An Update on Slasher Sim

1/1/2023

My name is Noir (aka radcowboylad), and as it’s known, I am the director/creator of this game. I have never delved too deep into my personal life or publicly spoken a lot about development here, but I have been considering writing this update for a loooong time. Since it’s now 2023 I think it’s time to at least mention something, explain the hiatus and talk about the future of this project.

Catch-up

In September 2021, my boyfriend and I planned to make this game together. (and not at all expected for it to get as big as it is now) He was going to be a writer, and I was going to be everything else. Plans quickly changed.

In January 2022 I suddenly became borderline homeless and we (my family, not including my bf) were temporarily staying at another family members house, sleeping on a mattress on the floor. I had no job but I had a lot of free time to work on slasher sim and ended up releasing the demo during then—I had big plans and a very helpful team during that time and since the demo got a lot of positive feedback, excitement and donations I was able to put more money towards it along with being able to survive by affording food and paying board during this difficult time. I am so so so grateful to the kind souls who joined the Slasher Sim Tier or donated money because I have no idea how I would’ve ended up without that support. Even though it would’ve benefited me much more to make this game not free, I’ve always wanted to strive towards accessibility. First and foremost, this is a passion project. It’s for the horror fans BY the horror fans. I don’t want to necessarily (and can’t) profit directly off of copyright characters. This entire project relies on myself, the team, and most importantly the fans who share my game or help fund it out of the kindness of their heart.

The Spiral

Mid-Late 2022 I realised I had been procrastinating and struggling a lot with managing along with making art again. Every single time I would do something other than working on slasher sim (which was a lot of the time after mid 2022 because of the procrastination) I just felt extremely guilty and lost a lot of hope in myself and the future of this project. My mental health was beginning to decline and I kept forcing myself to not draw unless it was related to slasher sim which just ended up harming me more than anything. 

I kept seeing signs everywhere that essentially told me to take a break or to quit, immediately I would shut down the thought because this project had essentially given me a purpose and an opportunity to live off of my own creation. (which I think is every artists dream tbh) 

Around September or October I finally bit the bullet and decided I really needed to take a break so I would stop feeling so terrible all the time about myself. This was the best decision I had ever made—my mental health improved, I let myself have fun without guilt constantly hanging over my shoulder, I was actually able to draw again (it was really fuckin hard, the only way I was able to really force myself back into it was to get myself a better tablet since the one I had was small and a decade old)

Every now and then, someone in the team (or someone new) would offer to help clean up some writing or start writing missing sections or the next planned character which felt really nice, as a lot of the team had fallen out or lost motivation. Before the break, this was really hard to handle as a director since this game as a visual novel heavily relies on the writing, and I am not a writer. I am the person who creates the whole UI, the art, the direction, the sprites, and basically everything else aside from the music and sfx. 

I felt really weird and ashamed if I kept asking for more writers after another left for reasons neither of us could control. So I planned how I could make everyone motivated and have good communication but it just never worked out fully. I can’t blame them much since we are basically driven off of motivation and passion, and I could barely motivate myself. 

Internal Drama

Unfortunately there was also a hint of drama happening in the dev team too. I never wanted to talk about it publicly since to me it was just very stupid and I didn’t want to involve the entire community. (i also thought that if i spoke about it during the time it was happening, it would put a bad taste over the whole thing like all those yandere sim fan games lol) This did however take a toll on the project, so I think this is the only appropriate time to mention it. Basically, the person who was helping me handle the writers and all the stressful stuff, (I think between February-mid 2022?) wanted to steer the direction/plot of a few Characters/Routes, which I had reluctantly been letting them do for a while (Tbf some of them were good decisions that I’m not mad about), but I finally decided to be a bit more firm with something I definitely wanted to stay and said no. I didn’t at all expect them to quit with hard feelings with 2 others leaving with them (one of which was one of our best hard working writers who wrote some amazing stuff) and I would be lying if I didn’t say it harmed the making of the project. 

Before they left, I eventually decided to try & meet in the middle with them, but it was already too late at that point, and for reasons unknown to me, it made them angrier. I wouldn't know about this until they suddenly sent huge walls of text to me the next day at 4 AM and blocking me before I could even respond. The others would follow along with this too (without blocking me immediately) and argue with me. I have an extremely small stress threshold and arguments like this would ruin my entire day even if the topic wasn’t serious or about me at all, so you can only imagine how much something like this would make me feel. 

Another one of them started occasionally arguing with me during the span of a few months (I really want to say they were borderline harassing me, but i don’t want to use a word that strong) and claiming that I’ve lied to the team about silly things (like my age even though it’s been public for years) and just generally talking down about the entire project. It made me feel like shit even though I knew that the stuff they said was entirely baseless and only written out of anger towards me that I never understood at all. I am the exact opposite of a confrontational person, I’m more of a peacemaker, and it was a real challenge to make peace when people were mad at me for reasons they didn’t explain or made no sense to me. There was also a part of me that just wanted to release the full game purely out of spite to prove them wrong, which also had its part in my stress.

But anyway, since then, that person has apologised to me in private. I can’t say I can forgive them considering the damage that’s been done to myself and the project, but I am just so glad it’s over with. 

I imagine they might read this, so if they are, all that I wish for is to not keep any hard feelings. I would still welcome you three with open arms if you wanted to give it another shot but I’m also not going to beg for anyone’s return either. Truth be told it’s hard to find people as passionate, motivated and talented as you all are.

How much of the game is actually done?

Since I know this might be on every fan’s mind right now, I‘ll cut to the chase and make it short. Jason’s writing is about 99% complete (not including stuff that is or is not coded in yet). The CGI is about 30% complete (still struggling with my art since the hiatus) and writing for other characters has begun. Bubba’s planning is 100% done. Harry’s planning is 90% done and up to the 1st intermission (after date 1) is written. I have not started on Harry’s CGI yet. 

I’ll let it be known that I wanted and planned to release Jason and Harry’s FULL ROUTE by Valentine’s day as it would(‘ve) been an appropriate day, but I can’t promise that at all now. It really depends if I get the strength and motivation, and if the writers do too. I will however try my best to at least get Jason out this year. <3

So what’s happening now?

Fast forward to today. I’ve been recently diagnosed with autism (which is not much of a surprise to me as I’ve kind of known since 2020 or 2019 & was self diagnosed but actually getting an official diagnosis felt like my brain expanded and I suddenly became hyper aware of EVERYTHING) and that’s been causing me to connect the dots to a lot of things. Why I do things and why people have treated me differently blah blah blah. That’s not what I want to talk about, but I did bring this up for a reason. As I mentioned earlier, I have a very low stress threshold and I can’t handle much at all without shutting down. I have this trait because of my autism. I thought that my anxiety just could be ignored or I could learn to deal with things but I now genuinely believe that I might not be able to handle the stress of directing this game alone again. It might be possible if everyone on my team worked together and was better with communication, but at this point I think that’s impossible to achieve for an indie game fueled by good feelings. 

I think in order for things to go back to the speed it was going at the beginning of 2022, I would need to find someone who would help me manage Slasher Sim, and include new writers who already know each other and can communicate well. So if you and your writer friends want to be part of this project and you all fit the criteria, don’t be afraid to message me (@radcowboylad or @SlasherSim)

I think I love this game way too much to fully let it go or officially give it up. It’s one of the most important things to me and I also don’t want to let everyone down. It’s just super hard to do things on my own and very stressful and slow when I have to rely on others to do stuff I can’t do.

TLDR: stuff happened and i felt bad but now I feel a bit better