What is taking so long?

Yandere Simulator has been in development for over 7 years. That’s unusual. What’s the holdup?

In this blog post, I’ll attempt to explain the problem.

Click “Continue Reading” to get started.

July 1st Progress Report

EDIT: Uploaded a new build on July 2nd. Changelog below.

A bunch of miscellaneous things were fixed/changed while I was in the process of putting the final finishing touches on Osana, so I’ve decided to upload a new build that contains those fixes! However, I’m not ready to release the official demo just yet.

You might be thinking “Gosh darn it, YandereDev! How much longer is it going to take?” and I honestly don’t blame you. Scroll down past this artwork by glitterstqr to hear my candid thoughts on the matter.

Whenever I attempt to estimate the date when something will occur, I try to imagine the “best case scenario” and the “worst case scenario”. For example: “If everything goes smoothly, the Kickstarter will happen in August. However, if a bunch of unexpected obstacles appear, it could happen in September instead.” We are now in the 2nd half of 2020. This is troubling to me, because even in my most pessimistic “worst case scenario” predictions, I always estimated that Osana was going to be finished by now.

For the past few years, there was always something else that took priority over Osana; putting more students in the school, making the students react to blood, implementing a save/load feature, etc. It didn’t make any sense to put Osana into the game before adding every core feature necessary to create the intended experience, so I deliberately put Osana at the bottom of my priority list, and spent all of my time on everything else that the game needed, intentionally saving Osana for last.

During the past few months, we have been at the stage of development where there is nothing higher in priority than Osana; the stage where nothing is more deserving of my focus than Osana. Furthermore, I am in possession of all the assets required to implement her; nothing is standing in my way. As soon as we reached this stage of development, I felt extremely confident that Osana was going to be finished within the first half of 2020. But, here we are in July, with no Osana. Why? What’s going on?

It’s not a mystery, but it’s not easy to explain, either. It’s not a black-and-white situation; there is no single culprit. It’s a complex situation involving numerous complicated factors. There is a part of me that wants to write a giant “What’s taking so long? What went wrong?” blog post, and break down every single obstacle that slowed down my progress from January 2020 to June 2020…but it would be a massive wall of text that most people would have zero interest in reading. And attempting to break it down into a short bullet-point list would oversimplify a very nuanced situation, resulting in a wholly inadequate explanation.

Rather than writing a wall of text, I would much rather explain the problems I’ve been facing in my usual video format, since that’s the medium in which I’m most comfortable expressing myself…but right now, I feel like any video I upload is guaranteed to get a negative response unless the video is announcing the release of Osana, so I feel like I should just keep my head down and work on Osana exclusively, and save the “What went wrong?” video for later.

In my BITC crossover announcement video, I mentioned that after Osana is complete and her release date has been announced, I will be releasing a video about the history of Yandere Simulator’s development. This video will discuss a wide variety of subjects that I’ve rarely (or never) ever spoken about in my videos:

1. The first few months of the game’s development; a “black hole” in the game’s history that I have rarely divulged any details about.
2. The decisions I made early in the game’s life that created numerous obstacles that would impede me throughout the rest of the game’s development.
3. The advantages and disadvantages of receiving attention from YouTubers while the game was still very young.
4. The game’s original audience, and the audience that the game ultimately attracted.
5. The reasons why some parts of game’s code were written in a certain way.
6. The subjects of Patreon, funding, budget, etc.

Unfortunately, it would be impossible to give an accurate account of the history of Yandere Simulator without discussing how development was impacted by the actions that other people chose to take, so that’s a subject I’ll have to cover, too.

I think that this “History of Yandere Simulator” video will dispel a large number of myths that have been allowed to exist for far too long, and will help a lot of people understand why Yandere Simulator has an unusually lengthy development cycle compared to most other indie games. In short, the situation is nowhere near as simple as people believe it to be, and I think it’s worth it to clear the air on the matter.

I don’t like saying, “I’ve been working on Osana! I’ve made a bunch of progress!” without actually  showing you tangible proof that I’ve really been doing things. However, everything that I’ve been working on recently is a spoiler, which means that I can’t actually show you exactly what I’ve accomplished recently. Whenever I’m in this situation, I fall back on an old, reliable compromise: Blurry Screenshots™. Click “Continue Reading” to see!