November 15th Progress Report (Patreon)

Over the past 2 weeks, I've been alternating back and forth between two objectives. The first objective is the implementation of Custom Mode, and the other objective is something else that might not be at the top of your wishlist, but has been on my mind for a long time.

Alternate Timeline for 1980s Mode

It is now possible to access an "alternate timeline" for 1980s Mode! In this timeline, the Journalist never investigates Akademi, Ryoba never goes to court, and it's possible for Ryoba to confess to Jokichi underneath the cherry tree!

Instead of outright telling you how to access this new timeline, I'll let you experience the thrill of discovering it for yourself. However, I'll give you a couple of hints:

• If Ayano snoops through her mother's belongings in 202X, she can find something very valuable from many years ago.
• Previously, during the 1980s Mode tutorial sequence, Ryoba was denied access to any room that wasn't directly relevant to the current stage of the tutorial. However, one of those rooms is now accessible.

It might not seem like much, but those two tidbits of information are actually massive clues. I don't think you'll have too much difficulty accessing the new timeline.

Aside from the Journalist not being present and the courtroom sequence being omitted, there are also a few other things that are different in this alternate timeline:

• The "Pre-Rival Cutscenes" have different dialogue.
• There are nine rivals instead of ten. Sonoko is skipped entirely.
• The student council does not get alarmed when you run in their vicinity, or shove you when you walk close to them.
• Making certain choices can "doom" the timeline to become a "dead end" where a happy ending is no longer possible. If this occurs, your save file will be deleted. It might sound harsh, but that's the cost of messing with the time-space continuum. Don't worry; the criteria for save file deletion will be made extremely clear to the player.

This alternate timeline was made possible thanks to the mercy of a certain character who was introduced many years ago, but hasn't been utilized very much in recent years. Oh, and she has a lot to say - over 70 voice lines in total! I hope you'll have a lot of fun with this new timeline!

Senpai Gift Utility

For a long time, it has been possible to leave gifts on Senpai's desk. In the past, this feature was purely cosmetic, but now there is more actual utility attached to the feature.

• It is now possible to build a relationship with Senpai as his "anonymous secret admirer." Leaving notes and gifts on his desk will slowly develop this relationship, causing Senpai to become more and more enamored with his mysterious benefactor.
• After Senpai finds a note or gift on his desk, information will appear onscreen to tell the player what Senpai found and how he feels about it.
• Increasing your Literature stat and reading romance manga will increase the effectiveness of the notes that you leave for Senpai.
• The Gift Shop (which is where you buy gifts for Senpai) will now restock gifts every day. There is no limit to how many gifts you can carry at any one time.
• Leaving a gift box on Senpai's desk will automatically give him all of the gifts that you've purchased. You could theoretically collect 5 gifts every day for 20 days and then give him 100 gifts all on one day if you wanted.

This feature is currently only meaningful in the "1980s Mode Alternate Timeline," but it will become meaningful in 202X Mode in the future.

Confession Scene

While implementing the "Ryoba confesses to Jokichi" scene, I realized that the cutscene I was creating could be used for the end of 202X Mode and Custom Mode, as well. I have given the Confession Scene a lot of utility; it tracks how rivals were eliminated, how Senpai feels about their eliminations, how Senpai feels about his "anonymous secret admirer," what he knows about the player's reputation at school, and any mental/emotional trauma he has experienced, such as discovering corpses at school. The game will use all of these factors to decide whether or not Senpai accepts the player's love confession. It's similar to how the game decides whether or not Ryoba gets a guilty verdict in her murder trial.

Custom Mode Progress

Custom Mode is about customizing every aspect of the students at school - their appearances, their behaviors, their routines, their names, their profiles, etc. Most of the work I did on Custom Mode over the past 2 weeks was related to giving the player complete control over student appearances. Now that all of the superficial and aesthetic stuff has been taken care of, the next step is giving the player control over how students behave...but that's where I've hit a bit of a snag.

I'm finding it very difficult to design a user-friendly and intuitive interface for Custom Mode. Everything I try feels very clunky. Switching between editing a student's appearance, traits, and routine...it's not easy to determine what the graphic interface for this should look like and feel like. Also, a core aspect of the game is the fact that student routines are supposed to change from week to week to make it more difficult to eliminate the latest rival. The interface gets even trickier to design when you consider the fact that the player may want to give every student 10 different routines, one for each week. It makes me wonder if any player will actually invest that much time and effort into designing 10 weeks of gameplay. Will most players just go with the default routines, or maybe just hit the "Random" button instead of fine-tuning a student's every move?

And then, there's the case of figuring out how to let the player design events...

Making two characters stand in a specific spot and say specific lines of dialogue from a text file on the player's computer? Extremely easy.

Allowing the player to dictate what animations the characters should perform during the event? Well, that would be tricky. Some animations loop, some animations are not designed to loop. What if the player types out the name of an animation that a character does not possess? There needs to be some code for detecting that the animation name is unsupported, and to skip that animation. Is there going to be an interface for previewing all animations? Etc.

Allowing the player to sabotage an event? Now we reach extreme levels of complexity. Will there be a system for instructing the game to spawn a specific 3D object in a specific location, with a button prompt that allows the player to perform a specific animation, but only if specific criteria has been met, like possessing a specific object? What will the interface look like for this? How will the player test it and make sure it works properly?

Making the game display dialogue written by the player would be trivially easy, but anything beyond that point makes the feature exponentially more difficult to implement. There's a strong possibility that sabotaging events simply won't be an aspect of Custom Mode, unless players would be content with selecting from a list of pre-made events that have already been fully scripted, and only need dialogue.

If I keep running into serious "Uh, how am I supposed to create an interface for this?" problems while developing Custom Mode, I may have to reduce the scope of it somewhat. Currently I'm kind of dreading working on it instead of feeling enthusiastic about it, which is not a good sign. If it gets exhausting to work on, I'll probably shift my focus to another one of the pre-crowdfunding checklist tasks, such as the superior socialization system that I've wanted to implement for a long time. At least I have a clear idea of what that interface is meant to look like.

In Closing

Aside from the progress report above, I don't have much else to say at this point in time. I don't have anything to announce regarding voice acting, the crowdfunding campaign, the next time I'll actually release a new build, etc. I'm still committed to working on the game, and I'm proud of what I've accomplished over the past 2 weeks, but there are a lot of topics that I simply can't comment on right now. I hope this isn't too disappointing to you.

Thank you very much for your patience during this period of the game's development, and thank you very much for supporting the development of Yandere Simulator.