Today is the 10th anniversary of Yandere Simulator’s development! I began developing the game 10 years ago, on March 31st, 2014!
To celebrate the game’s 10th anniversary, I created a music video. (Don’t worry, it didn’t take a lot of time away from development.) Please check it out!
How does it feel to work on one game for 10 years? When do I estimate Yandere Simulator will be finished? And, why did I decide that a song named “Macaroni” would be the appropriate song for celebrating Yandere Sim’s 10th anniversary? If you would like to know the answer to any of these questions, click Continue Reading!
Ten Years
The sentence “Today is the 10th anniversary of Yandere Simulator’s development!” can be interpreted in two very different ways:
“Holy crap! This guy hasn’t been able to finish his game, even after ten years of work!”
or,
“Holy crap! This guy has been updating his game with new content for a decade, and he’s still committed to it!”
I’ve already dedicated multiple lengthy blog posts explaining which of those two interpretations is completely invalid to me. You can read this post, this post, or this post to hear my thoughts on the matter. But, if you don’t have time to read thousands of words, then I’ll summarize it for you in just one paragraph:
When I first began developing Yandere Simulator, my intention was to make a short, simple, basic game about killing 10 girls. Over time, I gradually began to feel that it would be much more meaningful to provide a game that was constantly expanding and growing. A short novelty game would be forgotten in a matter of hours, but a continuously-updated game would be relevant for years. So, I shifted my focus from implementing 10 girls to consistently adding new activities and mechanics to the game.
Whenever I hear someone say,
“I was in elementary school when I first heard about this game, and now I’m in college!”
I think,
After you finished your homework for elementary school, there was a new Yandere Simulator video for you to watch. When you came home from a rough day of high school, there was a new Yandere Simulator update for you to download. And when you need a break from studying for college exams, there will be new Yandere Simulator content for you to explore.
I don’t see any of this as a bad thing.
Some fans have told me that Yandere Simulator is their “anchor.” Something they can rely on to always be there for them. A “constant” in their life. Multiple people have told me that they see the Yandere Simulator characters as “family” – and that’s one of the most heartwarming things I’ve ever heard. I’m very happy that I’ve been able to provide something so meaningful to the world.
Adding new content is fun; fixing bugs is satisfying; watching people explore the newest update is rewarding. The process of game development is probably the most fulfilling and gratifying activity I’ve ever discovered. (If I didn’t love it more than anything else in the world, then I wouldn’t be willing to do it every day for 10 years straight.)
But, with that said, I don’t want Yandere Simulator’s development to be perpetual. Over the years, I’ve been imagining all sorts of other video game projects that I would love to develop, and I’m extremely eager to begin working on them. So, even though it’s an absolute honor to be the guy who provides the world with Yandere Simulator, I do eventually want this project to reach a conclusion.
Around January of 2024, I finally finished implementing all of the features that I’ve always wanted the game to have. That is when I decided that it was finally time to change my focus from “continuously update the game with new content” back to the original plan: “give the player 10 girls to kill.”
Groovy! But…how long is that going to take?
Remaining Development Time
For the sake of brevity, I’m going to massively over-simplify the act of implementing a new rival into the game, and pretend that absolutely every task falls into one of five categories:
We’ll start with the one that, obviously, has to come first: Planning out the rival’s week. What makes her unique and sets her apart from other rivals? What interactions is she going to have with Senpai, and how can they be sabotaged? What’s the premise of her befriend/betray elimination method? What’s her unique elimination method? What kind of special circumstances will exist during her week (such as a bake sale for Amai, a school play for Kizana, a sports festival for Asu), etc? And what is all of her dialogue going to sound like?
There are over 20 different ways to eliminate your rivals in Yandere Simulator, but the “Befriend/Betray elimination method” is so different from all the rest that I feel it should be considered a separate category from everything else. A tremendous amount of work goes into the implementation of this feature; more than most other elimination methods combined. There must be an event where you learn about it, a private conversation with the rival about it, an environment for a stealth mission to take place in, a set of new characters to populate that environment, a text message conversation to confirm the completion of the mission, a living room cutscene where the rival is befriended or betrayed, etc. I would say that this one elimination method, alone, is approximately 20% of the total work that goes into implementing the rival.
Then there’s the Rejection elimination method. This method is spread across the rival’s entire week, and requires a large number of events to be added to the game. “Eavesdrop on the rival and Senpai” events, events that allow you to sabotage the outcome of future events, and events that branch out into different outcomes depending on whether or not the player sabotaged a previous event. Fortunately, I’ve recently developed a new system that makes it extremely easy to add new events to the game. Thanks to this new system, I’ve been adding Amai’s events to the game at a lightning-fast pace – about 7 times faster than it took for me to add Osana’s events to her week! So, even though the Rejection method comprises about 20% of the total amount of content in a rival’s week, it actually goes into the game quite quickly.
And then there’s the stuff that is specific to each individual rival. Her unique elimination method, the special circumstances at school during her week, her suitor, what her diary entry is going to say, what Info-chan is going to say about her, etc. Absolutely everything that pertains to the rival, aside from the two major elimination methods mentioned above.
Last, we have a bunch of other, assorted, miscellaneous things. Each week, a new cassette tape is meant to appear in the basement. Each week, the Basu sisters are meant to have a new set of conversations. Each week, the player is meant to be able to collect a new object for the Senpai Shrine. It’s a lot of stuff that isn’t connected directly to rival herself, but comes with the act of adding a new week to the game.
While working on Amai, I’ve been keeping track of how long it takes to complete all of the tasks in each category. Obviously, Amai isn’t finished yet, but the time that I’ve spent on her so far has given me enough data to make an educated guess about approximately how long it takes to finish each category:
- 5 days – Planning/Design/Writing
- 30 days – Befriend/Betray Elimination Method
- 15 days – Rejection Elimination Method
- 5 days – Additions Unique to Specific Rivals
- 5 days – Every other aspect of the rival’s week
Add up all of those days, and you can arrive at the conclusion that it takes about 2 months to implement a new rival into Yandere Simulator.
“But, you’ve already been working on Amai for longer than 2 months!”
During February, my rate of productivity was cut in half. My calculations above are assuming a normal speed of productivity. Also, a large portion of the past 3 months was spent building systems that will make it easy and convenient to implement future rivals. This means that all subsequent rivals should take less time to implement than Amai is currently taking.
So, now that we have a number to work with, we can start doing some math…
If each rival takes 2 months to complete, and there are 8 rivals remaining, this means that, after Amai is released, the game will only need to remain in development for another 16 months. This means that I might potentially be releasing the finished game sometime around the 2nd half of 2025!
But, wait! What if I’m underestimating the amount of work that post-Amai rivals will require? What if future rivals will actually take 3 months to complete? This means that the game would remain in development for at least 24 more months, meaning that the final version of the game would come out around the middle of 2026.
Hold up – there’s something else to consider, as well. Perhaps there should be a one-month period in-between rivals where I fix bugs related to the rival, and add quality-of-life improvements to the game. This means that new rivals would be released about 4 months apart. The game would have to remain in development for around 36 more months. The final game would come out towards the end of 2026, or maybe the beginning of 2027.
Also, what if I would like to return to producing YouTube videos? I’d really love to periodically show off my development progress on YouTube, just like back in the old days. But, if I split my time between being a game developer and being a YouTuber, I’d have much less time to work on the rivals. In the most extreme scenario, we might only see 2 rivals released per year. That would mean…four more years of development.
On paper, it only takes 2 months of work to implement a rival. But, that doesn’t account for the time it takes to fix bugs, gather feedback and make improvements, produce YouTube videos, or practice self-care. Theoretically, if I sacrifice all of those things, the game’s release window could be in 2025. But, would that be wise, or would it just be reckless?
So, what’s the plan?
I suppose there are two general directions that things could go in:
- Focus 100% on the rivals. Don’t make any additions/changes/improvements/fixes to the game unrelated to the rivals. Don’t return to producing YouTube videos. Abstain from hobbies, and focus exclusively on work. There would be 3~4 rivals per year. The game would be finished in 2025 at the soonest, 2026 at the latest.
- Alternate back and forth between “New Rival Periods” and “New Content Periods.” Spend a few months developing a rival, and then spend a few months making additions/changes/fixes/improvements/videos. There would be 1~2 rivals per year.
At this point in time, I don’t feel prepared to fully commit to one plan or the other. In fact, it’s possible that the best course of action isn’t either one of the above options, but instead, is something else entirely that will only become apparent with the passage of time.
For now, I’ll just keep working on Amai. After she is released, I’ll determine what my next steps should be.
What was that “Macaroni” thing?
Oh! Yeah! The music video! I’ll explain.
So, there’s this comedy troupe that I’ve been following for a really long time – almost two decades. Last year, they celebrated their 20th anniversary. They marked the occasion by releasing a music video titled “MACARONI” which features a montage of their work presented in chronological order. It was really touching; I’m very emotionally attached to those guys after watching them for 2/3rds of my life, and I was actually moved to tears while watching their video. I think that this was primarily because of the lyrics of the song.
“I wish it could be like this forever” – I can’t imagine a world where these guys are not still around and regularly producing videos. It’s been that way for 20 years. They’re a “constant,” an “anchor” in my life. Just like Yandere Simulator is for some people.
“The end may come someday” – It’s sad to think about the possibility that, one day, these guys might stop doing what they do. What could even cause that to happen? Irreconcilable creative differences? Severe financial problems? Just getting tired of it and wanting to do something else? It would probably be immensely difficult for them to let go of something that has been a part of their lives for so long. Just like how it’ll be difficult for me to eventually let go of Yandere Simulator.
The more I listened to the lyrics of this song, the more I started to relate to them. I started to feel like every line of the song was communicating my own thoughts and feelings towards Yandere Simulator, especially at this current stage of the game’s development. I decided that I, too, wanted to celebrate my big anniversary by creating a music video featuring clips from my YouTube videos in chronological order, set to the song “Macaroni.”
I went to Google to grab the lyrics, only to find that each webpage offered a drastically different translation of song. Even the lyrics in the troupe’s video didn’t stick to a 100% accurate direct translation of the original Japanese words. I wasn’t satisfied with any of the translations that I found online, so I decided to undertake the arduous task of translating the lyrics myself. I even tried to make sure that my English lyrics have the same number of syllables as the original Japanese lyrics, while retaining the meaning of each line. That was tough!
I’m sure that you already watched the video above before reading this blog post, but I’d like to ask you to go back and watch it again. This time, keep in mind that the lyrics at the bottom of the screen represent my thoughts towards Yandere Simulator, its development, and its community. (And, in case you’re having difficulty understanding how some of those lyrics could possibly relate to Yandere Sim, I’ll give you a hint: my overall feelings are positive, so always choose a positive interpretation when you have the choice.)
In Closing
I’m extremely fortunate to be in a position where I get to spend every day doing something that I love. I’m immensely grateful to the people who have stuck with me throughout every setback that the game’s development has been through. I wouldn’t be able to do any of this if it wasn’t for your continued support. From the bottom of my heart: thank you.
I’m proud of what I’ve created, but I’m also extremely eager to bring all of my other game ideas to life, as well, so I’ll be prioritizing “move in a straight path towards the finish line” rather than “build a cool amusement park” from now on. There are a lot of factors that make it difficult to estimate the game’s final release date at this point in time, but it’s gradually starting to become something concrete rather than something nebulous.
April 1st is a day reserved for jokes, so I won’t be releasing anything on that day – everyone would just assume that it’s a prank. The game’s next update will be released on April 2nd, instead. In my next blog post, I’ll describe how much work has been done on Amai so far, and list out what the remaining tasks are. I won’t be announcing a release date for her in my next blog post, but there is something that I feel very comfortable saying at this point in time: I feel absolutely certain that Amai will be released in the first half of this year. (There is simply not enough work remaining for her to take longer than that.)
Just like the song lyrics said…“The sky I look up at seems so far away,” but “One day, this will all end,” so please “Hold my hand as we walk forward together.”
Thank you for following the development of Yandere Simulator!