A FOOL FOR LOVE
An auteur to some, a fraud to others, one pinhead has created the biggest indie trainwreck of all time...
Yandere Simulator is the Star Citizen of indie gaming. In development for over six years now, it is a pig’s breakfast of spaghetti code and broken promises cobbled together by an egotistical hack who is demonstrably incapable of realising his vision.
On paper, Yandere Sim seems like a winning formula. You control a high school girl who is hopelessly in love with one of her classmates, and who will do absolutely anything to eliminate her perceived romantic rivals. A Hitman clone with the visual trappings of a cheesy anime show – the perfect opportunity to deliver emergent stealth gameplay and black comedy. Heathers for the 21st Century. What could go wrong? As it turns out: absolutely everything.
For the first few years of development fans and onlookers were willing to give the benefit of the doubt to the game’s creator, who goes by the non-de-plume ‘YandereDev’. Even the best crowd-funded games are prone to running a year or two late. But it’s reached the point where the backers are asking questions – and the answers beggar belief.
Of greatest concern is the code base. Yandere Sim is scripted largely via gargantuan arrays of If/Then/Else statements; thousands of lines long, and often nested eight layers deep. I know little about the nuts and bolts of computer programming, but apparently this is an incredibly inefficient way to go about making a game of this size. Unwieldy and nigh on impossible to maintain, it results in a game that runs slower and slower the more YandereDev adds to it. His scripts check every single frame to see if every single NPC is entering any of their available behavioural states. Use the console to kill all the NPCs and the frame rate shoots up by 200fps!
Then there are the character and environment models. Many contain preposterously large numbers of polygons when you consider the role they play in the finished product. As of this writing, the most complex object in the game is a toothbrush – a tiny prop with 5,592 faces.
In its current form Yandere Sim is fundamentally broken and simply cannot be completed – not without completely refactoring the code base, or better yet, starting over completely. Like Star Citizen, it might be a stretch to call the project as a whole a fraud. Even though his task is impossible, YandereDev may honestly believe that he can deliver on his promises to the Patreon backers funnelling him thousands of dollars per month.
His conduct to his supporters, however, is less ambiguous. Video recordings of his live streams and screen-caps of his Discord conversations paint a picture of an inflated and brittle ego and a volatile temper. He’s demanded that the creators of games inspired by Yandere
Sim abandon their projects, because if they finish their games first it might make him look bad. No kidding.
The longer he drags out development the more scrutiny he attracts, as internet sleuths comb over every bizarre detail of his online presence. Like a 350,000-word Soulcalibur fan-fiction titled ‘I Am Your Slave.’ Or some of his less savoury creative writing efforts. Or his bizarre commentary on Age of Consent laws. Or his decision to add the anime girl ‘Corona-chan’ to the game, to, er, ‘commemorate’ the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.
The similarities between Yandere Sim and Star Citizen are uncanny, and we’re not just talking about the torrid fan fiction (if you feel you’re not getting enough nightmares, read ‘The Fourth Stimpire’). Like Chris Roberts’s minions, YandereDev squanders irreplaceable time creating slick YouTube videos showing off the features he intends to add in the future, and concocting explanations for why development is taking so long. He even trots out the same tried-and-true excuses so beloved of Star Citizen’s defenders: “It’s still early days yet!”, “It’s only an Alpha!”, and, my personal favourite, “You don’t understand game development!”
His latest excuse for the absolute state of his labyrinthine source code is that it doesn’t actually need to be optimised; it’s only meant to be a demo to support a crowd-funding campaign. YandereDev will then use the funds raised to hire a REAL programmer, and all will be well. But when will that Kickstarter actually launch? In another year? Three years? The saga seems to stretch on forever.
Hell is often depicted as a place where the damned repeat their sins for all eternity. When we fail to learn from our mistakes, we create for ourselves a hell on earth. Like Dante and Virgil touring the underworld, we can wade through the swamp of Yandere Sim drama and bear witness to the limitless excesses of human folly, spawned endlessly from the ego of a man who simply cannot accept when he’s wrong.
Jesus wept.