Trivia / Yandere Simulator

A-C

• Accidentally-Correct Writing: YandereDev has stated that Yandere-chan wasn't designed with any particular real life mental health issue in mind and whatever she could be diagnosed with is fictional, yet her condition has a lot of similarities with (the common interpretation of) Alexithymia.
• Acting for Two: Many examples prior to the voice actors pulling out
  • Michaela Laws voiced Ayano Aishi (a.k.a. Yandere-chan), Ryoba Aishi, the Lust Demon, the Placeholder Club Leaders, and provided the screams of female students as they burn to death. She also voiced the side-game characters Kuudere-chan^note  (not the NPC Kuu Dere in the main game, who does not speak) and Tsundere-chan from Kuudere Simulator and its sequels, as well as Beldere-chan from Yanvania. The audio she recorded for Kokona's screams as she burns to death is recycled for all the other girls who can be killed by the flaming ritual knife and Ayano's demonic pyrotechnics. Technically, this means Michaela voiced all the female students, similar to Mom0ki mentioned below.
  • Caitlyn "Mom0ki" Myers voiced Gurin and Oka Ruto, and was the most commonly heard voice for Kokona Haruka and Saki Miyu.
    • To a lesser extent, her lines as Saki are retained for any kidnapped female who gets tortured and brainwashed, so technically, she voiced nearly every female student. This also extended to the teachers during the brief time when a glitch in Cyborg Mode allowed the player to interact with teachers as if they were students.
    • Prior to the July 23rd 2016 build, when her lines were swapped out for Mom0ki's, Chelsea Druce voiced both Kokona and Saki in their rooftop conversation.
    • When Osana Najimi was first addable to the debug builds by messing with the game files, whenever she would take her phone call, her voiced lines would be from Kokona's conversation (even though the text was completely different) voiced by Mom0ki rather than her normal voice, Brittany Lauda. Later updates implemented Lauda's actual lines.
  • Dawn M Bennett voiced three of the upcoming rivals in the Rival Introduction video - Asu Rito (Sports Club President), Muja Kina (Substitute Nurse), and Hanako Yamada (Senpai's Younger Sister).
  • Marissa Lenti voiced both Mida Rana (The Substitute Teacher Rival) and Genka Kunahito (The School Counselor).
  • Cayla Martin is a borderline example: she voiced Info-chan in the game proper and Dracula-chan in Yanvania.
• Approval of God:
  • YandereDev has posted fanwork of the game, such as videos and art, on his blog. He's even said that fanwork is one of the few things he wants to be emailed about, since he likes seeing it and makes him feel like programming the game is worth it. He's also commented on YouTube videos of the game, and lent his voice to the outro of "Senpai Notice Me: A Yandere Simulator Musical" by Random Encounters.
  • His YouTube channel lists liked videos, many of which are Let's Plays and other related works for Yandere Simulator.
  • When a fan created a mod that allowed players to place and pose any character to create amusing images – a "Pose Mod" – YandereDev said he liked the idea and has considered including something similar in the final game. Sure enough, the October 2016 update build (which otherwise only contained a few bug fixes and ability to tweak settings) contained the first iteration of Pose Mode. As a further nod, in March 2017, Dev put a hairstyle into the game to let Yan-chan resemble the modder's avatar.
• Ascended Fanon: Early on in development, YandereDev accepted a lot of ideas from the fanbase, especially from the threads on /v/. In fact, the game's concept and basic mechanics originated in a thread on /v/.
  • For example, Oka Ruto wasn't one of the ten rivals originally. But because people argued that the game needed a "goth girl", he created one.
  • He no longer accepts fan ideas due to being busy and too far along in development to consider radical changes to the concept. However, in February 2016, he did take a fan's suggestion that Mai Waifu should have rainbow eyes and put it in the game, mostly to see if he could.
  • The self-imposed Alphabet Killer challenge^note killing everyone in the school except for Senpai and the faculty members in alphabetical order (popularized by Jay from the Kubz Scouts) was implemented as an actual challenge mode in April 2020 after Jay continuously failed to complete the challenge due to various difficulties in normal mode.
• Banned in China: Some sites (well, one in particular) have not taken kindly to the game.
  • YandereDev's video explaining the panty-shot mechanic was flagged for inappropriate content. He reuploaded it with Take That! censorship, and the incident inspired him to add Censor Steam-obscured nudity to the game as a further Take That!. However, the frequency of inadvertent panty-shots due to the short skirts and even the Censor Steam-obscured nudity have led to other Youtubers' videos being age-restricted – and thus unable to earn revenue – because prudish or trollish users flag them for inappropriate content.
  • The game upset someone working at Twitch.tv and has been banned from appearing on the site at all. YandereDev has reached out to them to try and figure out what precisely is so offensive in his game that other Western games which ARE allowed lack, to see if it's something he might consider changing. He eventually got a response. Long story short, the game was banned for content in very early builds and Twitch is unwilling to continuously review a game in active development, so Yandere Simulator is staying on the banlist until it nears completion.
  • The game is banned in Kuwait due to its violent themes and fanservice.
• The Cast Showoff: Michaela Laws, the former Ayano and several voice actors, is also a talented singer, and YandereDev occasionally posts official videos of her singing songs in-character.
• Cowboy BeBop at His Computer:
  • YanDev intended for the game to be set at a Japanese high school^note  (he is considering changing it to an "academy" to avoid some Unfortunate Implications, the same reason he is leaving the characters' ages unspecified; also to maybe convince twitch.tv to un-ban the game), but was told by a Japanese teacher he had a fact-check session with that the white-and-blue default uniform is for middle school students, while high schools utilize blazer-style uniforms. The middle school outfit is still the default, but three blazer-style uniforms and one summer uniform have been added as alternatives.
  • When explaining why he wasn't going to accept fan-submitted characters, YandereDev provided two examples of Official Fan-Submitted Content-gone-wrong from other crowd-funded games: Duncan from Colossal Kaiju Combat!, and Juju from Skullgirls. A couple of days later, the developer of Colossal Kaiju Combat himself posted a reply stating that none of the events described in the anecdote regarding Duncan had taken place, and YandereDev has since removed the parts where he talked about Duncan.
  • There's been a couple of occasions (such as with YouTuber Super Panic Frenzy) where let's-players, bloggers, or whoever seem to be under the impression that the game is Japanese… and completed. Ignoring that everything – including the text and dialogue – is in English, and the game constantly reminds you that it's not even a beta.
• Creator Backlash:
  • Of a sort. While YandereDev isn't ashamed of his game, he's not happy when people treat it like a joke game. He's even considered renaming the game because of the negative connotations to the word "Simulator" in the title.
  • This has also come from the other direction. Critics of his often fixate on one comment he made early in development where he stated YanSim was a "serious game" in order to decry the game's longstanding clichés and punny names, as well as Dev's tendency to add in funny/bizarre cheats and Easter Eggs. In May 2017, Dev finally unloaded on this particular critique by pointing out that just because he wants his game to be taken seriously (see above bullet point), that doesn't and shouldn't preclude him from using the game to play with tropes and have a little fun.
  • Before creating Yandere Simulator, YandereDev was known on the internet as an infamous Let's Player named EvaXephon^note His livestreams were generally terrible (he died so many times that it isn't funny). Aside from his lack of talent and poor attitude, the most damning part of his time as an LP'er was that he had a tendency to stream pirated games before their official release date. He also tried to delete his own entry from TV Tropes, in direct violation of The Fic May Be Yours, but the Trope Page Is Ours (before the page was officially cut). In his post about changing the game's name on his blog, he added a link to a Pastebin post about his past (which he apologized for), but deleted it after he finished the January 2016 streaming event.
  • In his second video on the Student Council, he expresses agreement with the fandom's negative reaction to the cringeworthy lack of thought put into the numerous students' clumsily translated Punny Names. He has since decided to put more effort into making the new characters' names sound like actual Japanese names while retaining their meaningfulness, instead of just typing whatever pops up on Google Translate.
• Creator Breakdown:
  • By July 2015, the incessant stream of unhelpful emails, combined with YandereDev's lack of an efficient system to handle messages, nearly caused him to snap. As something of a coping mechanism, he created Midori Gurin, a Take That! to all the people who ask/suggest things he deems idiotic. Her dossier states that she constantly annoys her teachers by asking dumb questions, and Dev himself describes her as "very very stupid" while going out of his way to insult, berate, belittle, and (often) murder her. She's not meant to be liked. Moreover, she used to spend most of her time alone on the school rooftop… next to a bunch of items specifically used for murder and cleanup. If some of his videos are any indication, this is so she can be killed easily with no witnesses.
    Dev: First, we need a victim... [cut to Yan-chan stabbing Midori] THAT was easy!
  • This worsened in early 2017, to the point the game's development nearly stopped. Even as the email problem largely went away, communication with his volunteers and implementing long-delayed things (plus the game taking forever to compile code and often crashing) left him little time to actually write code for Osana Najimi, and the fanbase was getting restless at his lack of visible progress – a couple of his early YouTube fans turned against him during this time. This was the primary motivation for his decision to seek a partnership with tinyBuild.
  • He stated at the end of May 2017 that, even though he's become a popular developer, he can't actually enjoy his role because he knows firsthand how quickly the internet can turn on you (it already happened during his exodus from /v/). He used as his example the story of the Sword of Damocles.

D-O

• Dawson Casting: Zigzagged. The cast is apparently made completely of adults, with every main character claimed to be 18 years old. This is despite the fact that in the game, there is often evidence depicting the contrary (Ayano needing a fake ID, the uniforms being for middle school students, and one of the teachers explicitly liking teenage boys.) YanDev stated retroactively that every character is 18 regardless of evidence of otherwise.
• Dear Negative Reader:
  • In the video outlining the additions to the mid-March 2016 build, YandereDev depicted a person who complained about the game's difficulty via email as a baby in front of a laptop while explaining that it's only going to get harder. He has since made good on that promise.
  • YandereDev has responded to criticism of his attitude and its effect on the game's development by contrasting himself with Phil Fish. He has claimed that the stress of sifting through hundreds of mostly-useless emails every day and dealing with harshness from the usual critics has chipped away what sanity he had left. This, coupled with his reputation as a livestreamer for being thin-skinned and touchy to critique, meant it wasn't much of a surprise when he responded to a YouTuber's video lambasting his decision to disable the 3rd-party "Size Mod" with a rant that culminated with, "Go stick your dick in a beehive."
  • The Dev has a tendency to be curt with people who send him questions on Twitter that he's already answered, can't be answered quite yet, or that he thinks are stupid. It's especially if the person is rude about it.
  • A few times, YandereDev has called out the fanbase for opposing ideas he's thought of (such as the skirt-based inventory or using dead animals to hide a corpse's smell). The reasoning he gives is that the game is meant to be both darker and over-the-top in tone, so he won't change game mechanics for the sole reason that some people find it "offensive". Moreover, the game is still in development, so any ideas he suggests can become scrapped at any time in a puff of Fridge Logic. ^note  For instance, the original version of the skirt-based inventory – backlash caused by the fact that Yan-chan blatantly flashed the camera – was stated to be dropped because Dev realized it's easier to program one grid than two. The "kill-a-kitten" idea was scrapped because Dev was informed that real police dogs are trained to avoid false positives… and he would have to come up with a lot of new lore to justify the mechanic, and decided it wasn't worth the trouble. On the /v/ thread at one of the -chans, he unloaded on people complaining that he'd scrapped those mechanics. He insisted he was not giving in to “social-justice warriors” or compromising his vision for the money, and that they were acting no better than the people who had complained about the mechanics in the first place.
  • In December 2016, he wrote a rambling post on Reddit that attempted to answer a few people who had complained that Ayano is a Flat Character and does not fit the definition of a yandere (far from the first time he's referenced TV Tropes, positively or negatively). He reiterated that Ayano is supposed to be just a vessel for the player to pour their own emotions into, not unlike Link or any number of video game protagonists. However, six months later he seemed to change his tune somewhat, if this video is any indication.
  • As mentioned and linked above, his May 2017 Reddit post where he got onto a critic bashing YanSim for its "superficiality". In his long rant, he brought up not only Dragon Ball, but also pointed out that even the grimmest games – e.g.: Hitman: Absolution – can still have silly things in them. YanSim in particular is intentionally set in the most cliché setting imaginable and plays with "Anime High School" tropes six ways to Sunday. Early in said rant, while he agreed with the OP that his character names sucked (something he reiterated in his Kokona retrospective video), he thought complaints about it were blown out of proportion.
• Development Gag:
  • The Empty Demon is basically this. Unless you played older versions, you wouldn't know about the Placeholder Club Leaders (Deliberately Monochrome Empty Husks that were present to easily test the club functionality), the meaning of her speech, nor the way to summon her powers: killing all club leaders and dragging them to the Occult Club's summoning circle.
  • Though it was only put in the game on August 31st, 2020 when Osana was released, a line in one of Senpai's conversations with Osana, Senpai mentions having a recurring nightmare that he's standing underneath the cherry tree, unable to move. This is a reference to the first few months of gameplay, when he was not yet a fully implemented student and spent his time doing just that: standing underneath the cherry tree, unmoving.
  • Ui Tunesu was a placeholder student back as early as 2015 with the incredibly apt name "Witness-Chan." Come 1980's mode, where she serves her role as a witness in the tutorial to showcase the reputation feature and as a key witness in Ryoba's court case.
• Development Hell: Yandere Simulator has become a staple of this Trope on the internet, with the game starting development in mid-2014 and still going, over 8 years later. Yandere Dev has been offered partnerships with larger companies, such as tinyBuild, but they ended due to drama surrounding the two parties. The slow development, as well as anger towards YandereDev, have become more well-known than the game itself.
• Dummied Out:
  • Certain characters, like Victim-chan and Witness-chan (who never appeared in a public build) or the Student-chans (actually the default character model YanDev bought from the Unity Asset Store), are impossible to meet unless you access the game's code in earlier builds. The closest the public got to playing Victim-chan was in a video starring her that YandereDev made about getting away with murder. Witness-chan returned to the game in 1980s mode under the name of Ui Tunesu.
  • Oka Ruto (one of Yandere-chan's ten rivals) was removed from the game in August 2018. She has since been reintroduced to the game as of August 2020, although she only appears while visiting the Town. Later on, she was removed from the town and replaced by generic NPCs. That said, since she's the fifth rival it is a fact that she will eventually return to the game.
  • All of the "Rainbow Six" (six girls with different hair colors) except for Kokona and Saki were removed from the game in August 2018, although they were re-added to the game in August 2020, in which they appear in the Town scene. They later were replaced with generic NPCs. They were reintroduced to the game in October 2021 via 1980s mode alongside the "Rainbow Boys".
• Flip-Flop of God: As the game is still in development, numerous aspects of it can change, will change, or have already changed. This makes the works page and subpages rather contradictory at times; the Wikia fares even worse due to its heavy reliance on Twitter for citation when YanDev has largely moved to Reddit to answer questions, sometimes disproving his own tweets.
• Follow the Leader: There's a game on Steam called Yandere School that's trying to ape this games popularity before it even came out.
• Line to God: While he's become increasingly unable to correspond with fans, YanDev has a development blog, YouTube channel, Twitter feed, and Reddit account, which have been used to fact-check the game's (fan-made) wikia and even the TV Tropes page.
• Meaningful Release Date: 10-Rival mode (revealed to be 1980s mode) was released on October 10, 2021, at 10:10 AM PST.
• Meme Acknowledgment: In Midori Gurin's music video, she calls herself "Midori Gurinuuu!!", a reference to let's player Jay from the Kubz Scouts.
• Memorial Character: YandereDev included a hidden character in the Mid-January update named "Rainey" who spawns in the Martial Arts Club if you type her name. He later confirmed on Reddit that Rainey is the name (or at least alias) of a fan who was terminally ill and would unfortunately not live long enough to see the final product, so he agreed to include her as a tribute character.
• Network to the Rescue: The partnership with TinyBuild, their assistance in the project (including bringing in another programmer to re-write the entire games' code in C# using the Unity 5 engine) is something that YandereDev definitely appreciates. The partnership ended in December 2017, with YandereDev officially announcing this news in June 2018 after he was confronted by fans asking why their comments asking about his relationship with TinyBuild were being deleted, and why he disabled comments on his videos later that month.
• No Budget: "Yandere Simulator does not have a budget yet, so I can’t pay anyone to create assets for the game at this point in time. Instead, Yandere Simulator relies on the support of volunteers who kindly and generously offer to lend their skills to the game for free." –Volunteer page on YandereDev's blog.
  • He gets thousands of dollars per month via Patreon, but some of that goes to his bills and taxes (neither of which come cheap in California), and the rest goes to a number of different contributors. ^note  He has to pay the voice actors – who do not work for free, as well as his primary artists (Kjech, Beedrops, SRealms, etc.) whenever he needs unique art for a video or concept, music composers (originally Henry Rofkar of Only Wednesday Music, currently several artists contributing various pieces), and of course the 3D modellers (originally Druelbozo before demands from his day job caused him to leave the project in June 2016; the current modeller is Qvajangel).
• The Other Darrin: Despite the total exodus of the game's then-existing voice cast in September 2023, and the announcement that the game would not have voice acting going forward, at least one character (Info-chan) has been recast with a new actor.

S

• Schedule Slip: While YandereDev attempts to release a new "major" build on the 1st and 15th days of each month (minor bug-fixes often happen in between), there have been times where he simply hasn't been able to keep to this schedule. ^note  As of 2017, perhaps in response to complaints from fans that he spent too much time making YouTube videos at the expense of his game, he seems to have since adopted a policy of "New Build Now, Video Later" to ensure that the game itself at least will update on schedule. For the previous two years, he tried to upload both simultaneously.
  • The 1st of May 2015 was the first instance of this. It got worse in July, where he wasn't able to upload a significant build at all throughout the month (owing to him going to Anime Expo and having to slog through a mountain of e-mail). It persisted into August, where he needed more time to polish the build he was preparing, eventually releasing it over a week late. However, he then followed up a few days later with a completely unannounced but on-time update on August 15th, 2015.
  • He tried to get ahead of the curve with a pre-announced slip, saying that there would be no mid-September 2015 build due to him taking a vacation and anticipating being engrossed in the latest Metal Gear Solid game.
  • His scheduled October 2015 updates were both late – the October 1st build actually came out a week late, and the October 15th build came out two days late. However, both updates introduced major new mechanics, so there was relatively little complaining. He then got the Halloween update out on time, and then unexpectedly released a new build with another major new gameplay mechanic the very next day.
  • At the end of his November 1st 2015 update video, he invoked this again, stating that he planned to completely overhaul the design of the Akademi campus and he had no idea how long that might take. It took 14 days.
  • Due in part to a deluge of useless emails (again), there was no mid-December 2015 build. In the update video, he stated that he'd reached the point where new core mechanics are more complicated and will take longer than two weeks to code, thus it is no longer realistic to expect new builds every two weeks. He still attempts to release two builds a month.
  • On January 10th 2016, he announced that his hard drive had died. Although he assured fans that no progress on the game had been lost, he was still unable to work for a few days and thus missed a planned mid-January full-build update. He instead released an apology video and inserted an Undertale Easter Egg into the otherwise-identical January 3rd build. He also made up for it by releasing three major updates in February (including the one that redesigned all the girls' hairstyles).
  • In May 2016, he wasn't able to get a mid-month build out as it required assets he simply did not yet have. However, he released teasers on his blog post almost every day for the rest of May, and the June 1st update included a slew of new features and the first fully animated cutscene.
  • His trip to Anime Expo in July 2016, while great for marketing and his sanity, threw off his schedule for the next two months – mid-July saw instead the launch of the official website, and the next major build (introducing the burial mechanic) came July 24th. This meant no major update at the beginning of August, just bug fixes.
  • As of September 2016, he's still behind schedule – when he polled fans in mid-August on what he should concentrate on, a supermajority wanted him to do the Rival Introduction Video rather than finally add Matchmaking into the game. He completed his work for the video within a week, but delays in receiving lines and music meant the video was not ready on time. Instead, September 1st brought minor bug fixes and the groundwork for Matchmaking (though very little of its meat), which was fleshed out in a build three weeks later (a week late). The Rival Intro video itself came a few days after that (nearly a month late).
  • In early 2017, he more-or-less gave up because he'd fallen so far behind schedule on implementing Osana. He ended up partnering with publisher tinyBuild to try and get development back on track. Due to the increasing complexity of his update videos, they have tended to fall further and further behind schedule. To keep this from doing even more damage to the game's development, he started a "New Build Now, New Video Later" policy, where the game itself would update on schedule (or even slightly ahead of it), but the accompanying video would come whenever it was ready – typically within one to five days.
  • By Winter 2017, the things most slowing development were (1) correspondence with volunteers and actors (and tinyBuild) leaving him with less time to code, and (2) the long compile times and constant crashes of Unity 4 – the latter is expected to be fixed by tinyBuild's porting the game to Unity 5 and translating his code from JavaScript to C#.
• Screwed by the Lawyers: YandereDev has an unfortunate history of putting things in the debug builds, knowingly or not, without permission and then getting in trouble for it.
  • In the February 15th 2016 build, after being requested to do so by "an important person", YandereDev removed all of the Undertale audio assets from the game and altered the Gaster Blasters to something more unique. He had asked Toby's permission; Toby said no.
  • In his attempt to find a grass texture that wasn't just a square photo of dead grass, Dev found a nice one via image search but apparently did not realize it was a copyrighted image. One of Dev's critics contacted the original artist, who contacted Dev and demanded his work be removed.
  • When creating Nemesis, he sent a piece of art he liked to one of his 3D modelers as a proof of concept. However, the resultant hair was too similar to the original piece. The artist contacted Dev and requested Nemesis's hair be changed as he was uncomfortable being associated with the game. Dev did so within the month.
  • This is inevitable for the Shout-Out Easter Eggs that incorporate copyrighted music, which Dev has said will all eventually be replaced with original soundalikes. As of June 2017, nearly every piece of copyrighted music has been replaced with a soundalike ("Galo Sengen", one of the first in, was one of the last to go).
• Screwed by the Network: Since January 2016, the game is banned on Twitch, meaning that any account that streams its gameplay is immediately suspended. This denies YanSim a large chunk of much-needed publicity. As detailed in "A Warning To All Game Developers", the reasoning for why is completely unclear, as YanSim does not contain any elements more offensive than those found in higher-profile games that are allowed.
  • In February 2017, he finally got a response from Twitch. The game was banned due to the earliest builds violating Twitch's guidelines – the naked Titans, the violence against minors (no peaceful eliminations existed at the time), etc. Even though nearly all their original complaints were rectified in later builds, Twitch refuses to re-review the game for possible removal from the banlist until it's closer to completion, due to how radically games can change during development. Dev's response to this was essentially: "Well, this sucks, but at least I got an answer I understand, and it means I have to complete this game."
    • The possibility of getting YanSim unbanned from Twitch was another factor in his decision to partner with tinyBuild.
  • Now, even YouTube seems to be cracking down on the game – several YouTubers known to play the game have found their YanSim videos either demonetized or shifted to a lower ad tier, making it less lucrative to play no matter how popular the videos are. YandereDev himself has never made much money from his videos despite viewcounts in the millions – mostly because he only releases videos twice a month rather than every day.
• Shout-Out: This game is packed to the gills with these. The ones intended to be in the final game can be found on the Shout Out page.
  • Pretty much the entire point of the Easter Egg menu, which may or may not show up in some form in the final game. See above for specifics.
  • The April Fools gag videos mentioned near the top of this page have more than a few shoutouts.
  • The "I Want My Senpai Back" video is a parody of the children's book I Want My Hat Back. Osana even fills the role of the Rabbit who stole the Bear's hat in the book.
  • "It's beginning to look a lot like murder" has Yan-chan make Yuno Gasai's most famous pose.
  • The December 2015 update has a segment where Yan-chan sneaks through the Cooking Club to the tune of Encounter from Metal Gear Solid, and Phoenix Wright cameos to explain why Yan-chan's Frame-Up would never fly in real life.
  • The "Raising the Strength Stat" video ends with Yan-chan giving Osana a hammer-toss using her pigtails, much like Ms. Trunchbull did in Matilda.
  • The 2016 Halloween gift is a boss fight that is almost an exact copy of the Sans battle from Undertale with Oka as your opponent.
  • In the delinquent backstory video, the headmaster makes the iconic "Gendo Pose" at one point.

T-U

• Throw It In!: When asked by fans why certain non-core game elements appeared when they did, YandereDev has admitted outright that almost every case was him trying something just to test if he could do it.
  • Oka Ruto was added to the game early because he wanted to see how easily he could make a character with unique features (dark circles around her eyes, different walk/idle animation, special stockings and accessories). By that same token, the Occult Club was one of the first to be fully functional simply because Oka was already in the game.
  • The Martial Arts Club was the other club added early because the Unity Asset Packs he'd bought already had a karate gi as one of the available outfits and he wanted to see how easily he could make characters step into a booth and change their clothing. Same thing with the Art Club (minus its members) not long after. The smock is stock and uses the exact same changing mechanic (but different coding).
  • Mai Waifu was thrown in as a joke (see the explanation on the character page), and was going to be removed from the game before it was decided to put her in the gaming club. She was also given rainbow eyes because someone on Twitter suggested it would be neat; he agreed and decided to make it happen.
  • Mei Mio got her current bun hairstyle because someone convinced Druelbozo that Ayano should be the only girl in the game with a single central ponytail and he agreed. He also gave her reading glasses (not in the game yet, though fans have asked) because he liked her and felt she deserved a little more characterization.
  • Pose Mode happened because Dev saw kgftbz's Pose Mod and liked it so much he thought it deserved to be in the game officially. He later put in a hairstyle that resembled kgftbz's avatar – kgftbz himself, though not consulted beforehand, approved of the nod.
  • Mission Mode happened because (1) Dev wanted to give fans something to do during the long wait for Osana that wouldn't take him too much time to create, and also (2) he had been playing far too much Hitman. By that same token, Nemesis appeared because fans kept saying "Wouldn't it be neat if Yan-chan had someone stalking her?" and Dev agreed – also to give more variety to Mission Mode.
  • "Yandere-kun"^note  (a debug command that turns Yan-chan into a male body but changes literally nothing else about the game) happened despite Dev's earlier distaste of the concept because he saw a mod that tried it and he wanted to see if he could do it. The initial attempt was not successful.
  • When someone asked about the possibility of higanbana^note  (red spider lilies, associated with death in Japanese culture) in the game – due to Ayano having them as her motif in Crush Crush – this exchange happened…
    Dev: "There is one place in Yandere Simulator's school where it would be TOTALLY appropriate for Higanbana flowers to be growing. I'll try to drop the flowers in... but I'm REALLY bad with using Unity's terrain tool, so I can't guarantee it."
    (exactly one hour later)
    Dev: "I decided to set aside 15 minutes to familiarize myself with the terrain tool and plant some flowers. Now you will see Higanbana flowers in a very important location in yandere-chan's school! ^note  They form a ring around the mythical cherry tree, and are also growing out of season (they're a Fall flower but the game starts in early April). The exact reason why it is significant for Higanbana flowers to grow there will be revealed one day in the future."
• Trolling Creator:
  • When asked about YandereDev's gender, he claimed that he is a 16-year-old Japanese schoolgirl with pink hair and DD breasts. Hilarity Ensues as people call out inconsistencies in the claim and YandereDev in turn makes the claim even more ridiculous. A character matching this description – Mai Waifu – was added to the game, with her backstory being that she's the girlfriend of an overseas game developer. He has latterly claimed to be a capybara… piloting a busty pink-haired schoolgirl... crossdressing as a nerdy guy in his late-20's.
  • During a livestream, he teased to viewers that he would finally reveal his face at the end of the stream. Come the end of the stream… and he's using Facerig while insisting he's an anime girl, fox, sandwich, etc. While most found this just as funny as he did, a few people were not amused. ^{Note 1:} Back in 2014, long before the game's popularity took off, he did a livestream as EvaXephon where he is on-camera, face and all, while demoing an early build of YanSim. He even says his last name to the girl in the room with him. The stream was partially archived, and clips and screencaps from it are reposted from time to time as a bullying tactic. ^{Note 2} He finally allowed himself to be photographed (and filmed!) during his trip to Anime Expo in July 2016.
  • In one of his late-night livestreams in Spring 2017, he discussed showing his face, but joked he wouldn't do it unless someone paid him. Five minutes later, someone dropped the exact amount requested. Dev's response was along the lines of "You have got to be kidding." However, he kept his promise and turned on his webcam for the rest of the stream.
  • In the "Matchmaking" builds^note (September 2016), a cat was conveniently placed on campus after a major controversy about using a dead animal to hide a corpse. You don't do anything to him, other than use him as a conversation piece to win points with a Kindhearted Cat Lover.
  • He promised the release of Osana Najimi on August 1 2020, and posted a file named "Osana Release" on his Discord server. What it actually contained was a joke "game" where the player could push F effortlessly kill Osana. People have also pointed out that this was the reward for managing to kill every named NPC in alphabetical order in the Alphabet Killer Challenge (until Osana was fully implemented, when it was changed to the final rival, Megami).
• Troubled Production:
  • YandereDev's attempts to be a relatively-extroverted game developer backfired, to say the least. He ended up gaining so many fans and receiving so many comments (and he attempted to read everything) that he ended up barely having any time to develop the actual game. To try to get back on schedule, he stopped reading YouTube comments, then comments on his own developer blog, then finally gave up reading emails from everyone except people actually helping him with the game (or those who are interested in assisting and have the résumé to prove they're not wasting his time). On top of that, the game's only about 30-35% done presently, and he has to semi-regularly issue reminders for people to not waste his time with pointless e-mails.
  • He gave a couple of interviews early in 2015 where he stated that he hoped to get the game finished to the point of posting a Kickstarter (to hire professionals for better production values and to get the game on Steam) by that summer. Fast forward to the end of 2015 – the game is only around a fifth "complete": YanSim still lacks some core gameplay mechanics, and there's no win condition. During the interim, updates have posted every 2-3 weeks almost like clockwork; it's just that the actual work is taking much longer than he expected.
  • On January 7th 2016, he gave a tentative time-frame for the game's completion. At his current pace and assuming he remains the only programmer, likely completion date would be three years away, in January 2019, with a crowdfunding campaign unlikely before the end of 2016. Obviously no one was happy with this, himself included, which was why he opted to solicit suggestions for how to speed up production. As of late 2023, the game has still not even gone to the crowdfunding phase yet.
  • When asked about "feature creep", he insisted there is none.
  "At present, I am still implementing the features that were planned way back in April 2014."

  He later admitted to a lot of feature creep. Basically, YanSim was originally supposed to be like "Mission Mode" – something one guy with mid-level coding skills could create in eight months. As the idea took off and it became obvious hundreds of thousands of people around the world loved it, he wanted to give these fans something that would be worth their patience and money.

  • The primary reason for Rival-chan's non-functionality is because her model is incompatible with the animation rigs the dev has on-hand. Similarly, the lack of certain elimination methods (strangulation, to name an example) is because he has no animations for them. He has thus far been unable to get competent animators/riggers to volunteer for him and he currently lacks the means to hire a professional. ^note  No, the $5000 per month he gets from Patreon is not enough to hire a professional full-time, at least not while also paying voice actors and 3D modelers. Plus he admitted to taking a rather nasty tax hit (single, no dependants, independent business, plus living in a high-tax state like California).
  • YandereDev has conceded that his programming skills are not quite up to the task he has set out for himself. He has said many times that he would love to rewrite the game's code from scratch to fix its issues. However, doing so would mean at least two months of radio silence, which he fears might cause his increasingly young and fickle fanbase to lose interest in the game. This was another factor in his partnering up with tinyBuild. In February 2017, he decided that production had become so troubled that he had to do something to avoid the game going down in flames. They provided a programmer who converted his JavaScript spaghetti code in Unity 4 to C# in Unity 5. That programmer also wrote several notes on how certain inefficient scripts could be optimized when rewritten, and will likely be the one who replaces YanDev post-budget. However, in a June 10th 2018 blog post, YanDev made an announcement stating that he had cut ties with tinyBuild in December of the previous year over disagreements with their programmer.
  • In early July 2020, several of YandereDev’s accounts were hacked. The hacker leaked several of his emails, including all of his correspondence with tinyBuild which shed further light on what led to the end of partnership between them, along with the game's source code, and also commandeered the game's subreddit to, among other things, clear its entire ban list (consisting of over five thousand reddit users) and put the entire mod team and YandereDev’s account on said ban list. While YandereDev eventually regained his compromised accounts (and the subreddit itself, about three weeks later), and the event is certain to create further delays in development. Even before the hack, several fans have also taken it upon themselves to make clones of the game whilst trying to avoid his production pitfalls, including a game initially called Lovesick^note quickly renamed to Love Letter: My True Feelings to distance themselves from Yandere Simulator (named after YandereDev's proposed official title for Yandere Simulator). However, these games fell into their own troubled production cycles and became Vaporware.
  • Then, in 2023, many of his volunteers left the project in disgust when it came to light serious grooming allegations with an underage fan^note Leaked recordings of his private messages and voice chats on Discord and Snapchat reveal that he engaged in sexually-charged conversations with a minor. Among those who dropped out included the entire voice cast, leading to the announcement that the game would have no voice acting and that development would be on hiatus as of October 2023 (at least for big updates).
• Urban Legend of Zelda:
  • There are those who think that Osana Najimi is Senpai's little sister. This seems to be because of the Yandere Clicker game where the developer used Osana's (now Rival-chan's) face for the Imouto image. That was only because he used what resources he had on-hand at the time. There is an Imouto rival planned for the game. It's just not Osana.
  • There was a time when some fans thought Riku Soma was gay due to a pathfinding bug that put him abnormally close to Senpai. This is Hilarious in Hindsight considering he's the alternate suitor for Kokona.
  • Early on, it was common for YouTube viewers to assume things done by video-makers in mods were things that could be done in the unmodded builds – such as having a teacher confess love to Senpai or being able to push anyone other than Kokona or Midori off the roof. Because YouTubers weren't as diligent at the time in admitting they were modding the game (AzzMan being a perennial offender for awhile), it resulted in YandereDev being sent hundreds of bug reports about stuff he didn't even create. While he isn't against people modding his game – he loved kgftbz's Pose Mod so much he put a stripped-down version in the actual game – he got so sick and tired of being emailed about certain mods that he inserted code to disable them. Since then, YouTubers have been much more diligent about admitting when they're playing a modded build, and also sometimes go out of their way to tell viewers to not contact the developer.
  • An interesting example would be the Demonic Rituals. In a November 2015 progress video (the one that introduced the "Heroic Persona" and the updated school), YandereDev made an offhand comment that lead people to believe that there was an Easter Egg in the Occult Club. This lead to multiple attempts from players in an attempt to unlock it. The following video had YandereDev apologize, as there weren't any secrets in there. However, that didn't mean he didn't have plans for it. Sure enough, he teased the Pain Demon's ritual, and fully introduced the Demon Realm in a "totally normal" build. Which means that yes, this is a case where it eventually did become a feature in the game.

W

• What Could Have Been: As the game is still in development, a number of concepts were initially planned that have been significantly altered or removed entirely:
  • The original introduction (posted on YandereDev's channel in October 2014) had Yandere-chan first meet Senpai by crashing into him while Late for School. It also characterized her as a fairly average girl who was hesitant about killing, and only thought of it because Info-chan gave her the idea. Info-chan also was a School Newspaper Newshound who wanted to stir up drama in the school. ^note  Word of God says the reason he dropped this was because every time he would pitch a game concept with a fleshed-out character, /v/ would nitpick the character rather than discuss game mechanics, and the Promo Cutscene was no different. Now that the original target audience for the game is now the Periphery Demographic, he has considered moving Ayano's characterization back towards this somewhat. For what it's worth, a freelance animator and a group of amateur voice actors have taken the 2014 concept and made a series out of it. It has been praised by YandereDev.
  • The original student interaction screen (seen here) contained the options to "Threaten" and "Seduce". Those options have since been replaced with "Task" and "Ask Favor". Seduction became an upgradable stat instead, while "Threaten" was renamed "Intimidate" and became the delinquent alternative to "Ask Favor".
  • Aea's preferred design for Yan-chan was quite different – she had a short bowl-cut with two cowlicks that looked like devil horns, and her uniform was dark gray with red trim. While that hairstyle and uniform are now an option in the game, the classic Sailor Fuku and high-set ponytail have become absolutely emblematic of the character and remain the default.
  • One of the ten rivals was planned to be a second Yandere who possessed all of Yan-chan's abilities. Separately, concept art of Yan-chan fighting Info-chan on the school rooftop◊ surfaced, heavily implying Info-chan was the game's final boss and leading to speculation that she was also the second Yandere. In September 2015, YandereDev confirmed both rumors… alongside an announcement that the idea had been scrapped.
  • The original concept for the little sister rival character was The Ingenue. Her personality was later reworked into a rude, lewd, and lustful girl so that players wouldn't feel bad about killing her. She was then reworked again, appearance-wise into a female version of Senpai and personality-wise into a clingy and jealous (but not incestuous) brat… because players should feel bad about killing her, but not enough that they wouldn't if the need arose.
  • A planned elimination method was something similar to unscrewing the diving board at the swimming pool, causing the victim to faceplant to their demise. When this was discussed with others, YandereDev decided to drop it on the grounds of it being too ridiculous.
  • Raibaru Fumetsu's character model originally belonged to Osana Najimi. While YandereDev liked the design, he felt it didn't match with Osana's characterization – the model's too cute. Osana was given a different design in later artwork, while the original model became known as "Rival-chan" and placed into the game as an unkillable representation of future rivals. After years of teasing a possible role for her in the final game, she was eventually reintroduced as Raibaru, the former martial arts club leader and Osana's best friend who follows her everywhere, and prevents you from attacking Osana when she's nearby.
  • An unfinished Game Over screen in earlier builds (now removed) that would override the expected one if Senpai was dead at the time seems to indicate that his death was planned to be a failure condition. YanDev has since clarified that his current vision does not include any possibility of killing Senpai during normal play^note  ("SNAP" being a possible exception), and in the current builds, Senpai magically comes back to life each day if he's been killed through an Easter Egg mode.
  • Like Osana and Hanako, Muja was also changed in development. A post on /v/ describing the rivals referred to her as "lecherous, perverted, lustful, lewd". However, Dev later described her as someone who is relatively chaste, but prone to Innocent Innuendo. This was probably because the Substitute Teacher rival (whose week comes immediately after) is also supposed to be perverted, so it would have come off as redundant. The original design for Muja was re-used for the school nurse that appears in 1980s mode.
  • The old-school delinquents and the Yakuza character were originally planned for the main campaign, before being moved to 1980s Mode. This was in part due to their appearance being considered too anachronistic in the modern day. The original pitch also described the Yakuza as someone who was involved with snuff films, organ harvesting and human trafficking, and the only way to pay him was to kidnap students and hand them over for him to sell. After money was introduced, this was toned down to holding rich students for ransom in order to make him more sympathetic.
  • One of the rivals for 1980s mode was an antisocial and reserved girl whose dream was to become a meteorologist. During her week, a storm would be taking place and she would be outside alongside other students conducting an investigation on the weather, which would have given Ryoba the perfect oportunity to fatally electrocute her and making it look like she had been struck by lightning. Due to the difficulties of propertly implementing these weather conditions into the game, she was scrapped altogether and never received an official name, the closest thing she has to one being her codename: "Gloomy". Her personality and elimination method (shy and reserved and being fatally electrocuted) were instead given to Honami and Ai respectively.
  • June 2016 saw YandereDev tease a new inventory mechanic – Yan-chan opens her skirt to reveal two small grids for Tetrising weapons and other items... with her panties front-and-center on the screen. Cue complaints from fans who were offended by the obvious lewdness – apparently forgetting that upskirt photos are the game's currency – and others who weren't offended but felt the design was poor. YandereDev agreed with the latter critique, realizing that it would be easier to program one grid instead of two. He eventually decided Yan-chan would conceal items in a special double-lined skirt. The double-lined skirt made its unofficial debut in a Russian cosplay group's production.
  • In late-July 2016, after introducing the burial mechanic, Dev teased the idea of having Yan-chan kill a cute small animal (in this case a kitten) to throw off police dogs. Naturally, animal lovers were fairly upset over this. He walked the idea back a few days later, though this was less due to the backlash and more because he was informed police dogs are trained to ignore false positives when searching for bodies (that, and he didn't want to spend time in-game justifying a minor mechanic).
  • It was initially reported by Druelbozo that the Cooking Club President's name would be Amai Mafin. However, the Rival Introduction Video revealed that Amai's last name is actually Odayaka.
  • The Dev originally planned for Ayano to be able to have up to ten girls captured in her basement. There would also be several different ways for them to be stored, e.g. keeping them in cages.
  • In earlier builds, learning students' opinions was more of an Underused Game Mechanic, being only relevant when it comes to matchmaking. Following the release of the official demo on August 31, 2020, the Dev made more use of it in order to give two other mechanics — social interaction with other students and spreading lies and gossip — more depth than simply pressing a button.
• Why Fandom Can't Have Nice Things:
  • The Dev made a post on the blog explaining that the reason why he isn't making any fan-made characters canon currently is to avoid this trope ahead of time. In particular, he's concerned that the creators of the characters would make his life more difficult with legal issues. He is, however, considering it to be a Kickstarter reward, on the condition that you sign over the rights when you submit a character. As noted above, the developer of Colossal Kaiju Combat stated that, while what YandereDev's said about CKC was incorrect, the broader point about character ownership could be a tricky one.
  • He stopped answering people on Twitter because people kept abusing it to ask stupid questions, suggest the same things, tweet bug reports at him (which is one of the few things he wants people to email him about, since even with a video it takes more than 140 characters to describe a bug), and generally make him repeat things over and over again until he got bored.
  • On multiple occasions, YandereDev has had to make it absolutely clear that he doesn't want to be bothered by emails unless they are critically important. This is because whenever he wastes time responding to emails, he ends up having less time to actually work on the game. He even admits in the "Yandere Simulator's BIGGEST Problem" video that it's caused him to become irritable and lash out at fans. The only types of emails that he considers "acceptable" are potential volunteers with high-quality portfolios, detailed bug reports that follow his "useful bug report" outline on the blog, or fanworks that the sender has made (he appreciates them). If you send anything else, you'll more than likely delay the next update for everyone else. Later subverted, as he's gone on to state that he exaggerated the issue of annoying emails in an attempt to get people to stop sending them, but it only resulted in even more annoying emails.
  • Speaking of emails, YandereDev got really tired of people sending him emails containing "bug reports" for things that only happened by using third-party mods. Most of these involved a so-called "Size Mod", so starting with the build dated March 31, 2016, he made it so that attempting to use that mod would instead lead to a Kill Screen where a Wall of Text says that he decided to "cock-block" (his words) the mod because of all the people who sent him emails about issues that came from a mod that he didn't program (though naturally, the creator of the mod found a workaround within a week).
  • This almost resulted in the Rival Introduction Video being scrapped. At the beginning of September 2016, one of the music composers who worked on the video livestreamed part of the process, which enabled one of the livestream's viewers to leak a couple of screenshots and all of the names. YandereDev was understandably ticked off at this (especially when YouTubers who were spreading the leak refused his requests to take down the videos showing said leak), so he ended up losing almost all of his desire to finish the Rival Introduction Video. Not helping was this debacle coming on the heels of several dozen fans complaining that he was deliberately dismissing them by implementing Matchmaking first, even though a poll showed higher demand for the Rival Intro (along with others complaining about the video being only three minutes long). Dev finally finished and released the video at the end of the month, with it receiving overall positive reception.
• Word of God: The development process for the game is fairly open. As such, this is rampant on every account YandereDev has for the game, from YouTube, Wordpress, and (especially) Twitter. Much of it is for content he plans to implement in the final game, and testing out community reactions to various features. He also uses it to explain decisions behind certain ideas, such as his Take That! against Youtube's censor policy regarding the panty shots. Answering community questions was also a big purpose behind the accounts, although that's since taken a backseat due to the veritable flood of questions he receives.
  • He has been known to pop up from time to time on the YanSim subreddit, probably because its setup – moderated and lacking a draconian character limit – is much more conducive to asking and answering serious questions than any of his own pages.
  • Contrary to what many fans assumed, Shiromi is not based on Kokichi Oma from Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony, who YandereDev has never even heard of. She is instead inspired by multiple characters, particularly one from Bakemonogatari.
  • According to YandereDev in "Delinquents in Yandere Simulator", the incinerator is based on the one from Prison School.
• Word of Saint Paul: Similarly, volunteers, voice actors, and animators have confirmed or elaborated on details they're involved in. As an example, the girl on the laptop in the Student Council room was confirmed to be the Student Council President by a tweet from her voice actress (though the position of the laptop made it obvious anyway).
  • Another example would be Druelbozo^note  (YanSim's main 3D asset modeler prior to his departure from the project in July 2016) confirming that the Cooking Club President's name was Amai Mafin during a Twitch stream... although Amai's last name turned out to actually be Odayaka. Druelbozo has since stated that he was making a joke that people took seriously.
  • Mom0ki clearly loves Midori Gurin, her primary character^note  (though Oka Ruto will almost certainly end up with more dialog in the final game). As such, she created a Soundcloud page where she posts short voice clips giving Midori a not-insignificant amount of (non-canon) character development.
  • In Michaela Laws’s streams of the official demo, Senpai's (and Jokichi's) voice actor Austin Hively mentioned his headcanon that Senpai is a Nice Guy at school but a complete troll on the Internet. In the same streams, Laws stated that her performance as Ayano is meant to depict her as having Obsessive Love Disorder, while YandereDev has stated that he didn’t have a specific real life condition in mind when writing Ayano and that whatever form of insanity she’d be diagnosed with is a fictional one.
• Written by Cast Member: Several notable instances, particularly with tertiary content.
  • Ayano and several other character's former voice actress, Michaela Laws, programmed and contributed to the script of Burning Love, a Dating Sim Spin-Off for April Fools' Day 2016, which YandereDev dreamt up but didn't have time to work on.
  • She also wrote the lyrics for the "Epic Rap Battle Of Akademi" (and got Mom0ki and Brittany Lauda to perform their characters – Midori and Osana, respectively – for the video).
    • A couple months later, she did it again, this time enlisting Mom0ki, Austin Hively (Taro/Senpai and Jokichi) and Patrick Seymour (Budo) to reprise their characters.
    • She did it again, this time unexpectedly, in July 2017 with this impromptu battle between Yandere-chan and Yandere-kun (the latter played by Alejandro Saab, who voices the generic male students), with Cayla Martin (a.k.a Info-chan) as the announcer.
  • "Resentment", a rather metal YanSim-inspired song by Xandu, has lyrics written by Mom0ki (who also provided death screams), and is sung in-character by Michaela. Like much of this game's fan content, it got Approval of God, leading to some fans saying it should appear in the game – though as it's an original song not made under YanDev's supervision, he would have to work out a legal agreement with Xandu to do so.

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