February 1st Update

4:20 PM PST EDIT: There were some bugs with the new murder method, so I released a new build where those issues are fixed. The changelog can be found below.

Hello! This will be an extra-long blog post, since I worked on a lot of different things over the past 2 weeks. Many of the things I worked on are not reflected within the build itself, so if you’re thinking, “This build contains less content than I expected!” please read this blog post to learn about all of the other stuff that I worked on.

To get started reading this massive blog post that is over 3,300 words long, scroll down past this super-cute drawing of Ayano as an adorable nurse by eeennnnenen! (That artist posts tons of cute Yandere Sim artwork – be sure to check out their page!!)

I have so many things to tell you about today! But, first, let’s just get the changelog out of the way.

Improvements

• In Custom Mode, if the player tried to assign the “Sunbathe” action+destination to a student, the student would skip over that phase of the day unless they were a rival. This is because there is a limited number of sunbathing chairs in the pool area, so I had to make a decision about how many students would be allowed to sunbathe there, and I decided to give priority to the rivals. I’ve decided that, from now on, there will be an extra sunbathing chair in the pool area, so that the player can instruct a non-rival character to sunbathe. However, only one student can use it at a time. (I don’t want to add 89 sunbathing chairs to the pool area to permit 89 students to sunbathe simultaneously. So, I had to make an official decision regarding the maximum number of non-rival students who are allowed to sunbathe simultaneously, and to keep things as simple as possible, I’ve decided that the number will simply be “one.” If you have a better solution, feel free to e-mail me your idea.)
• You’ll notice that sound effects now play when you make menu selections at the “choose your screen resolution” screen. These sound effects were added for the purpose of quickly confirming that audio is functioning properly in the Android build of the game. (More about that below.) It’s more of a “debug feature” than anything else, but since it’s not a detriment to the game, it’ll probably stay.
• The protagonist now performs a slightly different “collapsing to the ground” animation when the player receives a game over. The protagonist now places her hand over her chest in the “collapsing to the ground” animation, communicating the pain that she is feeling in her heart when she loses her Senpai.
• If the player doesn’t know their rival’s embarrassing secret, the “gossip about rival online” option is not available. From now on, a window will appear at that screen to inform the player that the option is currently unavailable, and how to make it become available.
• The Custom Mode menu will now ask you to confirm your decision when you are saving/loading data, to make sure you don’t accidentally make the wrong choice and over-write data that you did not mean to over-write.
• In 1980s Mode, Gardening Club members now perform a “flower arranging” animation when standing in front of a pot of flowers, instead of performing a thinking animation.
• The science club and sports club members of 1989 now have unique portrait poses, meaning that every student in 1989 now has a unique portrait pose!! Whoo-hoo!!
• A new murder method has been added to the game! You can now shove students into the “Freezer Room” inside the Biology Lab!
• Amai’s previous social media avatar was a placeholder. It has been replaced with new, original artwork!
• The gym teacher in 1980s Mode now uses a unique clothing model! It’s really fantastic – check it out!
• The rivals’ laptops now display webcam feeds of the rivals when class is in session!
• The cooking utensils in the Cooking Club now use new, vastly superior models.

Second Build Improvements

• Amai now uses different usernames on all social media websites. Her old username is Cupcake Princess, her current username is Cupcake Queen, and only in her secret blog, she is Cupcake Empress. Her “Empress” account uses a fancy version of her “Queen” avatar.
• Updated student portraits. (1980s Mode teachers now use the same portrait poses as 202X Mode teachers. This may be temporary, in the event that unique poses are made for them in the future.)
• Added two new Bake Sale advertisements to the school – one featuring Amai’s mother, and one featuring Amai’s father. (The exact text may change in the future.)

Fixes

• A new “Guest Vtuber” was added to the game recently! The player can now play through the game using the hairstyle and accessory of a certain Vtuber who asked to be added to the game! (I’ll officially announce who it is once she releases a video about it.) However, there was a bug – the Vtuber’s hair model and accessory were appearing on Ayano’s character model in the “Osana Killing Montage” part of the intro animation, even if the Vtuber’s easter egg was not activated! Oops! This oversight has been corrected.
• In Custom Mode, if the player gave a teacher the “Clean” action, the teacher would not clean. This bug has been fixed. (However, keep in mind that the “Clean” action currently causes a student to Clean at a pre-defined location, not a player-defined location. This can be updated in the future if it’s a big deal to Custom Mode players.)
• In Custom Mode, if the player somehow set a student’s “Portrait Pose” ID number to be outside of the acceptable range, the game would softlock when generating that student’s portrait. This bug has been fixed.
• In Custom Mode, if the player assigned the “SocialSit” action to a student, they would perform a “standing and talking” animation instead of a “sitting and talking” animation. This bug has been fixed.
• In Custom Mode, after performing a Befriend/Betray mission, the text that displayed onscreen would describe the rival as a female, even if they were a male. This oversight has been corrected.
• In Custom Mode, if the player designed a male invincible student and attacked them during gameplay, the game over sequence would not play properly. This bug has been fixed.
• In the 1980s Mode asylum stealth mission, it is no longer possible to move the camera outside of the window and view the empty abyss existing outside of the asylum scene.
• In Custom Mode, if the player designed a student with the action “Sleuth” and the destination “Guard”, the student would not behave as expected. This bug has been fixed.
• When Sumiko and Ritsuko changed clothing in the shower building to go to class, they would get stuck and not exit the shower building. This bug has been fixed.
• On the Week Select screen of Custom Mode, Ryona’s name would be displayed instead of the name of the player’s custom protagonist. This bug has been fixed.
• The Student Info screen erroneously described the Journalist as being in a “Club.” This bug has been fixed.

Second Build Fixes

• After pushing a student into the freezer room, their collider would remain in place for a while, and it was possible for the player to bump into their invisible collider. This bug has been fixed.
• After pushing a student into the freezer room, if the player stood in a specific spot, it was possible to see the “Stop Following Me” button prompt above their head. This bug has been fixed.
• After freezing a student to death, it was possible to interact with their dead body even though the freezer room’s doors were shut. This bug has been fixed.
• If the player performed the “Freeze to Death” animation, all male students in school would receive the “frozen” overlay. This bug has been fixed.
• If the player killed a student using the push-into-freezer method, the student would be alive on the subsequent day. This bug has been fixed.
• If the player disabled transparent windows, the glass walls of the Biology Lab’s freezer room would become opaque. This bug has been fixed.
• If the player attempted to disable transparent windows, windows connected to the school plaza would disappear. This bug has been fixed.
• The camera could clip into the collider for the “Push student into freezer” button prompt. This bug has been fixed.

New Merch!

Ayano pins are now available from the Yandere Simulator Crowdmade store! If that type of thing is right up your alley, then go check ’em out!

Transparency Post

My annual Patreon “Transparency Post” is usually posted within the first few days of January, but this one ran a bit late. And by “a bit late” I mean that I posted it on the very last day of the month! I’m not sure how important these posts actually are to people, but in case you’ve been waiting for it, here it is:

https://www.patreon.com/posts/121182882

Hey, wait a minute. Didn’t you say that you were planning to work on…

Yeah, I know what you want to say. In my last blog post, I said that my focus for the rest of January was going to be Custom Mode. My intention was to finish making the last remaining changes that I had planned for Custom Mode, and then shift my focus exclusively to improving Amai’s week. However…if you scroll up, you’ll see that I barely touched Custom Mode at all in this update. What happened? Well, it was a combination of a lot of different things…

Volunteer Excellence

Over the past two weeks, an exceptionally high number of new assets was delivered by volunteers. The new “collapsing to the ground” animation – the new portrait poses – the new “freeze victim to death” elimination – the new gym teacher clothing – the new Amai social media avatar – the new renders of rivals attending class via their laptops – the new cooking utensils…the volunteers really delivered a ton of awesome stuff over the past 2 weeks! And, whenever I got my hands on an exciting new addition to the game, I dropped whatever I was doing to put it into the game right away! Some assets were a quick drag-and-drop addition to the game, but others (like a completely new murder method) took up an entire day.

In addition to all of that, I’ve also been working together with people to produce a bunch of cool stuff that I can’t actually show you yet. There’s a phenomenal artist who is making some new character artwork for the official website, another outstanding artist who is making some incredible art for a video that I want to release, an excellent 3D artist who is making some renders for Ryoba’s monologues in 1980s Mode, and another 3D artist who is working on something super exciting that I don’t want to announce just yet because I don’t want to reveal it until it’s ready.

Ah! So much upcoming content!

Power Outages

I live in southern California, which has recently been subjected to high winds. Exceptionally powerful wind can snap tree branches right off of trees. Sometimes, those tree branches land on power lines. When this happens, huge wildfires can start that burn down hundreds of acres of land!

My electricity company doesn’t want to risk being responsible for a massive fire (and thus getting sued for millions of dollars in damages…) so, whenever there is a “high wind warning,” they shut off electricity to my entire area for between 12 and 24 hours. It’s been happening a LOT recently. It sucks to sit alone and bored in the cold darkness, but it sucks even more to be thinking, “I could be getting so much work done on Yandere Sim right now! Everyone’s going to be so disappointed in me and mad at me!” the entire time. I really hope that you can be forgiving about this.

Progress on New Character Models

You may recall that, a few years back, new character models were created for Yandere Simulator, but required a few remaining tweaks before they could be used in-game. I stated that the only type of person who could make those tweaks would be a “technical artist” with a high degree of knowledge in the very specific field of optimizing anime-style character models for game projects. For many months, I was not able to find anyone with the exact skills and knowledge necessary to make the final remaining changes to the models…until January! Last month, one of the game’s volunteers demonstrated that he possessed the skillset required to put the finishing touches on those new character models! Lucky!

Because I really wanted to finish my Custom Mode tasks and progress forward to Amai, I was thinking of saying, “No, I don’t want to put the new character models in right now, I’ll just save it for later…” but, like most volunteers, this guy won’t be available forever; he’ll eventually have to shift his time and focus to his education or his job, and then he won’t be able to help out with the game anymore. So, I decided that it would be wise to jump into action and work together with him while the window of opportunity was still open. I spent a whole lot of time with him over the past 2 weeks, testing and debugging and troubleshooting issues with the new character models. It ate up a LOT of time, but I consider it to be time well-spent, since I don’t know when I’ll find another guy like this one.

I’d like to show you everything that the new character model is capable of (it’s MUCH more expressive than the current model!) but I feel like I haven’t provided anything of substance to my Patrons in a long time, so I’ll be posting images previews and video previews of the new character model on my Patreon, instead of here on this blog. Those video previews will even include 3D turnarounds of what the rivals are going to look like when using this new model!

Progress on Android Build

On January 1st, I announced that 2025 would be the year that I began investigating the possibility of creating an Android port of Yandere Simulator. Over the past 2 weeks, I finally took the time to look into it. Unfortunately, the process was not as simple as clicking “Export Android Build” and waiting for an APK to pop out. I encountered problem after problem…but each issue felt like a mysterious puzzle waiting to be solved, and after solving each “puzzle,” I couldn’t resist moving on to the next one.

After a tremendous amount of troubleshooting, I finally got Yandere Simulator to “run” on an Android device. I’m putting “run” in conditional quotation marks because the game’s graphics are not displaying correctly. Don’t worry, I already know the solution – however, it would require me to update the version of Unity that I’m using to develop Yandere Simulator. I’m hesitant to update the game engine, because the process of updating might break scripts/shaders/physics, or result in new bugs. I really want to investigate the feasibility of updating, but it would come at a huge cost – time.

Every time I want to switch from the Windows build to the Android build or change the way that Unity handles graphics / shaders / optimizes assets, Unity needs to “re-import” all of Yandere Simulator’s assets using the new settings. After nearly 11 years of receiving new content on a regular basis, Yandere Sim contains thousands of assets…actually, it would probably be more accurate to say tens of thousands.

So, how long does it take to “re-import” tens of thousands of assets? Well…take a look at this video I recorded.

Over 4 hours and 4 minutes…that’s how long it takes to re-import. Every time I want to switch from the Windows build to the Android build…every time I want to change the graphical settings…any time I might want to upgrade from my current version of Unity to a new version…that’s 4 hours that I won’t be able to get any work done.

Of course, I’m strategic about it. I don’t click the “change target platform” button unless I’m going to sleep. That way, I wake up, and the 4-hour operation is already complete. But, this means that the process of working on an Android build or upgrading Unity is super time-consuming, and can only be done at certain times of day. Also, it’s not something I really look forward to doing, since I know that it’s going to result in dozens of new time-consuming bugs to fix.

With that said, I still think I should update Unity anyway, because of the potential benefits – the latest version of the game engine might be far more optimized than the current version, which would result in better performance and framerate. It might be a huge pain in the ass for a few days, but ultimately, once I’m done, I will probably be very glad that I did it.

If I choose to upgrade to Unity 6 in the next 2 weeks, the next build might have very little new content, because I would be spending my time upgrading to the newest version of the engine and fixing all of the resulting bugs instead of spending time putting new assets into the game. I haven’t decided if I’ll do it yet, but if I do pull the trigger on that decision, I hope you’ll be forgiving when the next build winds up being smaller than usual.

This actually raises a question – should I really be planning absolutely every aspect of the game’s development around 2-week milestones? Is the “Update every 2 weeks” system actually holding the game back, since it means that I never choose to make improvements to the game that would take longer than 2 weeks to accomplish, or would interfere with my ability to deliver a new build within a 2-week window?

It’s a conversation that I think would be really important to have, but I’ll save it for another blog post.

New Merchandise Coming Soon

Another one of the many things that I’ve been spending time on over the last 2 weeks was discussing some extremely exciting new merchandise that will become available in the near future. I’ve already received some samples, and I’m really, really happy with how things are turning out!!

I don’t like saying, “trust me bro, it’s totally coming in the future, I can’t show it to you right now, but it’s real, trust me bro,” but I really don’t want to unceremoniously spoil the merch before it’s officially revealed. So, please look forward to seeing it in the future!

In Summary

A flood of excellent new assets – a bunch of lengthy power outages – the sudden appearance of a guy who had the exact skills necessary to improve the upcoming character models – a bunch of fantastic volunteers working on exciting things I can’t show you yet – kicking off development of the Android port – talking with a merch company about exciting new stuff coming soon – all of this stuff took up so much of my time that 2 weeks passed in the blink of an eye.

It’s frustrating to me that so much of my time over the past 2 weeks was taken up by things that I can’t actually show you yet! I’m terrified that it’s going to create the false impression that I haven’t been working, or getting anything done. I hope you can please be patient and trust that cool things will start to roll out one-by-one over the next few weeks and months.

Here’s a lesson that I really should have learned by now: It’s always a mistake to say things like, “Next, I will focus on (X Feature) and complete it by (X Day)!” That’s not really how his game’s development works. At the beginning of a 2-week cycle, I really have absolutely no clue what is going to happen over the next 2 weeks. From power outages to amazing volunteers showering me with phenomenal assets and artwork, there’s just a huge number of things that can completely derail the plans I had at the beginning of the week, and divert my time and attention elsewhere.

I really hope you understand that being the director/manager/producer of Yandere Sim is a full-time job all by itself, leaving very little time to be the programmer as well. …wait, didn’t I make a graph about this exact topic? One second, let me see if I can find it…ah, here it is!

When I made that graph, I really meant it. The majority of my time is spent talking to artists, animators, composers, modelers, and voice actors (yes, I’ve been reviewing a lot of auditions recently, too), and actual game development progress is made in whatever scarce amount of time is left over.

I really hope you don’t get the impression that I’m complaining; I’m not saying, “Damn those ultra-talented volunteers, how dare they generously make incredible assets for me?! This is all their fault!!” I’m just saying that there is a LOT more to game development than just typing code, and during some 2-week periods, the non-code aspects of game development are going to eat up all the available time, leaving zero time left for the code-related aspects.

What will I focus on over the next 2 weeks? What will I get done by February 15th? Who knows! It depends entirely on numerous factors completely outside of my control. It’s partially dependent on the availability of other people, and it’s partially dependent on whether or not there are natural disasters happening in my vicinity. I know that such a vague answer probably doesn’t inspire a tremendous amount of faith in me, but that’s simply the way things are. (That’s kind the way things have always been on this project…)

In the meantime, thank you for being patient with me as I continue the eternal struggle against the unpredictable nature of game development in general – and thank you for following the development of Yandere Simulator!

(Subtle reminder: Previews of the new character models will be uploaded to my Patreon within the next few hours! Don’t forget)