.” We are now in the 2nd half of 2020. This is troubling to me, because even in my most pessimistic “worst case scenario” predictions, I always estimated that Osana was going to be finished by now.

For the past few years, there was always something else that took priority over Osana; putting more students in the school, making the students react to blood, implementing a save/load feature, etc. It didn’t make any sense to put Osana into the game before adding every core feature necessary to create the intended experience, so I deliberately put Osana at the bottom of my priority list, and spent all of my time on everything else that the game needed, intentionally saving Osana for last.

During the past few months, we have been at the stage of development where there is nothing higher in priority than Osana; the stage where nothing is more deserving of my focus than Osana. Furthermore, I am in possession of all the assets required to implement her; nothing is standing in my way. As soon as we reached this stage of development, I felt extremely confident that Osana was going to be finished within the first half of 2020. But, here we are in July, with no Osana. Why? What’s going on?

It’s not a mystery, but it’s not easy to explain, either. It’s not a black-and-white situation; there is no single culprit. It’s a complex situation involving numerous complicated factors. There is a part of me that wants to write a giant “What’s taking so long? What went wrong?” blog post, and break down every single obstacle that slowed down my progress from January 2020 to June 2020…but it would be a massive wall of text that most people would have zero interest in reading. And attempting to break it down into a short bullet-point list would oversimplify a very nuanced situation, resulting in a wholly inadequate explanation.

Rather than writing a wall of text, I would much rather explain the problems I’ve been facing in my usual video format, since that’s the medium in which I’m most comfortable expressing myself…but right now, I feel like any video I upload is guaranteed to get a negative response unless the video is announcing the release of Osana, so I feel like I should just keep my head down and work on Osana exclusively, and save the “What went wrong?” video for later.

In my BITC crossover announcement video, I mentioned that after Osana is complete and her release date has been announced, I will be releasing a video about the history of Yandere Simulator’s development. This video will discuss a wide variety of subjects that I’ve rarely (or never) ever spoken about in my videos:

1. The first few months of the game’s development; a “black hole” in the game’s history that I have rarely divulged any details about.
2. The decisions I made early in the game’s life that created numerous obstacles that would impede me throughout the rest of the game’s development.
3. The advantages and disadvantages of receiving attention from YouTubers while the game was still very young.
4. The game’s original audience, and the audience that the game ultimately attracted.
5. The reasons why some parts of game’s code were written in a certain way.
6. The subjects of Patreon, funding, budget, etc.

Unfortunately, it would be impossible to give an accurate account of the history of Yandere Simulator without discussing how development was impacted by the actions that other people chose to take, so that’s a subject I’ll have to cover, too.

I think that this “History of Yandere Simulator” video will dispel a large number of myths that have been allowed to exist for far too long, and will help a lot of people understand why Yandere Simulator has an unusually lengthy development cycle compared to most other indie games. In short, the situation is nowhere near as simple as people believe it to be, and I think it’s worth it to clear the air on the matter.

I don’t like saying, “I’ve been working on Osana! I’ve made a bunch of progress!” without actually  showing you tangible proof that I’ve really been doing things. However, everything that I’ve been working on recently is a spoiler, which means that I can’t actually show you exactly what I’ve accomplished recently. Whenever I’m in this situation, I fall back on an old, reliable compromise: Blurry Screenshots™. Click “Continue Reading” to see!

Hmm…who’s this?

What’s happening here?

Who’s that?

What is going on in this screenshot?

And what’s all this about?

Have fun speculating!

Birthday Wishes

Despite the gloomy tone of the blog post up until this point, the past couple of days have been incredibly uplifting, because I was sent mountains of extremely heartwarming messages from people who wanted to wish me a happy birthday!

Thank you so, so much to everyone who sent me a sweet message or created birthday artwork for me! I appreciate it a whole lot!

As usual, the Russian Yandere Sim fanbase produced something amazing on my birthday – I’m always impressed by the incredible creations of the Russian fanbase! Please check out this incredible video with artwork from many, many artists!

Fixes, Changes, Additions

• All 6 teachers and Shima Shita have been renamed. Some students’ names are now retconned to nicknames. You can see these students’ “real names” in their student profiles. Not every student has a nickname+real name. Real names were chosen by looking up real Japanese names/surnames that real people in the real world have actually had. Some of these names may change in the future.
• If you are holding a mop and standing in front of a bucket full of bleached water, the bucket’s “Carry” prompt will change into a “Dip” prompt so that you can dip the mop into the bucket regardless of whether the mop’s prompt or bucket’s prompt is the dominant prompt.
• Fixed bug that caused students to return a dropped fire extinguisher to its original position by walking outside of school and then walking to the nearest wall, instead of using the school’s hallways.
• Fixed bug that would cause Yandere-chan to hold a weapon in her hand in a very strange way during SNAP Mode if that weapon was obtained from a trash bin that it had been hidden inside of.
• Fixed bug that caused glass cracks to render *over* Yandere-chan, when they were supposed to render *behind* her, as the player was mashing the button to activate SNAP Mode.
• Fixed bug that would cause a delinquent to completely ignore Yandere-chan and walk away from her if she tried to attack him while he was investigating a dropped weapon.
• Students will no longer be alarmed by the sight of Yandere-chan picking up a dropped weapon, if that dropped weapon is a non-suspicious object (such as a screwdriver).
• Fixed bug that caused the game to soft-lock if the player pressed the F key (or X button on controller) while at Info-chan’s “Favors” menu, during Mission Mode.
• Fixed bug that caused the game to believe that there was still bloody clothing at school if the player removed bloody clothing and incinerated it.
• Fixed bug that would cause students to slide across the ground if the player used a stink bomb on them while they were solving a puzzle cube.
• Added another background track to the school scene (9 variations in total, one for each possibly combination of sanity and atmosphere).
• Fixed bug that would cause the combat minigame to break if a delinquent noticed a dropped weapon on the ground in the middle of combat.
• Fixed bug that prevented the game from properly tracking whether or not Headmaster tapes had been collected when resetting save data.
• Added “Tutorials” option to the pause screen so that the player can view any of the game’s tutorials anytime they want.
• Fixed bug that would allow the player to walk in midair above the flowerbed in the center of the Gardening club.
• Fixed bug that would cause Yandere-chan to enter a weird state if Senpai saw her attacking a teacher.
• Fixed bug that caused the “SNAP” option to not shrink to its proper size at the Heartbroken screen.
• Fixed bug that would make the Stats screen appear sideways if viewed within Yandere-chan’s home.
• Replaced the 9th Schoolday track with an improved version of the track (provided by CameronF305).
• Fixed bug that made the mouse cursor appear on the title screen when it wasn’t supposed to.
• Fixed bug that prevented Kokona from running to her destination during her phone event.
• Mai Waifu’s hair no longer clips through the wall behind her while she is eating food.
• Added a collider to a tokonoma in the Calligraphy room that didn’t have a collider.
• Adjusted intensity of drums in the Alphabet Killer Challenge background music.
• Removed Raibaru from the courtyard (she wasn’t supposed to be there, whoops!)
• Fixed bug that allowed the player to see the seams of the skybox textures.
• It is no longer possible to laugh and sweep a mop at the same time.
• Fixed bug that prevented long sharp weapons from spilling blood.
• Added a collider to a trophy case that didn’t have a collider.
• Added a blue outline to a locker that didn’t have one.
• Retextured the models in Info-chan’s room.
• Updated three character profiles on the Characters page of the official website. All are Saikou characters. Some of the information that was in Kencho’s profile has been ret-conned.

July 2nd Update

• Fixed bug that would allow the player to perform the “push off rooftop and kill” animation on a student absolutely anywhere (even at ground level) if the time of day changed from “Cleaning Time” to “After Class” while the student was removing chalk from erasers on the school rooftop.
• Fixed bug that would cause the incorrect tutorial messages to display when using the Tutorial menu accessed from Yandere-chan’s phone, but only if Yandere-chan was standing in specific places in the school.
• Fixed bug that would prevent a student from heading to a meeting spot if they were in an event during the point in time when they were supposed to head to that meeting spot (after their event ended).
• Fixed bug that would cause the wrong prompt to appear over a bucket if the player swapped from holding a mop to holding another object, while next to a bucket that they could dip a mop into.
• Fixed bug that would cause the game to get stuck if the player attempted to use Yandere-chan’s phone to view tutorials while inside of Yandere-chan’s home.
• Fixed the “hide object in backpack and retrieve it” feature of the Alphabet Killer Challenge, which was broken in the previous build.
• Fixed bug that caused bloody clothing to be identified as a blood pool if it was picked up and then dropped.
• Fixed the “hide object in trash can and retrieve it” feature, which was broken in the previous build.
• Fixed bug that prevented the player from being able to exit the “Task List” menu after entering it.
• Fixed bug that caused the Tutorial menu to be labeled as “?????” when viewed from the Pause Screen.

What’s Next?

Instead of using broad, general terms like “putting the finishing touches on Osana” and “polishing Osana”, I can spell out precisely what remains.

I’m currently working on a cutscene that has two branching paths. After both paths are complete, I’m going to implement some voiced lines for Osana/Raibaru dialogue that currently isn’t voiced. Then, I’m going to give a certain student a task (it’s relevant to Raibaru!). At that point, I will do a final “Does everything work?” check on all of Osana’s elimination methods. After that, there will be nothing left to do aside from updating the GUI, and the Osana build will be finished.

Until 2020, Osana was not my primary focus, so I didn’t feel embarrassed that she wasn’t released. “Of course she’s not done yet! She’s not a priority! It doesn’t make sense to work on Osana until all of the core mechanics are in place!” However, now that all of the core mechanics are in place, and Osana has become my only focus, I feel like she really should have been done by now. So, although I never felt ashamed before, it is now that I am finally starting to feel embarrassed that Osana is taking so long to complete. It’s a bad feeling, and it’s lighting a fire under me to hurry up and finish her.

I know in my mind how long it should take, but…as anyone who has worked on a game project knows, “plans burst into flames as soon as they come into contact with reality”. Because I really, really don’t like the feeling of Osana not being released yet, I’m going to try extra hard to get this done by my “best case” time estimate, rather than my “worst case” time estimate.

Thank you for your patience and understanding, and thank you for following the development of Yandere Simulator!