Hello! The latest update is now available. It’s a “miscellaneous improvements and fixes” build.
The list of changes/fixes might look shorter than usual, because much of my time over the past 2 weeks was spent working on a new addition to the game that isn’t finished yet. What is it? Something very important that the game absolutely needs before the crowdfunding campaign is launched. Why? I’ll explain.
Over the years, a lot of crowdfunding campaigns have resulted in very disappointing products, leading to a general distrust of anyone who launches a crowdfunding campaign. Most of those campaigns all had one thing in common: they pitched an idea with little more than concept art. Anyone can pitch a product, but not everyone can deliver a product. Even as far back as 2014, I knew that if I said, “Hey guys, I’m making a game, donate to my Kickstarter!” very few people would be willing to trust me with their money, unless I was able to present them with tangible evidence that, yes, the game will exist, and yes, it will be fun. To me, the way to do that was obvious: To develop a demo.
When I launch the crowdfunding campaign, I want to say, “I need money to finish this game that is 90% complete and only needs funding for voices/animations,” rather than, “I have nothing but an idea. Please fund the entire thing.” Instead of saying, “I promise I’m going to make a fun game! Trust me! Just believe me, okay?” I want to say, “Don’t take my word for it. Go download the demo. It has many hours of content in it, so you can already see for yourself what the final game is going to be like.”
In other words, when I launch the crowdfunding campaign, I will be directing people toward the demo and stating that it’s an accurate representation of what the final game will be like. This means that, the day the campaign is launched, a huge number of people will play Yandere Simulator for the first time. So, with that in mind, I need to start making changes to the demo to make sure that anyone playing the game for the first time will be able to play the game comfortably without being overwhelmed or confused.
How do you teach a new player the mechanics of a video game? A tutorial! That’s what I’ve been working on for the past 2 weeks; a tutorial for 202X Mode that will teach new players everything they’ll need to know in order to get comfortable with the game.
I’m happy to say that it’s coming along smoothly, but it’s taking a long time. A lot of the features and improvements I’ve added to the game over the past year only took a few days to add, but a full tutorial will take a lot more work. It reminds me of an earlier phase in the game’s development, when I started to work on tasks that took more than 2 weeks of time and work to complete, so I had to stop focusing on trying to deliver exciting new updates on a two-week schedule.
Tutorials are usually the least-exciting and least-glamorous thing in a video game, so I’m sorry if you’re disappointed to hear that I’m currently spending a large amount of my time on a feature that isn’t thrilling to hear about. However, it’s still very necessary. If I launch the crowdfunding campaign, hundreds of thousands of people download the demo to play it, and they’re all completely confused and lost, that could kill the campaign’s chances of succeeding. So, a tutorial is mandatory, whether or not it’s exciting to hear about.
I’m not ready to publicly share my progress on the tutorial. However, I’ll post previews of the tutorial on Patreon in the near future. I feel guilty for rarely posting to Patreon, and I want to give my patrons some more content.
Okay! Now that you’re up to speed, it’s time to move on and get to the rest of the blog post. To see a list of everything that was fixed, changed, or improved over the past two weeks, scroll down past this gorgeous artwork of Ayano dressed as Bayonetta, drawn by OMGayano!
Yandere Simulator Development Blog 
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