Reputation and NPC Interactions

Happy New Year! If you haven’t seen the Annual Report blog post, check it out!

Most of the progress I’ve made over the past 2 weeks is summed up in this video:

When you are within a student’s field of vision doing something suspicious, a marker appears onscreen that points towards any students who can see you. When a student spots you, there is a full-screen effect (anime-style speed lines) to let you know that you’ve been noticed. Students will also vocalize their thoughts, currently rendered as subtitles appearing at the bottom of the screen.

Reputation

Here’s a closer look at the reputation bar (artwork not final):

As the video explains, reputation loss does not occur instantly; it occurs after students have gathered to gossip. Gossip occurs at 8:30 AM (when homeroom begins), 1:30 PM (when lunchtime ends), and 6:00 PM (when students go home and post on the Internet).

In the above image, the white marker indicates your current Reputation, and the “-50” in the above image indicates that you’re going to lose 50 Reputation points the next time students gossip. After someone spots you doing something naughty, you can apologize to restore 50% of the lost reputation. A student will only accept one apology per day. You can also compliment a student to gain some more rep. An apology + compliment combo is the best idea after you’ve been spotted doing something unethical.

Your reputation can be in one of three states; Unpopular, Neutral, and Popular. Being Unpopular causes students to keep an eye on you when you enter a room, so it’s harder to get away with stealth kills / theft / trespassing. When you’re Unpopular, students won’t fully accept your apologies, meaning that apologizing only restores 25% of lost reputation. Students also doubt that your compliments are sincere, meaning that compliments will provide you with less positive rep.

Being Popular means that students are willing to overlook one misdeed per day, completely forgive you if you apologize, and be extra flattered by your compliments. It’s easy to coast on a good reputation, but it’s very hard to claw your way back to the top if you’ve lost a lot of rep.

So far, complimenting other students is the only way to improve your reputation. Can you think of other ways the player could improve their reputation? Please leave suggestions in the comments below!

If your reputation drops to -100, the entire school thinks you are absolute scum – including Senpai. Rock-bottom reputation means that Senpai knows what a terrible person you are, and could never love you. This is an instant game over. However…

Game Overs

I’d like Yandere Sim’s “game over” to actually be a playable sequence. For example, if your rep drops to -100, you are given the option to either reload a previous save, or keep playing, with new objectives: Kill Senpai, and then kill yourself. If you can’t have him, nobody should be able to have him.

So, since “game over” in Yandere Sim doesn’t actually mean that the game is really over, what should it be called? Love Over? Catherine already uses the phrase “Love is Over” when the player dies, so Yandere Sim should probably use something more original than that.

How would you like to see game overs handled? Feel free to leave suggestions in the comments!

NPC Interaction

Another new feature is the ability to directly interact with students.  The artwork definitely isn’t meant to be final, but here’s a look at the student interaction menu:

By holding down the proper button near a student, Yandere-chan will call out for that student’s attention. If you don’t choose any dialogue options, and just awkwardly stand there without saying anything for 10 seconds, the student will get annoyed with you and leave. If you do this to a student multiple times in a row, you have demonstrated that you’re a weirdo who likes to waste other peoples’ time, so you’ll lose some reputation, and the student will ignore you for the rest of the day if you try to talk to them.

When interacting with a student, some options may be locked out. For example, you can’t apologize if you’ve done nothing wrong.

I haven’t yet decided what all of the different available interactions should be. The only four interactions that are guaranteed to make it into the final game are:

• Apologize – Restores 50% of the reputation lost from the last unethical behavior witnessed.
• Compliment – Boosts reputation.
• Gossip – Damage the reputation of another student (can lead to that student becoming bullied, staying home from school, or committing suicide).
• Goodbye – Ends conversation.

The other options on that dialogue wheel mockup are:

• Threaten
• Seduce

“Threaten” would cause a student to leave an area and walk elsewhere. It would result in a loss of reputation, but it can prevent that student from becoming a witness to murder, which is much more dire than simply losing a few rep points.

“Seduce” should probably be renamed to “Ask Favor”. It would only be available if your reputation is high, or if you’ve increased your “Seduction” stat enough to get people to do favors for you even without a good reputation. The “Seduction” stat would probably be increased by spending class reading H-manga instead of actually paying attention to the teacher.

As for actual favors, I can only think of 3:

• Leave (same effect as “Threaten” but without rep loss)
• Ignore (same effect as having a good reputation; one minor misdeed is ignored)
• Distract (student distracts a particular student for you)

Because “Leave” and “Ignore” have the same effect as “Threaten” and having a good reputation, “Ask Favor” seems like a pretty pointless option (or “Threaten” could be removed and replaced with another option, so “Leave” becomes the only way to make a student leave an area).

What kind of favors do you think the player should be able to ask NPCs for? What other interactions would you like to be able to perform with students?

Next Update

Now that students can properly react to suspicious behavior, the next feature I’d like to implement is getting students to properly react to murder. As I may have mentioned, I plan to have 5 different student personality types, each of which govern how the student reacts to murder:

• Teacher’s Pet: Student runs to nearest teacher, informs them of the murder.
• Social Butterfly: Student runs to nearest group of students, calls the cops.
• Coward: Student flees the school, calls the cops.
• Brave: Student attempts to restrain you.
• Evil: Student congratulates you on your kill, vows to not speak a word about it.

How do you feel about these personality types? Which would you remove, add, or change?