December 1st Progress Report

I wanted to take a break from working on Custom Mode, so I turned my attention to some other things that I've wanted to work on for a long time. Here's what I got done over the past two weeks:

New Socialization System

When speaking to students, the "Socialize" option was kinda lame. You simply picked a conversation topic from a list of 25 topics, and chose whether to say something positive or negative. It was not very fun or engaging.

The latest build drastically changes the "Socialize" feature. Now, instead of simply picking a topic to talk about, you are brought to a new interface that resembles a visual novel, and presented with 5 options.

(While viewing the screenshot in the gallery above, you may recognize the general layout of this interface; it's the same interface as the Matchmaking minigame, but with a few adjustments.)

There are 4 parts to this new interface:

Friendship Bar: Each student at school now has an individual opinion of you (instead of every student sharing the same opinion, determined by your "Reputation" bar). You can "level up" your relationship with a student from "acquaintance" to "friend" by gaining "Friendship Points" through positive interactions. There are two ways to gain Friendship Points: Doing a student's Task and using the new Socialize menu to have a successful social interaction with them.

Active Bonuses: There are 5 things that can increase the number of points you get from interacting with a student; the panties you're wearing, whether or not you've used the Gaming club's benefit to give a bonus to your social interactions, the Persona you're currently using, how high you've raised your Seduction stat, and how much you've increased your Psychology stat. All of the currently active bonuses are visible on the left side of the screen.

Interaction List: On the right, you'll see the most important aspect of this screen: the different ways you can interact with the student that you're currently talking to. The option to "make a positive/negative remark about a topic" is still present and available. "Compliment" brings up a list of 18 possible compliments to give the student. The correct compliment depends on the Persona of the student. (For example, a Teacher's Pet would want to hear you compliment their intelligence.) "Show Off" allows you to impress the student with your knowledge of one of the 5 school subjects - Biology, Chemistry, Language, PE, or Psychology. Choose the one that you've leveled up the most. Your last option is to simply give the student some cash and tell them to buy themselves a nice treat. Ideally, this would be replaced with a "gift" system where you have to give students gifts based on their specific interests, but that would require a lot of additional work and assets, so it's probably not going to happen.

Student Reaction: At the bottom of the screen, you can see the student's reaction to the last thing that you said to them. For example, if your compliment totally backfired, you'll see a bored and lukewarm response down there.

Most students will become your friend after you've surpassed 50 "Friendship Points." Doing a Task for a student gives you 50 points (plus a bonus). So, in most cases, all you need to do in order to befriend a student is simply do their Task. However, for a handful of students, the criteria is slightly different.

In one of my old YouTube videos - "Yandere-chan's Childhood" - Ayano was shown socializing with Midori and Kuu Dere when she was younger. Since this video has established that Midori and Kuu were acquainted with Ayano as children, their "criteria for friendship" is a bit lower. You can befriend them after earning a mere 25 friendship points.

All rivals - after the first rival - will have a higher "Friendship Threshold" than normal students. For example, Amai will require you to surpass 55 friendship points, and Megami will require you to surpass 95 Friendship Points.

I feel that this new system has the potential to be used in a lot of different ways:

• Perhaps, if a student sees you misbehaving, you should lose Friendship Points with them in addition to losing Reputation Points.
• Perhaps friendly students will have a lower threshold for friendship, and grumpy students will have a higher threshold for friendship.
• Perhaps a student at 100/100 Friendship Points will refuse to gossip about you or damage your reputation, even if they see you splattered with blood.
• Perhaps asking a Student for a "Favor" will cost Friendship Points, which means that if you want the student to do another favor for you, you'll have to score some more Friendship Points with them.
• After a successful social interaction with a student, your reputation goes up. Perhaps the exact extent that your reputation goes up should be determined by the Friendship Points you have with that student, rather than factors such as your panties/persona/seduction/psychology, etc.
• Perhaps the game keep track of which students are friends with which other students, and your interactions with one student should impact your relationship with that student's friends. For example, if Student A and Student B are friends with one another, and you have a successful social interaction with Student A, you'll gain a few Friendship Points with Student B.

The ideas written in the bullet-point list above have not yet been made to the game. However, depending on player feedback, changes like this might come to the game in the future.

Updated School Exterior

Over the years, various fans have created "New School Environment" mods that significantly improved the exterior of the school. I was extremely impressed with these mods; they inspired me to make various additions and adjustments to the school:

• 1. I'm no longer over-relying on that "small pink tree" model and using it absolutely everywhere.
• 2. There is now a lot more variety in what kind of props you see throughout the school.
• 3. The "hedge archways" now appear all throughout the school, rather than just in a couple of locations near the south side of the school. This turns it into a visual motif of the school, rather than just a novelty that is only found on one side of the school.
• 4. There are now a lot more "big pink trees" spread throughout the school.
• 5. Some parts of the school interior - the plaza, the stairways, the library, the faculty room, and the announcement room - also got some additional props and feel much less empty now.

It's refreshing to see so many changes throughout the school environment! It almost feels like a completely different place now! I really hope that everyone is going to approve of the changes!

Dreams

Have you ever played a sequence in a video game where the protagonist is walking through a black empty void and seeing creepy visions and hearing creepy voices? Like this scene from God of War 3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_LCvdUPEl1g I've always been a big fan of these types of sequences, perhaps because they felt "attainable" for me; they felt like something I could actually achieve myself, despite being a solo developer, because of their relative simplicity.

For years, I've wanted to implement playable dream sequences in Yandere Simulator that would provide information about the game's backstory and lore. However, it felt like an unnecessary addition to the game, so it sunk down to the bottom of my priority list. Well, over the past couple of days, I just couldn't stop thinking about it...so, I set aside some time and finally implemented a "dream" system into the game!

At first, I considered the idea that dreams would be random. Maybe there would be a 1% chance that, every time you go to bed, you have a dream. However, this might annoy players who are trying to do a speedrun and don't want a random event to interrupt their playthrough. So, I decided that dreams would have to be something that the player deliberately instigates. But, how do you induce a dream? As far as I know, there are no guaranteed methods to elicit dreams in real life...

I've heard that the food you eat before bed can affect the quality of your sleep. So, perhaps making the protagonist eat a specific meal is the most logical way to let the player deliberately induce dreams. And, as it turns out, there just so happens to be a restaurant in the street scene with no functionality associated with it. So, I made the decision to add some interactivity to the ramen shop in town: It is now possible to order special meals that result in dream sequences.

(Please forgive the A.I.-generated artwork for the shopkeeper; it's a placeholder while I wait for an artist to create real artwork.)

There is currently only one "dream" available. It focuses on the earliest parts of the game's lore - events that pre-date the Aishi Condition. Stuff that the player really has no realistic way of ever learning, unless it's revealed within a dream sequence. Putting it into the game was an experiment to determine if dream sequences were even feasible, but I actually had a lot of fun making it! It only took 1 day of work to implement, so I feel confident that adding more dreams will be easy!

I was originally going to include dialogue in the dream (subtitles at the bottom of the screen explaining what various characters were saying and thinking), but I was afraid of the dream giving away too much information and completely killing all potential for fun speculation and theorizing, so I decided to not include any voices or words in the dream. I'll look forward to seeing players try to figure out what events the dream is depicting!

Miscellaneous Improvements

Aside from the things mentioned above, I've also been making a lot of miscellaneous improvements all over the game. For example, I've made improvements to the 1980s Mode rivals' diary entries. Do you remember what they previously looked like?

"My friend asked to name my 5 favorite things. I decided on Art, Cats, Cooking, Cosplay, Nature."

Yeah...that was boring. I've made an effort to update those diary entries to sound much more natural and be more like real statements that a person might actually make. You can see an example in the image gallery above.

I know that this isn't the sort of thing that fans have been clamoring for - "OMG I CAN'T WAIT FOR THE DIARY ENTRY UPDATE!!!!!" but it's the type of thing that I really wanted to take care of before moving on to the next phase of the game's development. I suppose you could call it "tying up loose ends."

What Remains?

By checking the "Pre-Crowdfunding Checklist" page, you can see that there is barely anything remaining: https://yanderedev.wordpress.com/2023/06/06/remaining-pre-crowdfunding-checklist-tasks/

The only things that are left on the list are finishing Custom Mode and implementing some new hair models for 1980s Mode students.

For years, "The Checklist" was this nebulous, ambiguous thing that was always changing...and now it is something short and simple that looks very easy to complete. It's almost surreal to see it in this state!

There is a possibility that, over the next 2 weeks, I might work on a few things that aren't written on that list - like implementing Tasks for some of the 202X students who don't have Tasks. Aside from miscellaneous little things like that, there is almost nothing else I want to work on before I move on to the next phase of the game's development.

I feel like there's a very good chance that the Pre-Crowdfunding Checklist will be finished by the end of December. This means that, during 2024, my focus will finally shift to implementing the 202X rivals!

Before I close out the progress report, I want to acknowledge that I'm aware there are a handful of topics that I haven't addressed yet. "What will you do about voice acting?" "Are you still going to try holding a crowdfunding campaign?" "When will you return to making YouTube videos?" I'm very sorry, but I'm not ready to provide definitive answers to those questions yet. I think that I'll have the answers by mid January at the soonest, and early February at the latest. I'm sorry for keeping you waiting.

As always, thank you for supporting the development of Yandere Simulator!