The Big June Update - Yandere Simulator

EDIT: One feature – the “Chat Interaction” feature – is not working in the current build. Sorry about that! Please wait until the next build to try out that feature.

I don’t usually give updates “names”, but I’m actually pretty excited about this update, because it contains numerous significant changes to the game! That’s why I’m calling the latest build The Big June Update!

This is going to be an especially long blog post! How long, exactly? Over 3,000 words long! That’s how much new content I have to show off!

To begin reading this behemoth of a blog post, scroll down this absolutely gorgeous artwork of Sonoko Sakanoue drawn by Yokichi Sakamoto!

Crafting Items With Chemistry

For years, the Chemistry stat only had one purpose: upgrading it to to “Rank 1” would allow the player to obtain a poisonous substance from the school’s Science Lab. However, there was no reward for Rank 2, 3, 4, or 5. It was an incomplete, unfinished feature with little purpose. A dangling loose end that bothered me every time I was reminded of it.

So. I decided to spend a couple of days giving meaningful functionality to this long-neglected feature. The result? It is now possible for the player to synthesize various substances in the school’s Science Lab by upgrading the Chemistry stat!

The list of substances you are able to create increases as you level up:

Rank 1: Emetic Poison
Rank 2: Headache Poison
Rank 3: Sedative Poison
Rank 4: Lethal Poison
Rank 5: Smoke Bomb

(Yes, you read that correctly – the “smoke bomb”, previously only accessible in the Alphabet Killer Challenge, is now something that you can acquire and use in regular gameplay!)

The majority of the substances that are used for chemistry are found in the school’s Science Lab, but three of them are found elsewhere, grouped together in one room. I think you should be able to find them easily, though!

There are still other school subjects / stats in the game that currently don’t do anything past Rank 1, and in the near future, I’ll be giving functionality to those, as well.

Smoke Bomb

There is now a new item for sale in Info-chan’s Drops Menu – a smoke bomb. It renders you invisible for 5 seconds, allowing you to get away with anything – theft, murder, etc – as long as you’re inside of the smoud cloud.

I wouldn’t want the player to become over-reliant on this new item, so I’ve made it extremely expensive – it costs 100 Info Points. In fact, to balance it even further, I may decide that the player only gets to purchase ONE smoke bomb over the course of the entire game, or something along those lines.

Kidnapping More Students

For years, it was only possible to keep 1 student prisoner in your basement. However, as of now, it is possible to keep a maximum of 10 prisoners in your basement!

Long-time fans of the game may remember what I said about the “Basement Tapes” many years ago – every time the Ayano kidnaps a student and holds her prisoner in the basement, Ayano would have to move a piece of furniture in the basement to make room for the prisoner, which would reveal a cassette tape under that furniture. The reason why I’ve finally made it possible to kidnap up to 10 prisoners is to prepare the game for the addition of more basement tapes in the future!

By the way – after making it possible to hold multiple girls in the basement, it became necessary to change the way that the “sell kidnapped girls to the Yakuza” feature worked. The changes are:

The Yakuza will no longer purchase any kidnapped girl from you. He will now ONLY purchase the 10 girls that are listed on his Kidnapping page. The other girls’ families are not rich enough to bother with.
You can now sell multiple girls to the Yakuza simultaneously.

Getting Kicked Out Of Clubs

When I first gave the player the ability to join clubs, I said that if the player didn’t participate in club activities at least once a week, they would be kicked out of the club. This wasn’t relevant when there was only one playable week in the game, but with the addition of 1980s Mode, it suddenly became a very apparent “missing feature.”

Well, that feature has finally been added to the game! From now on, you must participate in club activities at least once per week if you don’t want to be kicked out of the club you’ve joined.

Permanent Item Destruction

Certain items at school are supposed to be “one of a kind” – for example, the katana in the headmaster’s office. That item has “lore” behind it; it’s a custom-made katana which Saisho gave to Kocho as a gift in the early months of 1989. While there are many katanas in the world, that specific katana is the only one of its kind, and it cannot be replaced. So…it’s kinda weird that if the player steals it and incinerates it, it magically re-appears at school the next day.

To make the game a bit more realistic, one-of-a-kind items will now permanently disappear from school if they are destroyed by the player. These are the specific items that will follow this logic:

The katana in the Headmaster’s room
The ritual dagger in the Occult Clubroom
The prop weapons in the Drama Clubroom
The sharp electric guitar in the Light Music Club
The traditional Japanese axe behind the shed in the Gardening Club

When deciding what should be done about other items being destroyed, things get a bit more tricky. For example, what if the player steals a syringe from the school infirmary and destroys it? A well-funded school like Akademi would be able to replace any missing supplies within 24 hours. So, even if the player destroys a syringe on Monday, a new syringe will still be waiting for them on Tuesday.

But, what about club property, though? What if the player destroys the box cutter in the Art Club, for example? I’ve decided that any club property that is destroyed will be gone for the rest of the week, but will be replaced on Monday of the next week. There’s an in-game lore reason for this: every club’s budget “refreshes” on Friday, allowing the club leaders to order new supplies over the weekend to replace anything that has gone missing.

So, if you steal some rat poison from the gardening shed, you won’t find any more poison in that shed for the rest of the week…but, starting on Monday of the following week, a new bottle of rat poison will appear in the shed.

Oh, and by the way: the lethal poison in the Science Lab is a one-of-a-kind item that the school has no reason to replace once it’s missing. So, once you use it up, it’ll be gone for the rest of your playthrough.

~~Chat Interaction Up And Running~~

The “Chat Interaction” feature described in my previous blog post should be working now! I’m a little nervous that there might still be some bugs with it, so please consider it to be an experimental work-in-progress for now. But, I’d like to see at least one person give it a try so I can see if it works properly!

Okay! With all of that out of the way, it’s time to get around to listing all of the…

Changes and Improvements

It is now possible to bathe in an emergency shower while wearing a swimsuit, without the need for a school uniform. (More specifically, the player no longer has the ability to use an emergency shower to change into a school uniform if they are wearing a swimsuit when they use the shower.)
The button to push a student off the school rooftop is no longer the same button as the button to talk to them. This should prevent the player from accidentally pushing a student to their death when they are merely trying to talk to that student.
Updated the behavior of the Journalist to make it more difficult for the player to kill their rival before she has passed through the school gate. (It should be impossible now. But if you can still pull it off, e-mail me a video of it.)
Two of Yandere-chan’s hair models were duplicates of each other, so they have been replaced with new hairstyles, and the “YandereHair” folder in the StreamingAssets folder has been updated with screenshots of all 208 of her hairstyles.
Re-wrote the text for the “Expel from school” elimination method described in the 1980s Mode “Ideas” menu, since it had a reference to a feature that was never actually added to the game.
Students now say a more appropriate line when reacting to the player holding a bloody weapon (instead of reacting to the weapon itself, they react to the fact that there is blood on it.)
Moeko (the 2nd rival of 1980s Mode) will now leave the area if she sees you near the barrel where she lights a fire, because she doesn’t want anyone to witness her secret hobby.
Added a “Distractions” tutorial to the tutorial menu. Hopefully, it will help new players. (With that said, a playable tutorial would probably be much more helpful…)
The delinquents will no longer make snide remarks towards you when you’re in their vicinity if you have befriended at least one of them.
It is now possible to wash a bloody weapon at a water basin (the large sinks found in bathrooms) in addition to drinking fountains.
Updated the icon for “Chat Interaction” in the Pause Screen menu (for both 202X Mode and 1980s Mode).
Updated the appearance of the 1989 headmaster in the Memorial scene and End-of-Day sequence.
Updated the texture for the floor and walls of the Newspaper Club. It looks much better now!
There is now an option in the Settings menu to turn off Subtitles completely.
Updated a few of the male students’ hair textures.

Bug Fixes

Fixed bug that caused an electrocuted character to completely ignore the fact that they were supposed to be dying of electrocution if they were electrocuted while in the middle of investigating a suspicious object on the ground or reacting to the player’s bizarre behavior.
Fixed bug that caused student council members to have the wrong colored outline after breaking up a fight between the protagonist and a delinquent. (Witnesses of bad behavior are supposed to get yellow outlines. The orange outline is reserved for murder witnesses.)
Fixed bug that prevented gardening club students from returning to their routine properly after being distracted. (This bug was documented in a video by a Japanese fan of the game who used surprisingly creative visuals to explain the bug. /watch?v=V3m2Ex9By6s )
Fixed bug that prevented the game from acknowledging that the player was carrying a weapon capable of creating a tripwire trap if the weapon was in the player’s 2nd inventory slot instead of the 1st slot.
Fixed bug that prevented the game from putting the protagonist into the correct clothing upon reloading a save, if the protagonist was wearing anything other than a school uniform at the time of saving.
Fixed bug that would appear a “pick up” button prompt to appear over the blue training baton used for Martial Arts Club sparring matches, even though the player is not allowed to pick it up.
Fixed bug that caused clothing that had been washed by a washing machine to have an orange outline (“murder evidence”) instead of a cyan outline (“useful object”) after it had been washed.
Fixed bug that prevented the game from correctly acknowledging what kind of game over the player had obtained if they killed over 50% of the school population before getting a game over.
Fixed bug that would cause a panty texture to appear on the face of any female student who was wearing a lab coat when the player enabled/disabled outlines using the Settings Menu.
Fixed bug in the Thanks For Playing screen that prevented the “X Button” from changing to “F Key” if the player was playing the game with a keyboard instead of an Xbox controller.
Fixed bug that prevented delinquents from performing their fighting animations if the player began a fighter with them after alarming them by holding a weapon in their vicinity.
Fixed bug that would cause mind-broken slaves to dutifully carry garbage bags to the school incinerator during Cleaning Time, even though they were supposed to be mind-broken.
Fixed bug that made a cyan outline appear around the delinquent’s radio in Yandere Vision (the cyan outline is only meant to appear around items that the player can used).
Fixed bug that caused clothing that had been washed by a washing machine to obtain a bloody texture if the player activated Yandere Vision after it had been washed.
Fixed bug that caused the “Mysterious Keys” and Bad Romance Easter Egg items to be active even if the player had not activated debug commands or easter eggs.
Fixed bug that would cause the player to fail any Mission Mode mission that required the player to perform an electrocution and also only kill one target.
Fixed bug that would cause gloves to teleport to the drama clubroom after removing them in the shower building, but only upon reloading a saved game.
Fixed bug that prevented the game from accurately remembering the position of the radio’s remote control and the power strip upon reloading a save.
Fixed bug that caused characters to become alarmed by suspicious objects twice in a row upon noticing them, instead of only becoming alarmed once.
Fixed bug that prevented the game from accurately knowing which weapons were contained within which bags / trash cans upon loading a saved game.
Fixed bug that caused the player to get a game over for stealing a student’s ring, even if the student was dead and couldn’t report the theft.
Fixed bug that made the Headmaster’s tapes re-appear in his trash can every day, even after the player had already collected all of them.
Fixed bug that would cause weapons to float in midair after being taken from the player and placed in the weapon box in the faculty room.
Fixed bug that would cause the Journalist to believe that witnessing a mind-broken slave walk by was equivalent to witnessing murder.
Fixed bug that would allow the player to complete Sho’s “Defeat me in a sparring match” Task by losing to him in a sparring match.
Fixed bug that allowed Ayano to perform the “successful Mission Mode mission” animation while carrying a corpse in her arms.
Fixed bug that caused the flames of Bunsen burners to animate even when time was frozen (such as when taking a photograph).
Fixed bug that caused the female student council members’ character models to turn pure white upon loading a save file.
Fixed bug that would cause the game to sometimes freeze when using the “pass time using book in library” feature.
Fixed bug that would cause the game to mute itself during Osana’s Friday morning conversation with Musume.
Fixed bug that caused the game to display the incorrect name for the character that Kyuji has a crush on.
Fixed bug that prevented blood stains from appearing on scissors after they were used as murder weapons.
Fixed bug that would allow the player to reduce the game’s volume to a number with a negative value.
Fixed bug that caused Raibaru’s character model to turn pure white upon loading a save file.
Fixed bug that caused the photographer’s camera to use the wrong size/position/texture.
Fixed bug that was preventing the “Blood” feature in Pose Mode from functioning.

What’s Coming Up Next In The Near Future?

While reading about the new features that were added to the game in this update, you might notice a pattern: most of the latest additions are things that were first announced years ago, but were ignored until now. Crafting poisons using the Chemistry stat, the ability to hold multiple prisoners in your basement, getting kicked out of clubs for not participating in club activities, permanently losing access to weapons after destroying them – these are all things that I first described a very long time ago, but simply never put into the game…until now.

Why am I focusing on putting these types of things into the game? It’s because I want the game to be “feature complete” before I implement Ayano’s rivals. Once the long-awaited rivals are finally put into the game, I want you to have a “complete” experience, not a half-finished experience where it feels like a bunch of features are still missing and a bunch of promises haven’t been kept.

Working on these features has been extremely gratifying! It feels like the game is finally taking the “shape” that it was always meant to take. These features are among the last remaining pieces of work that need to be done before we can move on to the phase of the game’s development that gatekeeps the completion of the game: the crowdfunding phase. That’s why it’s so exciting and rewarding for me to be working on these features!

In the weeks to come, you will see more of these “Promised by YandereDev years ago” features get put into the game. Once I’m done with all of them, you will see me start to upload YouTube videos (to my main channel) again. And when that happens, you’ll know that the crowdfunding phase isn’t far off.

Hopefully, it’s an exciting time to be a Yandere Simulator fan! And that makes me think that now is an appropriate time to say: Thank you for following the development of Yandere Simulator!