Female Senpai and Male Rivals in Custom Mode

“When will we be able to have a female Senpai?”

“When will we be able to have male rivals?”

When, you ask? The answer is...now!

(Only in Custom Mode, though!)

To read more about this long-awaited addition to the game, scroll down past this emotional artwork of Jokichi mourning the death of a rival by Aya_0w0__!

Custom Mode Gender Swap Option

Recently, I got curious about something: “Hypothetically, if I wanted to allow the player to change the gender of any character and have a female Senpai, male rivals, etc, how much time/work would actually be required? Would it create tons of bugs? Would it take hours, days, or weeks?”

I couldn’t stop thinking about it! My curiosity wouldn’t be satisfied until I had taken the time to investigate it, so I began working on it…and the process turned out to be much easier and simpler than I anticipated!

So, what is the result? Well, the newest option on the Start Screen of the Custom Mode menu should give you the answer:

This new feature is incomplete, so it can only be enabled once the player reads a disclaimer and acknowledges that the feature may create bugs:

With this feature enabled, you can change the gender of any student when designing characters in Custom Mode – even your Senpai! Take a look:

I tested this feature by playing through the game three times: once with an all-female student population, once with an all-male student population, and once with the current 1980s Mode genders flipped to the opposite. I fixed all of the bugs I encountered and was able to complete all three playthroughs without any errors, so it looks like things are stable and working properly:

After gender-swapping a character, you may sometimes notice that some animations don’t look right. That’s because if the game tries to play a female animation on a male skeleton (or vice versa) the character’s body will deform in an attempt to take the shape of the other gender’s skeleton. Fortunately, this issue may soon be a thing of the past…

Previously, the process of converting an animation from male-to-female or female-to-male was a tedious process that had to be performed manually by an animator volunteer. However, an extremely helpful programmer has recently created a tool that automatically performs that process and instantly converts an animation from male-to-female or female-to-male! This is a big deal!! With this tool, it will become much easier to make male characters perform actions that were previously exclusive to females, and vice versa! Exciting stuff!!

Of course, since the last build, I worked on much more than just the gender-swap option…

Improvements

• The button to spill liquid out of a bucket is now the “B” button instead of the “A” button, since players were often accidentally spilling liquid out of a bucket while trying to use the “A” button to open doors. (For keyboard players, it has been changed from the “E” key to the “Q” key.)
• When the player is talking to a student and selects the “Bye” option from the Dialogue Wheel, the player and the student say goodbye to one another. From now on, if the two of them have socialized using the new socialization system, their goodbye will sound a little more friendly.
• The “rummage through drawer for dirty magazine” button prompt is now red, in order to warn te player that it represents a suspicious action that the player can be punished for.
• From now on, using the Befriend/Betray stealth mission to eliminate a rival through friendship will result in the rival’s friendship meter jumping to 100%.
• A few more stats now appear on the Stats screen: the player’s current number of friends, and the number of times they have alerted other students.
• The police in the “End of Day” sequence are now using an original walk animation, rather than a default walk animation from the Unity Asset Store.
• To help you remember whether or not a save file is an “Alternate Timeline” save file, a fun guest will now be visible on the Calendar screen.
• Custom Mode now has unique background music! (You can still press the “M” key to switch to a different track or mute the music.)
• Senpai will now reject a rival’s love confession if her reputation is -100 by 5:00 PM on Friday.
• A student’s profile in Custom Mode can now be up to 200 characters long.
• The “Senpai with heart eyes” graphic has been improved.

Fixes

• The bullies are two-faced, and treat you differently depending on your current reputation at school. For example, when you’re talking to them, their idle animation changes based on your current reputation. However, that behavior – choosing idle animation based on reputation – was not present when using the new Socialize feature. This bug has been fixed.
• An “Alternate Timeline” playthrough is supposed to come to an immediate end if any characters die. However, the game was failing to acknowledge students who were driven to suicide as a result of bullying or deaths that occurred in the player’s basement (as a result of a kidnapped character starving to death). This bug has been fixed.
• Raibaru has “Invincible” Strength, so she can fight off an attack from a mind-broken slave. However, she was programmed to not fight back if a mind-broken Osana attacks her. This created a bug where any student with the “Invincible” Persona would not fight back if Student #11 attacked them. this bug has been fixed.
• Some players reported the game softlocking during the “suitor confesses to rival” cutscene. I wasn’t able to replicate the softlock, but I believe I know what may have been causing it, and I’ve attempted to implement a fix. Please send me a bug report if the game still softlocks during that cutscene.
• If the protagonist had a knife concealed in her inventory when she was attacked by a Hero, she would automatically take out the knife and enter the struggle minigame. However, the same wouldn’t happen if the protagonist was attacked by a teacher. This bug has been corrected.
• In 1980s Mode Mission Mode, it was possible to create a Multi-Mission mission that involved pushing a target off a rooftop. This was impossible if Yakuza Mode was active, since you can’t make students check their locker for a note in Yakuza Mode. This bug has been fixed.
• If your Custom Mode playthrough required you to eliminate one of your rivals using the “Drive to Suicide” method, you eliminated your rival with suicide, the game would fail to recognize it, and would kick you back to the start of the week. This bug should now be fixed.
• “Custom Mode” was only meant to function on empty save file slots. However, if the player highlighted a pre-existing save file slot and pressed the key to enter Custom Mode, they would enter the Custom Mode menu and lose that save file! Oops! This bug has been fixed.
• If the player mashed the laugh button while pushing a student into the iron maiden, they could put the protagonist into a weird state where she was could not stop giggling, but also could never perform any of the laughing animations. This bug has been fixed.
• If a character was hit with a stink bomb while carrying a tray of food, they would say a line about how they want to run from the smell but can’t run while carrying a tray of food in their hands…but they would still run, anyway. This bug has been fixed.
• In Custom Mode, assigning “walk animation #1” to a male student would give them an ancient walk animation from 2014 instead of the new-and-improved walk animation that male characters have been using for the past several years. This bug has been fixed.
• If the protagonist met the criteria to enter a physical struggle with Raibaru and the player tried to push Raibaru into an iron maiden, the struggle minigame would begin, but the protagonist would not hold the knife properly. This bug has been fixed.
• If the player sent a mind-broken slave to kill a teacher while that teacher was bringing a dropped weapon to the faculty room, the teacher would not drop the weapon upon death, and the weapon would be non-interactive forever. This bug has been fixed.
• If a male student witnessed a “shocking” death (such as a murder-suicide or a student burning to death) and walked backwards in shock, they would grow in size and become taller than an average male student. This bug has been fixed.
• If the player dragged a mind-broken slave’s body away from the place where they died, the mind-broken slave’s 3D model would appear invisible if the place where they died was not in view of the camera. This bug has been fixed.
• If the player befriended Raibaru, asked Raibaru to follow them, then attacked Raibaru right before the “Follow Timer” ran out, Raibaru would fail to enter the counter-attack animation properly. This bug has been fixed.
• Students are supposed to commit suicide after their reputation drops below -150. However, due to a bug, they weren’t actually being marked as “dead” – they were just failing to spawn at school. This bug has been fixed.
• If the player used the new Socialize feature on a student who was standing above / below them on the stairs, the camera would not correctly point at the student who was being socialized with. This bug has been fixed.
• After the player uses up a bottle of emetic poison, they are supposed to lose that bottle. However, if the player poisoned Senpai’s bento in 1980s Mode, the poison bottle would not disappear. This bug has been fixed.
• If the player threw a stink bomb at a musician while they were playing a musical instrument, they would run away with their musical instrument floating in midair in front of them. This bug has been fixed.
• If the player concealed a corpse inside of a body bag, hid that corpse in a locker, and then got sent to the guidance counselor’s office, the corpse would pop out of the locker. This bug has been fixed.
• If the player tried running into the male locker room with low FPS or during a lag spike, the character could get trapped inside of the male locker room, unable to exit. This bug has been fixed.
• In Custom Mode, when the player used Raibaru’s hairstyle, the locks of hair in front of her ears (not “sideburns,” but close enough) would not change color properly. This bug has been fixed.
• When performing the “do a student’s assignment for them” Task, Ryoba would perform a “writing” animation, but wasn’t actually holding a pen in her hand. This oversight has been corrected.
• If the player attended class while murder evidence was present at school, the player would perform a “sitting down and writing” animation while sitting in midair. This bug has been fixed.
• In Custom Mode, the “Relax” action wasn’t working for girls and was making boys sit in midair. The “Relax” action now causes a character to perform a “standing and thinking” animation.
• If the player made Osana and Raibaru stop being friends, Musume’s Friday morning event with Osana would happen much later in the day than it was supposed to. This bug has been fixed.
• If the player tried to put Nemesis’ corpse into any of the containers added to the game after the September 15th update, her corpse would float in midair. This bug has been fixed.
• If the player saved the game, loaded that save, and the killed a student, it would not be possible to interact with the student’s corpse. This bug has been fixed.
• If the player crushed Nemesis with a bookshelf, she would fail to play the “crushed by bookshelf” animation and would remain standing. This bug has been fixed.
• Fixed bug in Custom Mode that would prevent characters from pathfinding properly if their action was set to “Admire” and their Destination was set to “Stalk.”
• If the player spoke to a female delinquent during class time, there was a possibility that they would respond with a male voice line. This bug has been fixed.
• If the player took a photograph of a sleeping student, the text at the top of the screen would describe it as a photo of a “Corpse.” This bug has been fixed.
• If the player looked into the fountains in front of the school, they would be able to see blades of grass inside of the fountain. This bug has been fixed.
• If the player tried to give a character the “SocialSit” destination in Custom Mode, this would break most characters’ routines. This bug has been fixed.
• The labels “Time/Destination/Action” have been added to the “Editing Schedule” screen to make it easier to tell what is currently being edited.
• Students who removed dust from erasers during cleaning time were clipping into rooftop benches while doing so. This bug has been fixed.
• In Yakuza Mode, the “You are being chased!” music would not play if you were being chased by a delinquent. This bug has been fixed.
• The game was not acknowledging the player’s “Invert X-Axis” preferences in the dream sequence. This bug has been fixed.
• Ryoba had the wrong eye color in the alternate timeline confession scene. This bug has been fixed.
• Some of the text in Ai’s diary entry was the wrong color. This mistake has been corrected.
• Fixed bug that prevented the music in the confession scene from looping properly.
• Students were unable to pathfind into the greenhouse. This bug has been fixed.
• Two lines in the credits were intersecting. This bug has been fixed.

Amai Progress?

After satisfying my curiosity by implementing the gender-swap feature, I shifted my attention to implementing the next 202X rival, Amai. I’m now focusing on her exclusively, and not working on anything unrelated to implementing her.

If you want to know more details about precisely how much progress I’ve made so far, you can read my 2023 Transparency Report here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/2023-97591134

And, if you’re donating at least $3, you’ll be able to see a sneak preview of upcoming Amai content here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/preview-of-96517532

And also here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/preview-of-97614123

Thank you for following the development of Yandere Simulator!