Edit: Oops! There was a critical bug in the build that I uploaded this morning; the character would freeze upon dipping a mop into a bucket. I’ve uploaded a new build with the problem fixed. Sorry about that!
Hello! Two new features have been added to Yandere Simulator for the purpose of replacing some gameplay mechanics that simply weren’t any fun at all. Hopefully, you’re going to have a much easier time with certain elimination methods now that these new mechanics have been added.
So, what exactly was added? Well…
It’s complicated, but click Continue Reading to read a looooong blog post that explains everything!
Tripwire Traps
Splashing liquid on students has been one of Yandere Simulator’s core gameplay mechanics for a long time. It’s connected to any elimination method that involves:
- Dousing a student in gasoline.
- Forcing a student to deviate from their routine and go someplace with few witnesses.
- Getting a student to leave their smartphone unattended while they change into dry clothing.
In short, if you want to eliminate a character with fire, rejection, or expulsion, you WILL have to splash liquid on them at some point in time, for one of the above reasons.
For a while, there was a “trip while carrying a bucket of water” mechanic that allowed the player to easily splash water on anyone, anywhere, anytime. Unfortunately, this mechanic was deeply flawed. The problems were:
- It was ridiculously overpowered. It was too easy to eliminate a character by just splashing some water on them and then eliminating them with no witnesses as they changed into dry clothing. Making a character deviate from their routine is a valid strategy, but it should require planning and knowledge of a character’s daily schedule, and it shouldn’t be so “free.”
- Giving the player the ability to throw water anywhere at any point in time meant that any event between two characters could be instantly interrupted by a sudden bucket of water, which screwed with a lot of scripted story events.
- Tripping while carrying a bucket of water should carry a small reputation penalty, and maybe cause students to avoid you when you’re carrying a bucket. But, if you spill a bucket containing something much more suspicious, such as blood or gasoline, you should be identified as a murderer. These kind of conditions significantly complicate a feature that is meant to be straightforward, not complex.
With all of that in mind, I removed the “trip while carrying a bucket of water” mechanic and replaced it with something else: bucket traps.
I gave the player the ability to place a bucket of liquid above a doorway, so that when the door is opened, the liquid will fall on anyone who walks through it. However…
I have always HATED this mechanic. It’s always been frustrating to use, for multiple reasons:
- Waiting long periods of time for your target to walk through a door isn’t fun, it’s boring.
- Sometimes, another character will walk through the door before your target, which will trigger the bucket trap and ruin your plans.
- If you try to use distractions (like giggles) to lure your target through a door, you have to do it from the other side of the closed door, which means that you can’t actually see the person that you’re trying to distract.
(…not to mention the fact that a bucket above a doorway is VERY noticeable, and anyone who sees it should avoid the door or take the bucket down.)
For years, I have been trying to come up with an alternative to the bucket-trap mechanic. A method for splashing water on characters that:
- Requires knowledge of your target’s routine, but doesn’t require you to wait extensive amounts of time.
- Doesn’t outwardly look like something that should severely damage your reputation.
- Logically wouldn’t be spotted by the target before they trigger it.
- Doesn’t require your presence in the immediate vicinity.
- Makes logical sense inside of a school environment.
- Can work anywhere in school, not just in doorways.
- Works with every type of liquid, not just water.
- Can also be used for electrocution.
…and I think I’ve finally found it.
A tripwire attached to a water cooler.
Here’s how it works:
- Use a bucket to fill the water cooler with a liquid of your choice (water, blood, gasoline, or brown paint).
- Poke a hole in the water cooler with a sharp object.
- Cover the hole with masking tape from the Art Club.
- Use a thread from the sewing room to set up a tripwire that will pull the masking tape off of the water cooler if anyone walks by it.
This will cause the water cooler to spray water over anyone who walks in front of it!
Cool, right?
“But, YandereDev, YandereDev!” you might say. “That sounds like a lot of steps! How will I keep track of all that?”
Don’t worry! I tried to make it as convenient as possible. When you’re standing next to a water cooler, a checklist will appear on the left side of the screen and tell you what steps to follow to set up a tripwire trap – exactly like the kidnapping checklist that appears when you’re standing next to the instrument case used for kidnapping.
Convenient, right?
“But, YandereDev, YandereDev! How is this any different from the bucket method? Isn’t it functionally the same thing?”
Nope! There is one very BIG difference that solves all of the problems of the bucket method:
Before you create the trap, you can pick up the water cooler and place it anywhere you want!
This way, you can create a trap practically anywhere, instead of being forced to create traps in doorways. This easily solves the problems described above, as long as you are smart about where you place the trap.
But, as you can tell by the title of this blog post, there is one other new feature that was added to the game today: a car battery.
You can now find a car battery inside the same storage room where the water cooler is located. If the car battery is dropped into a puddle of water, it will cause that puddle to become electrified for a brief moment. If any character is standing in that puddle of water when it becomes electrified, they will be electrocuted and die!
As you can tell by the “Toss” icon that appears when holding this new item, it’s possible to throw the car battery a short distance in front of yourself. This is to let the player place the car battery into a puddle without standing in it. (The protagonist will die if they are standing in a puddle when a car battery touches it.)
By the way, there are two more details I’d like to mention – and they can both be combined together in a particularly interesting way…
- When a water cooler sprays out its liquid, it creates three puddles in front of itself.
- If two puddles are touching each other, and a car battery is dropped into one of those puddles, the electricity will “jump” from one puddle to the next, electrifying all puddles that are touching.
Do you see where I’m going with this? Let’s revisit that screenshot at the very top of the blog post:
Notice something? Two sets of three puddles. That’s right; you can re-use the tripwire trap an infinite number of times, and it’ll create a set of three puddles each time.
This means that you could create a chain of 100 puddles, drop a car battery into a puddle on one side of the school, and electrocute a student on the opposite side of the school!
Sounds like something from a Looney Tunes cartoon, doesn’t it? It’s goofy, but if the player wipes out their rivals with this silly method, I’ll consider it to be perfectly valid, because it takes time, effort, and skill to arrange that many puddles in a row.
Hmm, I wonder who will be the first person to upload a YouTube video of an electrocution kill that involves a massive puddle chain…
I hope that you’re going to have fun with these two new features! Of course, these two features aren’t the only things that changed in the latest build. All of this stuff changed, too:
Fixes and Changes
- Certain models are “stored” high in the air above the school. At certain times of day (noon) the sun would cause these models to cast a shadow down to the ground below, resulting in mysterious shadows sliding across the ground. This bug has been fixed.
- From now on, if the player drops a dead body too close to the entrance of the boy’s locker room, the dead body will teleport in front of the locker room, to prevent a bug where the player would permanently lose the ability to move that body.
- Added planters to the school rooftop, aligned with the way that doors open, to prevent situations where characters get stuck on doors when trying to pathfind around the rooftop. Also, rooftop doors can now only open outwards, not inwards.
- Fixed bug that caused female students to walk around school wearing swimsuits if the “Pool’s Closed” sign was placed at the top of the pool stairs while the students were already wearing swimsuits.
- If a character was squashed by a falling bookcase while holding an item in their hands, that item would not drop, meaning that the player could never retrieve it. This bug has been fixed.
- Fixed bug that would prevent the game from moving out of the “Choose excuse to give the counselor” phase of the sent-to-counselor sequence, if the player chose to not select any excuse.
- Fixed bug that caused the police to incorrectly believe that a bloody uniform was present at school if the player washed blood off of a bloody swimsuit by taking a shower.
- Fixed bug that caused Ryoba to adopt Ayano’s idle/walk animations if she was beaten up by delinquents and then rested in the school infirmary.
- Fixed bug that caused the “Raibaru breaks Ayano’s arm” sequence to appear blurry if the player was playing with depth-of-field turned on.
- From now on, any locker that contains a dead body will have an orange outline around it in Yandere Vision, instead of a cyan outline.
- Fixed bug that would cause an item to become tiny if it was placed into a trash bin and then removed from the trash bin.
- Fixed bug that would cause the game to forget that the player had collected the fundoshi panties from school.
- Fixed bug that caused Ryoba to lose her unique face shape when she put on a martial arts gi in the Art Club.
- Fixed bug that prevented the “KA-SHING!” sound effect from playing when Raibaru detected an incoming attack.
- Fixed bug that prevented the player from being able to pick up a can of dropped paint from certain angles.
- Fixed bug that caused Ryoba to lose her unique face shape when she put on an apron in the Art Club.
- Fixed bug that would cause students to perform a “texting” animation on their cameras in 1989.
- Updated the artwork for the bully girls on the official website.
One Last Thing
In addition to everything described above, one other new feature was added to the game today – but I’m not ready to officially announce it yet. It will get its own separate announcement, hopefully in the near future.