| 2025 Dev Diary #11 - More Summer News [message #575] |
Thu, 10 July 2025 08:47 |
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Horemheb
Messages: 137
Registered: October 2022
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Senior Member
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Hello everyone! With the release of build #31, the foundational 'scaffolding’ for every period of the school day is now in place. This feels like the perfect time to update you all on where School Simulator stands and where we are hoping to go over the next half year.
Honest Reflections on Development
Let’s get the obvious out of the way: development has been slower than we originally hoped. As anyone who’s worked in software knows, progress can be unpredictable, especially when you’re venturing into a new genre for the first time. School Simulator is our first simulation game (all our priors being 2d adventures), and, as it turns out, building this simulaton is a bit more complex than we thought. Some of our early code decisions did not work well, and we’ve spent a fair amount of time rewriting those parts and bringing in outside help recently to move things along.
Where We Are Now
Now that the entire school day is up and running (more or less), our focus is shifting to perfecting the simulation itself. NPC pathfinding is in a good place, and our next big push is to implement the unique ‘scenes’ that play out during the different parts of the day. That’s where most of our development energy will be going in the near future.
We know there’s a strong desire for more user interaction, and trust me, we want that too. But right now, getting the simulation to actually work comes first. Once we have a solid foundation, we’ll be able to layer in more interactive features. Until then, we’re holding off on heavy interaction systems.
Under the Hood
For the curious among you who’ve poked around the character debug output, you might have noticed a mountain of data for each character, some of it referencing features not used. The good news is that a lot of the code for future features is already sitting there, just waiting for us to activate and polish it. (Entire weekly schedules, for example, have been in place since last year, before Early Access even began.)
Looking Forward
As for a release date, I hesitate say anything that may seem firm, because game development is nothing if not unpredictable. Our target remains Q4 2025, sometime between October and December. Will we hit that window? Hard to say, but we’re certainly trying.
Heading off the Elephant before he gets to the room (a sneak announcement!)
Before I click post, I have an unofficial sneak announcement for those of you who read this far: there is another Discipline Master game currently in development, and it's looking very likely to launch before School Simulator. Now, if I were in your shoes, the cynical side of me might say, "Ah, that’s why development on School Simulator is so slow, they’re busy with another game"! But to be clear, that's not the case here. The new Discipline Master title is being developed by a completely separate team (or really one passionate individual over at BLS), with no overlap or shared resources with our project.
That’s all for now. Thank you all for your continued support and patience. Wishing you all a great summer!
[Updated on: Thu, 10 July 2025 08:48] Report message to a moderator |
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