Today is the 11th anniversary of Yandere Simulator’s development; it was 11 years ago, on March 31st of 2014, that the game’s development began.
Every year, I write an “anniversary blog post” to commemorate the game’s birthday. If you’re interested to hear what I have to say this time around, scroll down past this artwork by RaineBeau and KattyStarlitt!
What else could I possibly say?
After a decade of writing anniversary blog posts, it’s gotten pretty hard think of something to say that I haven’t already said before.
Out of all the anniversary blog posts I’ve ever written, the most important one was definitely the 9th one. I put a tremendous amount of time and work into that post, and, even after all this time, I still feel that it communicates about 95% of everything I want to say about the game and its development. So…aside from that, what else is there to say?
I’ve already explained how Yandere Simulator gradually transformed into the type of game that is regularly updated with new content.
I’ve already explained that I believe a game’s value comes from whether or not it’s fun, not whether or not it’s finished.
I’ve already explained that I don’t see any reason to be ashamed of Yandere Simulator’s lengthy development time.
So…if I’ve already said everything I want to say about the game’s development…and there’s just nothing left to say…
…then…well…
…maybe I could I tell you about a dream I had?
Music Game
A few days ago, I had a dream that I was inside of a video game. In this game, I was walking to the top of a hill. As I climbed the hill, I encountered musicians who blocked my way.
Each musician was some kind of anthropomorphic animal-person who was hiding their face. Sometimes they were wearing something as simple as a bag over their head, but other times, they were wearing a spooky mask.
In order to get past a musician, I had to fight them. These fights took place in an empty black void with the musicians being represented by black-and-white sprites, kinda like in Undertale.
The musician would play a song, and each note they played on their instrument transformed into a ball of energy that I had to avoid. By surviving until the end of the song, I “defeated” the musician.
After defeating a musician, their mask would fall off, revealing a cute animal face underneath.
I could tell that there was supposed to be something “symbolic” about the removal of the mask. It seemed like the objective of the game was to convince the musicians to think, “You don’t have to hide your true self from the world! People will love you just the way you are!” or something along those lines.
When I woke up, I felt overwhelmed by a powerful desire to prototype the game that I had seen in my dream, and make it real. I opened up Unity and wrote a script that reads a MIDI file and spawns energy balls when it detects that an instrument is playing a note. It kinda sorta worked, but it wasn’t fun to play; if a lot of instruments were all playing at once, the result was a massive wall of energy balls, and you couldn’t even tell that they were supposed to be synchronized to the music. I decided to fix this problem by having multiple enemies onscreen, each one meant to represent a different instrument inside of the MIDI file. (And, of course, because MIDI files sound like garbage, I muted the MIDI and played a non-MIDI version of the song over it.)
Here’s how it turned out:
It’s pretty basic, but you can kinda sorta get the idea of what this would be like if it were a full game, right?
Imagine if you could shoot energy balls at these musicians, and when you defeat one, their instrument disappears from the background music. The objective would be to defeat all of the musicians in the band before the song ends, while avoiding damage. And when you defeat an entire band, they take their masks off and come to a realization that leads to personal growth. And then you move on to the next band, etc.
“Okay, that’s nice, but what does this have to do with Yandere Simulator?”
I’ll explain.
When you think “YandereDev,” you might think of anime girls, blood, knives, panties, a school setting, etc. But, those are not necessarily the only things I want to develop games about. A black-and-white pixel art game about battling anthropomorphic masked musicians is just about the furthest possible thing from Yandere Simulator, and yet, I’d be totally willing to develop it…if Yandere Sim didn’t eat up 100% of my time.
I think I have more to offer the world than just a game about stabbing anime girls in a school. I have a dozen different game ideas that I’d love to develop, and none of them are anything like Yandere Simulator. A lot of my ideas are something that you might see in a game jam – short, simple, weird, experimental games that are small in scope and developed in less than a month. That’s the type of game I’d prefer to be making.
If I was “unshackled” from Yandere Simulator, I would probably be releasing a new game every month. You’d visit my blog every 30 days to see the latest “YandereDev game experiment,” and it could be anything, even a game about helping a furry guitarist realize that it’s safe to remove the paper bag he wears on his head to hide his insecurities. I would love to be a developer who releases 12 games a year, and release several hundred games before my death.
…but instead, my life is Yandere Simulator.
24 hours a day.
7 days a week.
I’m not sure when I’ll get around to those other game ideas.
Could be years from now.
It’s kind of a bummer.
…
…
…
…well, anyway, if you’re curious to know how the “Music Dream” prototype feels, you can download it here:
https://www.mediafire.com/file/vbvns6tvmwf5az1/Music+Dream.zip/file
Make sure to read the README.txt file.
The response to the Kataba Video
Hey, remember that short video I made about Kataba Aishi?
There’s something I’ve just gotta get off my chest.
In this video, I announced that I do not intend to make a “1960s Mode,” and said that I will not create a gameplay mode featuring Kataba, because her gameplay would be so different that it would have to be a separate game altogether.
Would you like to know what the majority of the comments on the video were?
“I can’t believe he’s planning to add another new mode!”
“I can’t believe he’s already planning his next game!”
…but I…
…but you…
…but that’s not what I said. In fact, that’s the opposite of what I said!
It’s like they watched the first 2 seconds of the video, decided what kind of nasty comment they wanted to write, posted it, and then left.
I’m gonna be 100% honest with you; it’s demotivating. I am discouraged from creating things or sharing things or communicating things, because I know that no matter what I do, there will always be people who will ignore whatever I actually did, and then get mad at me for something that I only did inside of their imagination. They will reject reality, and substitute it with a fiction that they invented in their minds.
It’s been going on for years. Any time I ever make any type of statement about anything ever, my statement is misinterpreted in the most egregious manner possible. If I say, “The sky is blue,” immediately there are 10 people in the comment section who are outraged that I’ve declared the sky to be green, even though that’s not what I said at all.
Well, I don’t want this blog post to be one giant misery parade, and I’m sure that you’d rather hear me talk about the actual game, so let’s do that instead.
Development Plans
The plan is:
- Make improvements to Custom Mode
- Make improvements to Amai’s week
- Add voice acting and unique animations to Amai’s week
- Return to making YouTube videos
- Begin work on Kizana
Ideally, Kizana would be released sometime late this year, perhaps around December.
With that said…
Recent Progress
Recently, I have felt very unsatisfied with my rate of progress. Back in January, there was a stretch of time where I got a ton of work done super fast, and I felt really optimistic about the future. But, during February and March, I lost that momentum, and slowed down to a glacial pace. All of a sudden, it feels like I’m trying to walk while my legs are submerged in molasses; every step forward takes tremendous effort. Why? What happened? What changed?
I’ve got some theories, but they’re all really depressing to talk about, and I don’t want to drag down the mood of the blog post, so I’ll spare you for now. I just want you to know that, if you’re thinking, “Wow, that YandereDev guy sure has slowed down lately…” I’m also thinking the same thing, and I’m going to try to turn that around as soon as possible.
In Closing
In previous blog posts, I’ve already said almost everything I could possibly say about the game’s development, so this year, I kinda just rambled about a bunch of unrelated topics. It probably wasn’t the most cheery blog post in the world, but I hope that, at the least, it was insightful.
Thank you for following the development of Yandere Simulator!
