As soon as I heard there was going to be a Yandere Jam on itch, I was straight in there as a participant, haha. I didn't really know what I was going to do, as I was just finishing up with Spooktober VN Jam 2021, and then I wound up having a lot of personal problems in my life which absolutely destroyed my ability to work on projects. As February 2022 loomed, I was beginning to wonder if I'd be able to make anything at all for Yandere Jam. Despite the crappy situation I was in, a part of me was just screaming, you CANNOT miss this. It would be wrong. You know you'll regret it if you can't contribute something!

Just to warn you, it's going to get quite personal for the next few paragraphs, so if you just want to skip ahead to the actual stuff about making the game, scroll down to the 'The Beginning' heading x3

- The Personal Stuff -

So I was sort of planning on forcing myself to create something no matter what. Luckily for me, I actually started feeling better once I began coming off of the antidepressants I was on, my nasty brain fog lifted, and I was raring to work on something again :3 Less fortunately, however, was the fact that I was away from home trying to help a friend when the jam actually began! I had no access to any sort of computer, and so all I could do was wait as patiently as possible for the day I was scheduled to travel home.

Initially, the plan was for me to spend around a week and a half at home around the start of February, and in that time, begin working on something for the jam. I was then supposed to travel to see my best friend for a long weekend birthday trip she'd organised for us, then travel onwards from there to spend more time helping the other friend that I was with when the jam first began. However, a lot happened during the time I was at home.

The friend that I was trying to help began to become more and more manipulative, attempting to guilt-trip me into coming back sooner, along with trying to get me to feel bad about working on the jam over spending time with him. No matter how I explained things to him, it's as though nothing sank in. He couldn't seem to accept the fact that I have a life of my own, and couldn't spend all of my time with him.

Now, I realise how that might seem somewhat funny considering my love of yandere characters and their inclusion in my projects! I should reiterate though that behaviour like that in reality really isn't fun to deal with at all >.< Eventually, he even went as far as to say that he had a heart attack, and that said heart attack was my fault because of the stress I caused him by not being there with him... Whether intentional or not, this sort of attempted manipulation of emotions by someone who is supposed to be a friend just isn't acceptable. My close friends and family had been telling me there were red flags for a while, but I kept on making excuses for the guy because I genuinely believed that some of the ways he acted weren't entirely his fault and that he should be given the benefit of the doubt.

What I didn't realise, was quite how badly my mental health was deteriorating + how stressed I was becoming with the whole situation.

The heart attack claim was the final straw. It made me so angry and uncomfortable that I knew I just couldn't go back and spend time with him as planned because I didn't really feel safe anymore. I was ground down to the point that I had nothing left to give; and knew that if I didn't put some distance between him and myself, things were going to go downhill very rapidly. And so I went and met up with my best friend for the long weekend she planned for us, managed to have a wonderful time, and then came straight back home again. I cannot even express the level of relief I felt at just being able to come home rather than feel guilt-tripped into travelling onwards to see that other friend. Keep in mind as well, that I had to travel 6 hours on a coach to see this person, so it's not like it was a case of just popping over to help him out and then heading home. Whenever I went over there to see him, I would essentially have to stay there for at least a week to even justify the time + cost of travel.

I would also come to realise later on in the month that had I gone and spent a further week at his place, I would definitely not have finished my jam project in time. So it all worked out for the better in the end!

- The Beginning -

Because I knew I'd have very little time, I initially thought that perhaps releasing the already made new demo for CiQ + adding in the route of the yandere character within the cast would be the way to go since the demo part was already constructed. However, I soon began to realise that it wasn't much of a head start! The UI was a mess and needed pretty much remaking from scratch, and I hadn't even done a spelling and grammar check on the character's route draft. It just wasn't a viable option in the time I had, and so, I wound up wasting approximately 2-3 days of work merely arriving at that conclusion.

It was then, in my desperation, that I settled on localising an English fandub for Yandere Heaven volume 01. It was something I'd had in the back of my mind for a long, long time, but never executed because of working on other projects. I knew that it wouldn't exactly be easy, but that if I really worked my ass off, there might just be a chance at completing it by my personal deadline of Friday 25^th February. The only reason I couldn't work on my submission right up until the deadline of the jam was because my dad and I had planned a long weekend away from the 26th-28^th February long before I even knew Yandere Jam was going to be a thing x3 So yeah, being away at the beginning of the jam alongside knowing I would miss the end of it certainly made it feel as though I attempting the jam on hard mode!

Yandere Heaven is a pretty old drama CD series now, but I bought the discs many years ago and had a mixture of all the English fan translations saved to my laptop. Sadly, most of the kind people who took their time to make fan translations are no longer around online for me to credit them, and the links that used to show their work have all since vanished. Without them, I wouldn't have stood a chance. All the people who made the English fan translations had stated that English wasn't their first language, and it showed within the things they posted. However, I was just grateful to have any sort of translation at all, and they were more than good enough for me to understand what was going on in each CD. My job from there was essentially to work on their translations to make them flow more naturally in English by tweaking and rewording most of the lines. Something which I foolishly thought would be a fairly easy task! Let's put it this way, I now have a much greater appreciation for localisation teams, haha. Nevertheless, it was still easier/faster than writing an original story from scratch, and that's exactly what I needed if I was going to release something in time.

I feel like if I had longer to work on the localisation, it would have come out better than it did because I'm not entirely happy with the way I worded some of the lines, but it was something I couldn't afford to spend too much time on.

- The Middle -

In a move that I can only describe as madness, I decided to work on all the game's UI next. I kept saying to myself, what are you doing? It would be far better to get all the code done so that the game is constructed and playable before working on making things look pretty! The problem was, I already had it in my head and I just couldn't let go of wanting to work on UI. I felt like it would be easier to construct the rest of the game around a theme I'd already created within the UI, because at the point, I knew I wanted to create a rose-tinted sort of aesthetic, but wasn't entirely sure how to go about it without it turning out somewhat garish, as I'd never worked with a limited colour palette before!

It took me what felt like forever to create a title screen I was happy with, but once that was in place, it made it so much easier for me to make everything else match! From there, I had more confidence in my bright pink backgrounds and dyed character sprites.

Since the characters in the CD do an awful lot of thinking to themselves, I really wanted to find a fun way to differentiate from their thoughts and their words spoken aloud, and that's when I decided to try out the little cutaways with the desaturated backgrounds. One of my concerns was that the transitions may become a little tedious, and so rather than forcing the player to wait through them, I made it so they could be fast-forwarded either by clicking or scrolling to proceed.

- The End -

The last part of construction consisted of cutting out voice actor lines, doing what audio editing I could, such as the slight reverb on thought lines + high pass filter for Kakeru/Kasumi's lines on the phone. Not being an audio editor, I did struggle with getting some of the VA audio to match the volume level of others. There wasn't really anything I could do to fix this, but I did make sure to include individual volume sliders for each character within the game's settings so that the player could fiddle with those and make things sound the way they wanted.

Then came the ever arduous task of matching voice acting to mid-sentence sprite expression changes. If you've played any of my recent games, you'll have noticed this is something I adore including, despite the ridiculous amount of work it adds, haha. A part of me is tempted to stop and just stick with the standard of using 1 expression for each new line, but ever since I first did it, I can't seem to pull away from it. There's something about it that, to me, just makes everything look so much more animated. I mean, if I had the ability to use Live2D, I would, haha. But for now, this is the closest I can get to making my games feel as though they have more movement to them!

Once that was complete, it was a matter of testing for bugs and stuff. Unfortunately, with it being so close to the time I needed to upload, I wasn't able to test as extensively as I would have liked, even though I already managed over 5 hours as it was, haha. And I was unable to get a copy to anyone privately in time for testing assistance either, which meant uploading the game before I went away, and then spending the entire time paranoid that there were some really nasty game-breaking bugs in there, haha. I wouldn't recommend going about things that way, but on this occasion, I didn't really have a choice!

- What Went Right -

So, in the end, I was really happy with how the game turned out aesthetically :3 I wasn't sure if I would be able to pull off all that pink, but I'm pleased with the overall look + execution of transitions throughout the game. Amusingly, the UI pretty much looks like half of my menhera & yami kawaii wardrobe with its pastel pinks, purples, and contrasting black xD

It was also the first time I'd ever really worked with camera movement and depth of field. I do sometimes move my sprites closer to the camera to enhance the drama of a scene, and I did dip my toe in the water with depth of field here and there, but never really found a reason to use it, or camera movements very much until this project.

Because the scenes escalate so fast in the story of the CDs, the yandere-ness in everything seems somewhat comical, and so I wanted to exaggerate that by using those fast camera swishes between characters when they're arguing and such. That was a lot of fun to do!

Overall, I was aiming to create the version of this whole scenario that I could see in my head from way back when I first listened to the CD years ago. There are plenty of things I'm not quite content with, but it definitely turned out even better than I was hoping for in the aesthetic department :3

- What Went Wrong - 

As I mentioned previously, I'm not entirely satisfied with my localistion, but since I've already talked about that, I'll bring up some other stuff here, haha.

I struggled a lot with some of the UI, especially the settings screen. I'm not sure what it is about Nani x Unity, but for some reason, the way certain UIs look in the previewer can come out looking differently in an exported build, and this is something I've had problems with on all of my recent projects >.<

Because I hadn't used it in a while, I was a little rusty, and I sort of forgot that the previewer sometimes lies to me, haha. So I thought I was all done on Friday evening, exported a build to test, only to find that all the text for the individual character volume sliders in my settings UI were just invisible >.> This is something that also happened in Limbo Line. It seems to happen when you have your font size very close to the size of the space it's contained in. In the previewer, everything appears to be just fine, but in an exported build, it's like the game has decided that no, actually, it's clipping, and because it's clipping, it just won't show up.

It's an easy enough fix because you can either increase the container space or decrease the font size, but because you can't rely on the previewer to give you an accurate representation of what it'll look like in an exported build, all you can do is make the build to find out if you managed to fix it. And even for a small game like this, exporting a build took about 25 mins per platform. Now imagine all you have done is tweak font size and want to check whether or not it's visible. Waiting 25 mins just to check something small like that is excruciating T_T haha.

It gave me a hell of a lot of stress I didn't need on Friday night when I just wanted to get the game released and submitted so I could go to bed since I had to be up before 7am the following morning!

I would then discover after a couple of friends played through the game that I managed to miss some typos (always incredibly irritating, especially when they're really obvious ones!) along with the discovery of a few bugs, some of which are quick fixes, others I have literally no idea how to fix. So yeah, the nightmare isn't over xD

I'm always grateful to have bugs reported because there's a lot of stuff that doesn't happen while I'm testing that may well occur for other players. Sometimes it's simply because of their system rather than any specific action they've taken in the game. For example, my friend LPB, who I've worked with on several projects, found that the text for Atsushi's name in his yandere mode text box was popping out on her computer. This is something that doesn't happen on mine, and so if no one tells me about it, I'll never know because it doesn't occur for me. Now that I know about it, I can attempt to fix it, and it should be as simple as decreasing the font size.

It does suck when it turns out there are bugs you have no idea how to fix though :( For example, LPB loaded a save file, and for some reason, the game decided to load all 4 sprite characters. Something that shouldn't happen because the male and female characters never come across each other at any point. Once you've picked the combo of Atsushi + Kakeru or Aoi + Kasumi, you're stuck with them until you begin a new game. The two lots of characters' routes are even separated into different scripts! I cannot for the life of me fathom why loading a save would suddenly cause the game to load all 4 characters into one scene >.< I don't ever mess with the default save/load code within Nani because that sorta thing is just waaaay beyond my skill level. So it's just baffling.

While it's not totally game-breaking as it can be fixed by the player if they either reload the save again, go back to the title screen + reload, or close the game + load again, it's still incredibly frustrating to know that bugs like that exist and there's nothing I can do about it :(

- Conclusion - 

While I'm happy with how things turned out overall, there's definitely some stuff I wish I could change. If I had more time, I would also like to have possibly written some additional original content for each character, such as an epilogue/after story to be unlocked upon reaching the end. However, since this is a fandub and not fanfiction, not only was I conscious of my lack of time, but I was also wary throughout when it came to staying true to the original material.

At the end of the day, my goal was to make an English localised version of an audio-only drama CD that I adored the moment I listened to it, and I feel as though I succeeded in that task :3

I also learned a lot more about camera movement and depth of field – both of which are things I'll be able to incorporate more of in future projects now that I'm a bit more confident with how they work.

If you managed to make it all the way to the end of this rather long ramble, thanks for reading, and man, you have incredible stamina x3