Oh, dear. That didn’t work at all!

In an attempt to re-connect with old volunteers whose contact information I had lost, and make it easier for me to organize my e-mails, I made a Volunteer page with clear instructions on how to contact me if you’re a volunteer. The result was a flood of new e-mails from people offering to volunteer to help out with the game. Since then, I’ve spent around 8 ~ 12 hours a day reviewing and replying to volunteers.

Even though I’ve been doing literally nothing but eating, sleeping, and reading e-mails for the past several days, I’ve still got dozens of e-mails remaining to answer, and I seem to be getting new ones at a faster rate than I can answer the old ones, so the pile only keeps growing! Most of the e-mails that I’m replying to are several days old already.

On one hand, it’s extremely heartwarming to know that so many people are generously offering to help out with Yandere Simulator. On the other hand, not a single new line of code has been added to the game since July 1st, aside from bug fixes.

Most volunteers who contact me are very skilled people, but I find myself not able to give them any tasks, because all tasks have already been taken up by the first people who volunteered. I constantly find myself thinking, “Drat, I shouldn’t have given the task to THAT guy. This other volunteer is WAY more skilled. I should have given the task to HIM, instead!” It’s an absolutely terrible situation to be in.

Because I’m going to be doing absolutely nothing but answering e-mails for the foreseeable future, it looks like it’ll be absolutely impossible to include anything remarkable or noteworthy in the game by July 15th. This is extremely disappointing to me, since the new Volunteer page was supposed to help development, not bring it to a complete halt. I don’t use the phrase “absolute disaster” very often, but I don’t know how else to describe this situation.

If you’re one of the people who e-mailed me at any point in the past week, I deeply apologize for how long you’ve had to wait for a response.

On a more positive note, the past week has put me in touch with dozens of extremely talented people who I’m absolutely honored to be acquainted with, and once I’ve “separated the wheat from the chaff”, so to speak, Yandere Simulator is going to have an absolutely awesome team behind it.

How can I help?

Don’t volunteer if you’re still in elementary school.

Don’t volunteer if you have no examples of previous work to show me.

Don’t volunteer if you openly admit that you have no skills whatsoever.

Don’t volunteer if you have less than a year’s worth of experience doing whatever you’re volunteering to do.

Don’t e-mail me at all unless you’re not reporting a bug, volunteering to help with the game, making a business proposal, or sharing fan art.

This is going to sound very harsh, but in the interest of saving my time and your time…

Don’t volunteer to be an artist if you can only draw stick figures.

Don’t volunteer to be a voice actor if your microphone sounds like a tin can and a string.

Don’t volunteer to be a 3D modeller if your idea of “texturing” is downloading an image from Google and putting it onto a model with no UV mapping whatsoever.