October Development Update

Hello! It’s the first day of a new month, so I think it’s a good time to give you an update on my progress.

The Light Music Club is 90% implemented. To finish implementing them, I require a small number of animations (five, I think), a few voiced lines, and some simple 2D artwork. Over the past month, a lot of unfortunate things have happened; two volunteers had their computers break, another volunteer had to fly to another country because of a family emergency, and another volunteer simply disappeared without explanation. The Light Music Club is highly dependent on volunteer assistance, so if critical volunteers aren’t available, I simply have to wait until they’re available again (or in some cases, find replacements). In an ideal world, the Light Music Club would have been done within a span of 2 weeks…but that simply isn’t how things worked out.

Whenever I’ve been unable to make progress on the Light Music Club, I spent that time working on other features. A lot of time over the past month was spent on “wish fulfillment”; working on features that I’ve been daydreaming about for months or even years. The magical girl minigame, the martial arts practice minigame, improvements to the game’s framerate, and miscellaneous stuff like making all of the club leaders have meetings on Friday. It’s been incredibly fulfilling and satisfying to finally implement these things. I worked on these types of features to pass the time while waiting for Light Music Club assets. However, I recently ran out of “wish fulfillment” features to work on, so I’ve turned my attention back to “core gameplay” features. On that note:

As I recently mentioned, I’ve been working on the guidance counselor. I’m delighted to inform you that I’ve made tremendous progress on her! Here’s what has currently been implemented:

• Teachers no longer expel you immediately when they catch you misbehaving. Instead, they send you to the guidance counselor.
• All teacher voiced lines have been replaced / updated to reflect this.
• When talking with the guidance counselor, the player has to come up with some sort of excuse for their recent behavior. This is an interactive “minigame” that involves quick reading and quick reflexes.
• If the player succeeds at the minigame, they are allowed to leave her office, and normal gameplay resumes.
• If the player fails the minigame, they are either suspended or expelled, depending on how badly they screwed up.
• If you’re suspended for 5 days on Thursday, you obviously can’t come to school on Friday, so this is an automatic game over.
• The guidance counselor’s dialogue changes depending on whether or not it’s the first/second/third time she’s had to lecture you for whatever you’ve done wrong.
• The player is no longer able to freely walk around inside of the guidance counselor’s office at any time; you can have meetings with her, but you can’t bring things into her office or speak to her when you’re bloody/insane.

There is still work that remains to be done:

• If the player tries to use the same excuse multiple times, the guidance counselor is going to call you out.
• If the player tells an obvious lie (blaming something on the delinquents when the delinquents are all dead/expelled) the guidance counselor is going to call you out.
• If the player keeps getting sent to the guidance counselor, she will become less lenient and deliver harsher punishments.
• All of her animations are currently placeholders, and need to be replaced with better ones.
• I have all of her voiced lines (almost 70!) and all of Yandere-chan’s voiced lines, but I haven’t implemented them yet.

Implementing the guidance counselor has gone by much, much faster than implementing the Light Music Club, since the guidance counselor isn’t as dependent on assets from volunteers. After I receive a handful of animations, I’ll have everything I need to implement her. In fact, it’s likely that the guidance counselor will be finished before the Light Music Club, since I still need to wait for some volunteers to become available again before I can continue making progress on the LMC.

Since both features are so close to completion, I won’t release any new builds until after both features are finished. If I complete the guidance counselor and still don’t have what I need to finish the LMC, then I’ll just move on to one of the next features on my checklist; making students react to blood, further improving the framerate, working on the mysterious obstacle, implementing a save/load system, implementing the intro cutscene, etc.

Too long, didn’t read! Give me a summary!

TL;DR: The LMC is almost done, but I can’t make further progress until critical volunteers become available again. In the meantime, I’m working on other features like the guidance counselor. The counselor is almost done, and the next build will contain both the LMC and the guidance counselor.

Thank you for following the development of Yandere Simulator!