Four years ago on this month, Tristan, Marnel and I became officially registered as Squeaky Wheel Studio Inc.We’ll be taking a break today and having dinner with some of our gamedev friends to celebrate, but in the meantime let me take a walk down memory lane.


I am at EGX 2015 for the launch of Prison Architect. The IVSoftware team have kindly flown me and my wife over to celebrate the launch, so I use this as a way to pitch our game Political Animals to publishers. I meet Cliffski for the first time and pitch the game to him.

Within a couple of days he offers me a publishing deal. Anyone who has done a publishing deal before will know that this is an extraordinarily short amount of time to get a deal done. It helps that we got along and Cliffski is a one-man show studio that answers to no one, but still.


After landing back in Manila I immediately set about establishing a company, which is not a trivial process in the Philippines. I end up paying more than I probably needed to in order to have another company help me set up my company, such is life here. We are officially registered with the SEC by October 28, 2015

Funny aside, I had thought that we had incorporated on October the 15, which is why we are celebrating our anniversary today. :P


After almost a year of working nonstop on Political Animals and taking it to conventions like BICfest, TGS, and PAX, we release the game. Even with all the advantages that we had, it is a flop.


A mere 10 months later, we launch Academia : School Simulator in Early Access. It succeeds well enough to save the company and we continue development of the game.


It has been a little over 2 years since Early Access launch, and 3 years since initial development of Academia. We have hit many highs and lows, but the game continues to make enough income to support our team.


This brings me to an announcement from the future. At some point before October 2020, we want to launch version 1 of Academia : School Simulator. The game has made major strides since it first came out. While there is still more work to be done, we can finally see the finish line.

Games like Academia : School Simulator are tricky things. While there is the potential to build on it infinitely, we believe we’re coming close to a point that we are personally satisfied with it. Version 1 doesn’t necessarily mean the end of development, but it does mean a change of focus for the team. It’s been a long road, and we’re excited to slowly inch our way to something new, whatever that may be.

Spoiler Alert, we have some exciting news coming up soon, so stay tuned!


We want to thank everyone that has supported us throughout this journey. Thanks to everyone who has played the game (if you enjoyed your experience please write us a review because it really matters!). Thanks to our partners, our parents and families for supporting us. Thanks to our fellow devs, streamers, and publishers for supporting us, spreading the word, and putting your faith in us.

We hope that you’ll stick around for the years to come!

Hello scholars,

We are super excited to share that our next themed update will be called Land Expansion! That's right, this is something that you all have been asking for for a very long time, so we're really happy to finally add it to the game.

A larger school needs a more complex student delivery system, so we'll be adding school buses! Not sure what to do with all that new land? Why not start building some electricity and water generation objects to offset your utilities costs? And when you have electricity to spare, why not sell it back to the grid for a tiny profit?

These updates are a little meatier than our old updates, so we're trying to release them every one and a half months. So with luck, you should be playing this new update by the middle of October! See you then!

Hello Scholars,

Squeaky Wheel's election simulation game Political Animals is now on a weeklong sale , ending on September 17!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/458630/Political_Animals/

If you've ever wondered if you could win an election while keeping your paws clean, now is the time to find out! Political Animals lets you customize your candidate, pick specific staff to suit your campaign strategy, and lets you play across 8 beautifully hand designed maps. Local multiplayer is best so you can shout obscenities at each other as you near election day.

Bundle Discount!

Even if you're not super interested in politics, if you buy this bundle you can actually get Academia : School Simulator AND Political Animals for about 15% cheaper than if you bought Academia on its own, WHAT A DEAL!

Thanks everyone, we'll be back with an update announcement soon!

Hello Scholars!

We’re excited to finally release our first themed update, which we are calling Law and Order! This has been a long time coming, so let's get right to it!



You can now link certain zones to each other, to maximize efficiency! In much larger schools, there was a tendency for the students and staff to wander or get lost in school, leading to them not having enough time to eat or hang out and have fun in the common room. With Zone Linking you can now specify which classrooms will go to specific cafeterias and common rooms, as well as principals’ offices (principals with an “s” you say? More on that later). We’ve also added links from kitchen to cafeteria, so you can more efficiently control your kitchen staff.



In larger schools, students could sometimes take forever to walk to the principals office, losing them precious learning time. And once they’re at the office there was a crowd of students waiting for the principal to scold them!

To address that issue, we’ve added vice principals and Zone Linking for principals’ offices. To better manage your school, you can hire a vice principal, plop him in a specific area of your school, and link certain classrooms to that office.



The lawyer uses the power of legalese to let you get away with...well not murder, but maybe some less ethical things. Hire a lawyer so you can fire your employees at will (no more warnings!) and expel your students as you please. In future updates when we have an events system, the lawyer will be much more interesting.



Gang Members have been spotted near your school! As gang members go, these guys are actually pretty chill, they most want to influence your students to be more delinquent and to join their gang, and while they’re at it they’ll use your clean toilet facilities. Chase them off by hiring and routing some monitors! Larger schools will attract more gang members, so make sure you’ve got all the exits covered!


- Added grant for Cafeteria Zone to Classroom Zone linking
- Added Principal's Office to Classroom zone linking
- Fixed delivery bug when there are no refrigerators
- Fixed zone linking bugs
- Fixed visual bug where time controls are blocked
- Fixed lawyer bugs
- Increased real world seconds to 120 seconds per in-game hour
- Fixed wrong subject icons on the student profile and the overall student population panels
- Fixed bug where smokers are stuck
- Updated Zone Link icons
- Fixed Zone Linking bugs
- Fixed Research bug
- Fixed UI alignment bug
- Implemented Gang Members
- Implemented delinquents can now work
- Implemented Vice Principals
- Updated game texts
- Fixed zone linking bugs

Thanks to everyone who tried out the test and candidate builds and submitted bug reports. As a little Easter Egg, there is a hint in the description about what the next update will be, can you figure it out? It’s something we mentioned more than once!

Hello Scholars,

We're excited to announce the first of our themed updates, which we're calling Law and Order.

This update will add staff like the Vice Principal, who will help the principal handle the workload of scolding students. We will also be adding the lawyer, who gives you access to some mildly unethical ways to make running the school more efficient (hint : did you ever wish you could fire your staff without those pesky warnings?).

Delinquent student labor will be added so that they can be assigned to clean the school, giving you an alternative to detention and counseling, plus some cheap (but wildly inefficient) labor.

Gang members will try to infiltrate your school and try to influence your students to make them delinquents. They're not dangerous, just very rude, and you'll want to route some monitors around key areas to make sure they don't influence your students.

Finally, Zone Linking lets you create order in your school by linking certain zones to each other so that, for example, you can assign students in a classroom only to use specific cafeterias. This will make organizing much larger schools much easier.

We're targeting the end of August for this release (fingers crossed), and we hope you all are looking forward to it!

PS since people have been asking, yes this update is FREE.

Hello Scholars!

We overhauled our production process this month so we don’t have as much features in this month’s update. However we are excited to be sharing a much clearer roadmap very soon so that you know what to expect in the coming months! Until then, here are the updates for this month.



The history subject did not have a special room, so we needed to add one! The AV Room has now been added as the special room for History class. The teachers get to take it easy as the kids watch documentaries on the TV!



You can now adjust visual settings like turning off the zone colors, tooltips, shadows, and adjust
the hue and saturation colors of the game. If there are any specific visual settings you want us to try out, let us know in the comments!



We found out in a Twitter poll that about 50% of you were not aware that teachers could be assigned to specific year levels. To address this, while in the department panel you can now see on the teacher avatars what year level they are assigned to. We will be adding further UX improvements like this in the future.



- Fixed confusing needs increasing indicator
- Changed safety need computation
- improved safety computation (related to delinquents being too impactful)
- Improved unassigned students' AI
- Implemented common area assignment to classroom
- Fixed achievement bug
- Fixed black screen bug
- Fixed delayed student count update when a student dropped out or is expelled
- Fixed loading error related to TV animation
- Added teachers' TV behavior
- Added AV room category and fixed AV room requirements
- Added graphics settings
- Added AV room grants and research
- Fixed bug regarding zone colors
- Fixed black screen error when moving to next school year
- Fixed research lock bug on the Staff Population panel
- Fixed AI bugs

Hello Scholars,

Build 0.3.15 is now live! This month we focused on recuperating after launching Alpha 3 and tending to bugs and balance fixes. But we promise some new features every month, so this build brings Smoking delinquents, Expelling Students, and some sweet UI Updates!

(Reminder : There is no longer a 32-bit version of this build)



There’s a new set of delinquents for your monitors to catch! Torie over here thinks she’s super cool, smoking in the toilet but the principal knows better! (SMOKING IS BAD, GUYS, REMEMBER IT’S BAD)



Ideally we would advise that Torie take counseling for her issues, but if you’re feeling impatient you can go ahead and expel her! There’s a price to pay though, as your school will lose prestige as word spreads that you expel bad students to keep your stats.



The Student Population and Profile UI needed a lick of paint, and now they’re in line with our new designs!



We’ve update the Bank Loans system so that interest rates go higher the larger the amount you loan, and paying off interest in advance updates the daily rate that you pay. FUN!



There was a lot of confusion about how food crates work, we adjusted it so that you get food crates depending on the number of refrigerators you build. Hopefully this will make things easier to manage!


Been a while since we added new sounds! Click on some of the new zones, objects and staff to hear the new SFX.



Previously we made changes to the game so that you would only be able to access higher ranking teachers as you rise up the ranks. Makes sense we thought, since we figured good teachers would only want to work for good schools! We realize that might have messed up the balance, so we’ve made some changes so that upgraded teacher ranks can be researched.


We are aware there are some issues with the balance of the game in terms of juniors failing and food running out, so we’ve made some fixes to adjust for that. More long term fixes coming soon.

Bug Fixes and updates:
- Fixed HireTeacherPanel bug
- Rebalanced character needs
- Fixed workers not working bug
- Fixed bug when closing year-end report
- Rebalanced learning points
- Fixed love interest leaving behind confessing student
- Implemented kitchen-cafeteria assignment
- Fixed accepting transferee students grants bug
- Fixed bullying student bug
- Fixed bug where the negative SFX plays when loading a game or going back to the main menu
- Fixed smoking animation by adding an offset
- Truant notification zooms in on the smoker
- Increased chance for smokers to appear
- Fixed tuition fee is given multiple times bug
- Updated Food Unhapiness text - Fixed saving/loading Admissions values (interested, incoming, etc.) bug
- Improved implementation of ambient and SFXs
- Added zoom effect and lock-on effect on expelled students when notification is pressed
- Added crying animation for expelled students
- Fixed minor Student Profile panel bug
- Refund money for dismantled bush
- Fixed crying expelled student bug
- Fixed User Report Status Overlay bug
- Fixed unassigned students notification bug
- Fixed smoking animation

Hello scholars,

We’re happy to finally be able to release the Alpha 3 version of Academia : School Simulator. It’s been more than a year since Alpha 2 came out, so let’s recap a few of the major updates we made since then!



Since Alpha 2, we added the Music Room, the Science Room, the Basketball Court, and many other new zones.



Kind of a boring sounding update, but this is definitely one of the most important things for a simulation game, since it helps you keep an eye on what’s going on in your school!



We added research to help you run your school better, and achievements for you to shoot for while playing the game!



Students now fall in love or can be rejected, and this affects their motivation!



Mismanaged your school? Hire an accountant and take out a loan!



Our major game mechanic for Alpha 2, the satisfaction mechanic added some much needed tension to the game. If you don’t run your school well and satisfy the students, they may drop out!

Those are only some of the stuff we added since Alpha 2. Feel free to check out our old updates to see what else we’ve been up to.

To prepare for Alpha 3, we wanted to spend most of the month making sure the game was as bug-free as possible (fingers crossed!) But of course we still wanted to add a couple of new things for you all. Check out what we’ve added this month:



You now have a rival school to compete with every year. Try to beat your rival school every year! The effect right now in the game is that it unlocks a couple of achievements, and sometimes your students will leave for the rival school. We will add more to this mechanic in the future.



The Zones, Build, Objects, Logistics, Planning, and Staff Menus have been given a major overhaul. You can now scroll through the menu to look for objects, or simply type for the object you’re looking for in the search bar. We also added a “Frequent” category in the Objects menu where you can find the most commonly used objects.


More achievements for those that love them, and new grants to reward folks that achieve them. What’s not to like?



It’s been brought to our attention that our students don’t have much racial diversity. We’ve added new skintones to the game to address this. Note that this only affects new students, so if you have an old save you will have to wait until the start of the new year.



We’ve improved the fences so that they no longer connect with the walls, and added some new fences for you to choose from!


We have made adjustments to the grants and rewards to make the game a little more balanced.


We balanced the game so that you can only hire higher level teachers as you increase in rank. This is still up for balancing so let us know what you think.


- Rebalanced satisfaction increase and decrease rates
- Fixed black screen when loading other files or going back to the main menu
- Fixed black screen when loading a save file
- Fixed counseling bug when loading a dropped out student
- Fixed multiple students using the same piano
- Fixed dropouts bug when loading a save file
- Fixed basketball bug
- Fixed zone colors visual bug when loading save files
- Showed school ranking first in the year-end evaluation
- Fixed dropouts bug when loading a save file
- Added increasing fun when using the Music Room and the Science Lab
- Improved basketball-related behaviors
- Fixed achievements bug
- Added achievements-related grants
- Fixed year-end evaluation bugs
- Restricted some special characters in school name
- Updated cost for grass
- Fixed error on starting a new game
- Added Rival Schools mechanics
- Fixed water fountain offset
- Fences now don't connect with walls
- Fixed school and rival ranking bug
- Removed clicking sound when starting the game
- Added smooth step to camera focus
- Adjusted texts
- Fixed reports visual bug
- Added delivery zone details
- Added icons and changed colors for Prestige tooltip
- Added new walls and fences
- Fixed staff behavior bugs
- Improved camera behavior in windowed mode
- Added new character faces
- Fixed students getting stuck in plate counter
- Allowed removal of bushes when doors or floors are built over them
- Fixed achievements-related bugs

Hi Everyone,

We wanted to share some news today that may disappoint some of you. We have an update coming to the game soon, which will be our Alpha 3. We wanted to let you know that the Alpha 3 update will be the last one with 32-bit support. I’m sure some of you will be disappointed, so we wanted to be honest and let you know why we are doing this.

32-bit systems have a limit of 2GB memory usage. This means that we’ve been struggling to optimize the game for the past year, and have lost valuable development time in the process. Given the fact that Steam’s own hardware surveys suggest that less than 2 percent of their users are on 32-bit systems, it’s hard to justify that additional time and effort.

This wasn’t an easy decision for us, and we wanted to make sure to support 32-bit at least up until Alpha 3, to guarantee any 32-bit players a more fully featured game than when we launched.

Academia : School Simulator will continue development, and we hope that by the time we release version 1, you’ll have a 64-bit system to enjoy all the new features we will have released by then.

Thanks for all the support, and see you at the next update.

Hello Scholars,

We're back to bring you an sweaty, exercise filled April update!




It's blazing hot this summer (well, it's summer here in the Philippines where we live) so why not build a Swimming Pool that your sophomore students can use for PE? Last one in the pool is a rotten egg!




It's NBA playoff season right now, so it's the perfect time to add a Basketball Court to your school and watch your students shoot some hoops!




This is the major feature we have been working on for quite sometime. Student needs now have to be satisfied, otherwise they will “drop out” or basically leave your school. Open the Reports menu and click on the satisfaction button to see how satisfied your students are.

This adds a layer of challenge to the game that wasn't there before, as you can now lose student if you don't maintain your school well!

NOTE: This is a new mechanic and will need balancing after we observe your feedback. Please let us know how you feel about it in the discussion boards!


To make bug reports easier, we have integrated them into the game. Clicking on the bug report button will now let you submit a bug report in-game with all the necessary logs and save files attached, so no more clicking around to find your save file!




We made some much-needed changes to the Teacher Hiring UI to make it easier to see which teachers are good at what subject. We've also added some arrows to the teacher avatars to more easily move them from the department to the teacher pool and back!


Students will sometimes use staff doors if there are no other nearby entrances/exits. Make sure they have regular doors accessible to them.


Fixed bug where values in Admissions Panel are erratic
Fixed tooltips in Reports Panel
Fixed crashes with big maps
Fixed bug when accepting transferee grants during the build phase
Fixed admissions bug
Fixed location of tooltips in the reports panel
Fixed objects bug when merging zones
Fixed wrong admission student number bug
Fixed zones' ambient sounds
Fixed objects orientation
Fixed in-game bug report bugs
Fixed Satisfaction reports student counts bugs
Fixed wrong dropout reason in Satisfactions reports panel
Fixed Admissions text bug
Fixed formula for getting interested students
Fixed bug with special rooms during zone removal
Fixed department panel bug
Fixed price tooltip bug


Color money in pointer when placing objects to red if player can't afford it
Added some tooltips
Updated Canteen Bench orientation
Zone labels of newly created zones now show up in front of other items
Added tooltip in admissions and admissions button blinking
Updated starting money options
Made pre-generated trees non-blockers to ease confusion
Rebalanced Satisfaction damages
Improved Satisfaction reports panel
Improved worker behaviour
dded Bowel need and behaviour to staff
Adjusted Safety need damages
Updated reports page colors
Changed littering probability
Removed long names to avoid clipping in the new HireTeacherPanel UI
Darkened year-end evaluation's congratulatory panel's background
Updated Satisfaction-related texts
Applied gameover when all students dropout
Changed priorities of character needs
Rebalanced character needs
Optimized workers behavior. Added notification when workers can't reach their tasks
Added year level in special PE zones (Pool, Track, and Court)