Amai Progress Report (Patreon)

Hello! I'd like to give you a brief progress report on how my work on Amai is coming along.

Befriend/Betray Stealth Mission Environment

I'm really excited about Amai's Befriend/Betray elimination! So, over the last two weeks, that's what I've been focusing on the most. To be more specific: recently, I've been spending a lot of time building the environment for her Befriend/Betray stealth mission using some really phenomenal 3D models that some exceptionally talented volunteers have provided me with.

At this point in time, that environment is around 80% complete. I'm still waiting on a few art assets to be delivered, but even without those assets, there is still a lot of work I can get done (such as placing NPCs around the map to serve as obstacles for the player to avoid / victims for the player to pickpocket).

At the top of this post, you can see a video preview of the stealth environment! Only a quick peek, though; I want you to be impressed and surprised when you see the entire environment fully revealed in all of its glory, so I'm keeping most of it a secret for now. 

Some aspects of this environment are still placeholders; in the above video, you'll notice that there are some places where one building model has been duplicated many times in a row. I think that looks absolutely awful, so I plan to change that before Amai is released. Still, though, I hope you enjoy watching that video preview, as short as it may be!

Amai Progress Trello

I worked on the stealth mission a lot because I'm super hyped for it, but I've also been working on various other tasks that are related to getting Amai into the game. I actually created a Trello page to keep track of the tasks that have been completed so far:

https://trello.com/b/0p8ubDwM/amai-checklist 

Please keep in mind that this Trello page is NOT a list of all work that needs to be done to implement Amai. I only created it to help myself keep track of what tasks I have completed, what tasks I am currently working on, and what tasks I am planning to tackle in the near future. It absolutely shouldn't be interpreted as a full list of all Amai-related tasks.

Updating Systems to Support Future Rivals

Fortunately, a lot of the work that I've been doing to implement Amai is work that I won't have to repeat when I implement future rivals! I'll give you an example:

Back when Osana was the game's only rival, a lot of the game's systems were designed to display text about Osana specifically. In other words, many of the game's systems did not check the current week and then grab text related to the current rival. Everything was hard-coded to be about Osana, specifically.

Over the past couple of weeks, one of the things I've been working on has been to update a lot of these old systems to make way for new rivals in 202X Mode. For example:

• When leaving a note in a rival's locker, the "what is this note about?" window should display different "dark secret" text depending on who the current rival is.
• When leaving Ayano's home, the "where would you like to go?" window should display different "stealth mission destination" text depending on who the current rival is.
• When using the "Offer Help" feature to ask a rival about their Befriend/Betray stealth mission, the dialogue that appears should depend on who the current rival is.
• When the player texts Info-chan and asks her for a rival's dark secret, the text that appears should depend on who the current rival is.

Now those systems are displaying text based on the current rival, rather than being hard-coded to display text about Osana specifically. This was a major step towards making the game support more rivals being added to 202X Mode, and now it's behind us!

Modular Rival Event Script

I will confess to you one of my greatest sins: For Osana's week, each one of her events used a different script. All of these scripts were mostly the same, with very few differences. That's a very bad practice - it's called "code duplication," and it's highly frowned upon, because it's extremely inefficient. I cringe when I think about it!

To facilitate a smoother implementation of Amai and subsequent rivals, I've begun creating a new rival event system that is designed to be as "modular" as possible so that it will be possible to create a wide variety of different rival events using just one script. The system is being designed so that all of the information required to build a rival event - where it will take place, what lines of dialogue will be spoken, etc - will be entered into text fields inside the Unity Editor. This way, adding new events to the game should be as easy as filling out some data fields, rather than manually coding every event as a separate script.

I'm really proud of the work I've done so far on this new rival event system, and I would love to make a video showing it off and demonstrating how easy it is to use it to create new rival events! However, I think that I shouldn't reveal it until it's 100% finished. Maybe you'll get to see it two weeks from now, during the March 1st Amai progress report!

In Closing

I'm really hyped to be working on Amai at long last! There are a lot of different reasons why I'm very happy to be working on her, but in the interest of time, I'll limit myself to sharing just one with you:

I am often asked, "How long will it take to finish Ayano's rivals?" I always feel uncomfortable trying to answer this question, because I feel like it won't be possible for me to provide an accurate estimate until after I've implemented at least one post-Osana rival. Once Amai is 100% finished, I'll finally have the knowledge and experience necessary to make a meaningful estimate about how much time it will take to implement the rest of the rivals! Just another reason why I'm really happy to be working on Amai!

I'll continue to keep you updated with twice-a-month progress reports!

As always, thank you very much for supporting the development of Yandere Simulator!