Day 25: Custom Mode Concepts

In recent times, I am very reluctant to consider planning anything for the game that isn't absolutely necessary, especially if it's ambitious, complex, and would take a lot of time to add - but there is one "unnecessary" feature that I'm so enthusiastic about, there is a chance that I may actually take the time to add it to the game, since it would add a tremendous amount of value - both replay value and production value - to Yandere Simulator.

That feature is "Custom Mode" - an interface that lets you design a 10-week story mode. You would be able to choose the appearance and routine of every student in school, as well as the 10 rivals that would be appearing. Text (for the students' profiles and also the rivals' dialogue with Senpai) would come from a text file that the player would drop into the StreamingAssets folder.

Adding this feature to the game would also come with the benefit of another feature being trivially easy to add - "Random Mode", a mode where the game randomly generates a bunch of students and rivals. Potentially, after this is done, all of the work would be done do implement an "Endless Mode", where the game just keeps generating new students and rivals to replace any dead ones, resulting in a mode that lasts forever.

This would essentially allow the player to design an infinite number of their own yandere stories, instead of waiting for me to implement 9 specific rival girls for the game to be complete. Also, being able to design your own yandere experience would make the game more of a true "Simulator", which its name implied, but its gameplay never really represented.

A fan created the above concept art for what Custom Mode's interface would be like. These designs are not 100% equivalent to exactly how I imagined Custom Mode, but are close enough in nature that viewing these designs will give you a general idea of what it would be like to design students in the Custom Mode interface.

Also, it's worth mentioning that I don't imagine the player using a top-down map to design student routines; I imagine letting the player walk around the school environment and actually place students around the map.

Actually implementing Custom Mode wouldn't really take that long - I estimate 2 weeks of work - but I anticipate that after players begin using it, several months of bug fixes, new features, and quality-of-life improvements would follow, exactly what happened with 1980s Mode, but on a smaller scale.

What do you think? Would Custom Mode be the most meaningful addition that the game could possibly receive, or would it just be an unnecessary time-sink that would needlessly delay the game's development? I'm very interested in what you'd say about it...