What if I had prioritized the rivals instead of the gameplay?

Whenever someone urges me to hurry up and quickly implement the remaining rivals into Yandere Simulator, I wonder if they really understand what they’re asking me to do. They’re telling me to put 10 characters into a game before the game has all of the mechanics necessary to make it fun to eliminate those characters. And that just seems silly to me.

Sometimes, I think about creating a build of Yandere Simulator that has 10 rivals – but no features – purely for the sake of making a statement: “It would be dumb to put the rivals into the game before building the systems that would make it fun to eliminate those rivals.”

So, today, for April 1st, a day reserved for silly jokes and pranks, I decided to do it: to create a build of the game that features 10 rivals…and nothing else. The purpose? To send a message. “This is what you asked for. A game with 10 rivals in it. But it’s missing something, isn’t it? That’s right – it’s missing the fun. Now do you finally understand why implementing fun mechanics is more important than implementing the rivals?”

Here, take a look. It’s a build where you can kill 10 rivals, see the conclusion of Ayano’s story, and watch the credits roll. But it sucks. Because it lacks all of the features necessary to make the experience fun.

https://www.mediafire.com/file/lqs6tz196jifmsx/YandereSimulatorFinalRelease.zip/file

“But, YandereDev!” you might say. “It shouldn’t take 8 years to make a game fun!”

According to what I hear on a daily basis from the fans, the game is already fun. It became fun years ago. There are people who have e-mailed me to say that they’ve played Yandere Simulator for 6 hours straight and had a great time. I already made a fun game, and it’s not even complete yet. I’m proud of that.

So why isn’t it done yet? Because my plans for the game are just so ambitious that I’m still not done adding fun things to the game, and I won’t put the remaining rivals in until I’ve finished preparing all of the systems and mechanics that the game needs. That, and I also need to raise the funding necessary to pay for the rivals’ voice acting / animations / events.

Actually, there are also a lot of other reasons why it’s taken 8 years. If you want to know them all, you can read about them here.