tinyBuild, the studio behind Punch Club, and Hello Neighbour, have partnered with YandereDev to co-develop and publish Yandere Simulator.
“We love the game’s design and are going to build a development team to elevate the game’s production values, where the original dev assumes role of Design Lead,” reads the press release from tinyBuild. “This project’s structure is very similar to what we did with co-developing SpeedRunners, which went on to sell 1.4m copies on Steam.”
tinyBuild also stated Yandere Simulator will either go to paid alpha or some other source of crowdfunding to expand the game’s budget. This is not new territory for the developer, as they did something similar for Hello Neighbour.
Some may remember Yandere Simulator as an offbeat anime-inspired title that was banned from Twitch last summer. Players take the role of the shy student, Yandere-chan. She has a crush on “Senpai”, but he’s unaware of her existence. Since she’s too shy to just come out and say hi, she decides to literally eliminate any competition possible. It was banned from Twitch for its intense nature, but mostly because users can kill characters who are children.
Yandere Simulator has been in development since 2014, and has garnered the attention of a pretty loyal fan base. Though, there have been questions from those interested have questioned why it is taking so long. In response to those questions, YandereDev released a series of videos discussing the development length, and some possible solutions to the issue. One solution involved crowdfunding so YandereDev can hire more team members, but now it looks like tinyBuild could help in that regard.
tinyBuild’s first bit of success came from their first title No Time to Explain in 2011, which received high user ratings across the board, and since then it’s made its way to next gen consoles. Following the success of that game, tinyBuild has made a name for itself by partnering with other indie developers.