In my previous two videos, I discussed some problems that I’ve been facing – and a lot of people asked, “Shouldn’t your publisher, tinyBuild, be helping you with that sort of thing?”
Well, now’s probably the right time to tell you that tinyBuild and I stopped working together in December of last year. There’s a reason why I was extremely reluctant to say anything about it for a very long time: ending a partnership is negative news, and I was terrified of accidentally violating the part of the contract that forbids speaking negatively about the other parties of the contract. So, to stay on the safe side, I decided to simply not acknowledge it at all. However, staying completely silent about tinyBuild has only caused confusion; I think it’s important that I talk about it openly, so that people don’t fill in the blanks with their imagination.
In short, tinyBuild and I had a lot of experiences which taught us that we weren’t a good fit for one another. The main reasons why I wanted to be with a publisher faded away over time, and the partnership wasn’t working out for either of us, so we went our separate ways. I kinda wish that things had turned out differently, but I’m also 100% okay with being self-published.
Whenever people speculate about why I’m no longer working with tinyBuild, they try to extrapolate information from some vague remarks I’ve made about having difficulty working with a programmer. Although it’s true that the programmer and I had disagreements from time to time, he was absolutely not the primary reason why tinyBuild and I stopped working together.
The plan was for the programmer to refactor certain aspects of the code, but it proved to be impossible to refactor that code while I was still making changes and additions to the game. It wasn’t the sort of situation where we could just work in separate branches and then merge our work; if the programmer entirely changed the nature of a script, then all of the work I did in the meantime would be incompatible, and would have to be tossed out. To avoid doing any wasted work, I’d have to stop updating the game for a period of several months while the code was being re-factored.
Going for a long period of time without any updates would be a death-stroke for the game’s popularity, so we decided not to refactor those scripts. As a result, the programmer couldn’t do anything of major importance, and could only make little adjustments. (This led to a lot of arbitrary code changes, which caused us to have disagreements, which led to me making vague remarks about having difficulty working with a programmer.) Having an expensive programmer sitting around with his hands tied is bad for every party involved, so the programmer returned to working on other projects for tinyBuild instead. Days afterward, when discussing completely different subjects, tinyBuild and I realized we should go separate ways.
When people were making comments like “Did tinyBuild dump YandereDev?” and “Did YandereDev fire the tinyBuild programmer?” and “Did YandereDev not understand the programmer’s code?” I desperately wanted to shut down all the rumors by explaining the facts, but I was afraid of saying anything at all about the subject of tinyBuild, because I didn’t want to accidentally trip some clause in the contract. I was also afraid of letting the questions remain there in the comment section, since it would cause people to doubt the game. My brilliant solution…was to start deleting any comments mentioning tinyBuild.
What the hell was I thinking?!
Boy, was that stupid!!! It looked really suspicious and sketchy, and it seemed like I was trying to cover up something dirty, so people started calling me out. (This was compounded by also having a lot of hate comments completely unrelated to tinyBuild – but that’s a different subject.) It was snowballing into a worse and worse situation with each passing second. I had no clue how to handle all of this happening at once, so I panicked, and just disabled comments everywhere. (And that was even more stupid, but maybe I’ll talk about that in a separate blog post.)
After typing it all out, I realize that explaining the tinyBuild situation was way easier than I thought. Now I feel horrible for putting it off for so long. It just caused confusion, and allowed rumors to grow. This is definitely one of the most stupid mistakes I’ve made ever since I started working on Yandere Simulator.
Ever since the beginning of the game’s development, I never really planned to have a publisher. The age of the Internet has made self-publishing much easier; a publisher can be a nice bonus for a few reasons, but it was never necessary for the project to succeed. Yandere Simulator will be fine without a publisher – but it won’t be fine if I keep making stupid mistakes like this one, so I’ll use this as an extremely important learning experience, and hopefully never do something this dumb ever again.
I’m still not ready to turn on comments just yet, because it won’t be easy to handle all the hate that I’ll have to see after screwing up so badly. Right now, I don’t really want to spend too much time thinking about comments…I just want to crawl into a hole and focus on the game for a while.
This isn’t really the only subject that I need to address in a blog post, but…well, I want to take things one at a time.
I definitely should have explained the tinyBuild situation months ago. I’m sorry! I hope you can forgive me.
Yandere Simulator Development Blog 
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