May Preview #13 (and two polls!)

The next build is still on track for June 1st. The cut-scene that caused the delay is now 100% finished; all that remains is testing for bugs, fixing whatever bugs I find, adding polish, and seeing how many additional features I can add between now and June 1st.

I promised that I would post previews of cool upcoming content for every day that the build continued to be delayed, so here’s another preview:

I’ve always wanted Yandere Simulator to have an original school uniform, instead of using the cliche “Sailor” school uniform, I want the game to have a school uniform that makes you say “Oh! I recognize that! That’s the uniform from Yandere Simulator!”  The above image is a school uniform that I designed by combining aspects of some of my favorite anime school uniforms. This roughly what I want Yandere Simulator’s “official” school uniform to be. (I might still want to make a few tweaks here and there.)

Of course, if I’m a horrible uniform designer and the majority of people think that my design looks ugly, then I would be a fool to use that design. As with most things, I think it would be a good idea to present multiple options to the fanbase and then let the fans vote on Yandere Simulator’s official uniform.

Let’s try a quick test poll right now! What do you think of the uniform featured above?

No matter what the school’s “official” uniform is, a lot of people associate the stereotypical “Sailor” school uniform with Yandere Simulator, and won’t want to use anything else. So, of course, the traditional “Sailor” uniform will be an option in the final game.

By the way, there is something worth mentioning. Yandere-chan’s current character model is a store-bought asset, and this model lacks many of the features that I would want to see in a video game character model (namely, the capacity for an expressive face) and I think that her body proportions are a bit strange, so I plan to eventually replace Yandere Simulator’s current character models with custom-made character models that have way more versatility.

Updating the game’s character models would require at least a month of “downtime” during which no apparent progress is being made on the game. The reason it would require so much time to update the game’s character model is because there are dozens of scripts that are designed to directly access specific parts of the current character model, and ripping out the game’s current character model would break all of those scripts. Also, there’s no guarantee that all of the game’s current animations would be compatible with the “final” character model, which means there is the possibility that the “final” character model can’t even be implemented unless I have a full set of (over 100) animations made specifically for the new character model.

I don’t think that this is the correct time to have a month of “downtime” where no apparent progress is being made on the game. So, the “Aoi” character model will remain in use until after the game’s crowdfunding campaign, which will most likely take place in late 2016 or early 2017.

Because Yandere-chan’s current appearance is very closely associated with Yandere Simulator,  I believe that the protagonist’s final character model should be similar in nature to the current character model. The protagonist’s final character model should have a hairstyle that is very similar to the hairstyle she currently uses. It might look like this, for example:

Similar enough to be an original asset, but close enough to the original that you still recognize the character.

With that said, let me poll you on two things:

How do you feel about the use of store-bought assets in games?

And

How would you feel if Yandere-chan’s character model and hair model were replaced with similar-looking models?

By the way, the hair models and clothing models in this blog post were modeled by Druelbozo. Fun fact: I started working with Druelbozo exactly 365 days ago, on May 27th, 2015!