June 4th Bug-Fixing Build

I feel bad for making this blog post, because my previous blog post was a pretty important one, and now I’m pushing it down the page, robbing it of visibility. Before I discuss the new build, I want to remind you that I’m going to be posting concept art on my Patreon for 30 days in a row! If that sounds interesting to you, click the link to learn about it!

With that out of the way, time to discuss this new build…

A lot of people were reporting a problem: They were not able to use the sewing machine in the Sewing Room to make a bikini or a scarf. I think I know what the problem was; the “make a bikini” button prompt and the “make a scarf” button prompt were extremely close to one another, which made it very difficult to select the one you actually wanted. (Well, I suspect that was the cause for about 50% of the bug reports. As for the other 50%, I think that many players didn’t realize that if you want to sew the bikini, you have to walk over to the fabric rack and grab some fabric first…)

Because more than half of the bug reports I was receiving were about this one singular issue, it was worth it to upload a new build way ahead of schedule just to solve this one issue, since it was clearly impacting a lot of people. With that said, this build also contains a lot of other changes, as well. To read a list of everything that was changed in the latest build, scroll down past this adorable artwork by blue nori snow!

Follower Adjustment

When a student is following you, a timer appears above their head. When this timer runs out, the student stops following you.

The original plan was to limit the player to one “Follow Me” per day – if you ask the same student to follow you twice, they would refuse. After playtesting, this seemed like it was too strict, too harsh, and would just frustrate players. So, I decided to allow the player to ask for the “Follow Me” favor an infinite number of times.

However, this meant that the timer became absolutely pointless. Why have a timer at all, if the player can just ask a student to keep following them an infinite number of times, whenever the timer runs out?

Should the timer be removed entirely? No! If you tell someone “Follow Me” and then you don’t actually lead them anywhere important, they should get bored and leave after a while. It makes sense to have a timer representing a person’s patience and willingness to put up with you, if you’re wasting their time.

I want to implement this feature as originally intended – only one “Follow Me” allowed per day – but first, I would need to find the right “balance” for the timer feature. Here’s what I’ve come up with:

From now on, the timer will fall by 1% per second when you’re moving, but will accelerate to 10% per second when you’re standing still.

Once you ask a student to follow you, you have 140 seconds to lead them somewhere. That should be enough time to reach anywhere in school. However, if you ever stand perfectly still and don’t go anywhere, the student will start getting bored really fast, so you can’t afford to waste any time.

If people agree with this system, then that’s how it’ll go into the game when the Follow Me feature becomes a once-a-day feature rather than an infinite feature.

Improvements

• The “make bikini” and “sew scarf” button prompts are now on separate sewing machines. How will the player know what sewing machine is the correct one to use? Simple: the corresponding sewing machines now have books next to them. The books are titled “How to sew a scarf” and “How to make a bikini.” This should make it obvious which sewing machine results in which item of clothing.
• The player can only talk to a club leader about their club when they are a certain distance from their club. However, some club leaders move around, change their club locations, etc. This made it frustrating to talk to Budo about his club, since you’d have to wait until he was standing with his arms crossed (signifying that he had reached a “club” location). From now on, you’ll be able to talk to Budo about his club more easily if he’s in one of the Zen gardens, as long as you wait a few seconds for him to take a few steps into it.
• The roll of bodybags is now considered suspicious outside of Cleaning Time. (At Cleaning Time, it can be mistaken for a roll of garbage bags, so it’s not considered suspicious.)
• A file named “LooseHairTemplate” has been added to the StreamingAssets folder to provide a template to people who want to make a custom texture for Ayano’s “loose hair” model.
• The act of carrying a concealed corpse is now far more suspicious. A student’s “Suspicion Meter” will now fill up 5x faster when you are carrying a concealed corpse.
• Improved the texture on the ground in the backstage area of the school gymnasium.

Fixes

• The point of a No Friends run is to require the player to play through the game without being able to ask students for Favors. The Seduction stat allows players to force students to do Favors for you. Therefore, Seduction shouldn’t be available during a No Friends run. This oversight has been corrected; Seduction can no longer make students do favors for you during a No Friends challenge run.
• If the player made a blood splatter texture appear on a student (for example, by sending a mind-broken slave to kill someone) and then made a water splatter texture appear on another student (for example, by using a water cooler tripwire trap), the blood texture on the original student would turn to a water texture. This bug has been fixed.
• Wearing a bikini would shrink the size of Ryoba’s bust. This was a limitation because of clipping problems with the bikini model. The clipping problem has been fixed, so wearing the bikini no longer shrinks Ryoba’s bust.
• If a teacher caught you making a tripwire trap, she would send you to the guidance counselor. However, she wouldn’t actually dismantle the trap. This oversight has been corrected.
• If the player threw a stink bomb at a character who was returning a misplaced item, the character would fail to drop or forget about the item. This bug has been fixed.
• If a student council member caught the player digging or burying with a shovel, the player would not properly exit the digging/burying state. This bug has been fixed.
• If the player concealed bodybags in a bookbag and saved the game, the bodybags would not be in the bookbag when the save was loaded. This bug has been fixed.
• In the Alphabet Killer Challenge, some of the lockers (meant for hiding dead bodies inside) were clipping into other props. This oversight has been fixed.
• Due to a bug, students could perform the “waving hello to friend” animation even while in the middle of a death animation. This bug should be fixed now.
• Fixed a bug that prevented the “You are playing an outdated build!” text from accurately detecting whether or not the player was on an outdated build.
• When Ryoba changed into a bikini, she would lose her unique face shape and would adopt the default face shape. This bug has been fixed.
• Fixed bug that prevented the camera overlay from appearing in 1980s Mode (when aiming a camera obtained from the Photography Club).
• Fixed bug that was preventing the bullies from performing their bullying animations at lunchtime.

Easter Egg Changes

• The camera now zooms out when you’re using the Titan Mode easter egg.
• Fixed the broken hair texture on the Huntress easter egg.

Task Bug

“YandereDev, YandereDev! There’s a bug that prevents you from being able to complete Tasks! The steps are…”

1. Accept a task (for example, “bring me headache medicine”)
2. Perform the task (for example, talk to the nurse and get some headache medicine from her.)
3. Don’t turn in the task; instead, end the day and go home.
4. When you return to school the next day, it will be impossible to turn in the task, and also impossible to perform the task again (for example, you will not have the ability to talk to the nurse and get medicine from her.)

A lot of people have reported this bug, but no matter how many times I repeat those steps, I cannot replicate this bug. For me, the Task system is working perfectly. If I return to school the following day, I can still perform and turn in the completed Task.

The fact that many people have reported the bug tells me that it is a real, actual, genuine, valid bug…but the fact that I can’t replicate the bug tells me that, so far, nobody has actually provided me with valid steps for causing the bug to happen.

I’d love to fix the bug, but I’m still waiting for someone to actually discover the set of actions that must be performed to consistently make the bug happen. After like a dozen attempts to get this bug to happen, it is simply not happening for me, so I can’t investigate it or fix it. If you find the exact process that triggers the bug, though, then please let me know.