Hello Scholars,

We’re excited to bring you our next update, called Food Fight! Here’s what’s new:


Delinquent students will now occasionally start food fights in the cafeteria, leading to another giant mess for your janitors to clean up. Make sure your delinquent students are getting counseling or other disciplinary measures to try to keep this under control!


You can now adjust the quality of your school’s food. Inferior food is cheaper but will make your students sick. Superior food is more expensive but can improve student health, which in turn leads to better learning and less delinquency! Click on zone edit and a kitchen zone to adjust, or check the kitchen reports panel.


The goon mechanic was boring for some folks since once you set up some routes, the monitors would automatically get rid of the goons. We decided to make it a little more fun by making it a hide and seek game. Your monitors will alert you if they see someone suspicious, but you now have to find and click on the goon to dispatch it. Let us know what you think about this!


At the end of the school year we want you to be able to look back on how you’ve improved (or worsened) over time, so this new school timeline has been implemented to help you track stuff like your rank, your student’s grades, and more! Click on the tabs to show and hide data so you can plan for your school’s future.

As we near Alpha 4 release we are slowly cleaning up and finalizing the UI for a much better playing experience. We’ve also updated the colors for the school logo for better color combinations (we hope!)


- Fixed Flags localization bug
- Fixed prestige bug when a student dropped out
- Fixed tofu characters bug
- Fixed goons bug
- Fixed pet eat animation
- Fixed school bus not arriving bug
- Fixed wrong salary deduction for hiring teachers
- Fixed counselling queue bug
- Fixed admissions grant bug
- Added bug where students enter the school from outside the bounds of the map
- Fixed flagpole error
- Fixed custom logo icon bug
- Fixed Student panel issue on different resolutions
- Improved blocker in land expansion
- Improved delinquent queueing
- Improved Overall student info panel
- Changed goon visit formula
- Fixed school bus not entering bug
- Fixed Admissions grant requirement bug
- Zero funds gameover now happens at the end of the day
- Fixed missing principal action localization
- Added TobaccoBillboard object
- Added Health problems in clinic reports page
- Fixed pet animation playing while game is paused
- Fixed stuck on loading transition after starting school year
- Started implementing school timeline
- Implemented food options
- Updated health system
- Implemented goon queueing when kicked out
- Fixed teachers are not doing anything upon entry
- Added icons to the reports panel
- Improved timeline graphs
- Added student roaming AI if there are no available chairs in the AV room
- Fixed food quality header bug in the kitchen reports panel
- Fixed student leaving bug
- Fixed flagpole bug where it reverts to the default flag after loading
- Foxed UI localization bugs
- Fixed pet labels
- Updated evaluation panel and year end congratulatory panel
- Fixed missing text name for principal
- Implemented food fight
- Updated health, dirt, and food crate variables
- Improved UI
- Improved school timeline graphs
- Fixed staff context panel auto closing

Hello Scholars!

We’re excited to share our new update with you, which we’re calling School Spirit! Here’s what’s been added since the last update.


Are you a Drill Sergeant, a Reverend, a Capitalist, or just a plain old hardworking principal? These are some of the options available to you with our new Special Principals mechanic. Whether it’s your first time or your 10th playthrough and you want something new, the special principals should give your game a little extra flavor.


A fun little addition to you school, select a school pet when you start your school (old schools will have a random pet assigned) to bring some love and joy to your school! Any student that interacts with the pet will get a bonus to fun!

You can now choose a flag to represent your school. Our special flags perpetually flutter in a magical breeze.

In line with the additions above, we also cleaned up the school customization panel to make it easier to interact with!

We’ve introduced some changes to help with the pacing of the game. This includes more realistic bank loans, which require you to reach a certain amount of prestige before the bank entrusts you with a larger loan amount.

dropped out students may sometimes appear as unassigned students after loading the save file with the dropped out students


- Added Utility-generating objects grants
- Fixed cashflow bug
- Fixed admissions bug
- Fixed year end results UI bug
- Fixed year-end results data integrity bug
- Updated school bus grant text
- Fixed cashflow bug
- Fixed school bus staying in school overnight bug
- Fixed negative incoming students bug
- Fixed expelled students still waiting at the bus stop
- Fixed not enough money bug in sandbox mode
- Fixed localization bugs
- Auto remove floors in tiles with objects that restrict floors
- Force staff to eat at staff cafeteria if it exists
- Added Thai localization
- Tile context panel for floors will no longer be opened (can't press on tiles anymore) - Added dog and cat pets
- Updated student tuition, subsidy, and teacher subject teaching stats
- Fixed estonian localization bug
- Fixed hotkeys not being localized bug
- Fixed characters starting in the middle of the map
- Fixed students vanishing into thin air during dismissal
- Fixed losing zone links when zone is removed
- Implemented pet context panel
- Added pet eating animation
- Added thoughts for pets
- Added localization in custom school panel

It's been two years since we launched Academia : School Simulator in Early Access, and we have consistently updated the game based on your feedback. It's a much better game now, and if you agree, we hope you'll nominate it us for the Labor of Love award. There are far bigger games out there than us, but let's see how far we can go with your help!

Hello Scholars, we’re excited to announce that our upcoming update will be called School Spirit! This update will be a little less mechanics heavy, and will focus more on letting you do stuff to personalize your school.

Our big update this month is a special group of new principals that with different attributes that will shape how you play the game! We will also let you pick a school pet and a school flag.

We’re hoping to release this update within the next few weeks, so keep an eye out on our page for more news!

Hello scholars,

We're back with an exciting announcement. Squeaky Wheel is publishing its first game, called Ruinarch!

Ruinarch is a wickedly fun evil overlord simulator where you cause havoc on people’s lives before taking their lands. Inspired by story generators like Rimworld and Dwarf Fortress, create an infernal narrative for your victims as you poison food, raise the dead, and inflict endless misery upon them.

If the trailer and description sound up your alley, please wishlist and follow the game now!

We're super excited to be taking this journey with a fellow Filipino studio, and we hope that you will join us! That's all for now, more Academia updates coming soon!

Hello Scholars!

We’re excited to release our second themed update, Land Expansion! The key mechanic is fairly obvious, so let’s get right into it!



This is something we’ve been promising for a very long time, and now you can finally expand your school! If you felt that your school was so constricted that the students were already sitting on top of each other, now you can buy four plots of land to expand your school!



Kids will get tired walking to school all day, especially with your expanded school now taking more of the map. You can now spend some money to put the kids on schoolbuses and make sure they get to class on time, ready to take on the world of learning!

NOTE: School bus zones MUST be built next to the sidewalk, and school bus operation starts the day AFTER building it.



Utility costs getting you down? Become self sufficient by drawing water from the ground or harvesting energy from the sun! But be careful, these objects are very expensive and have a higher rate of breaking down.



500 students with raging hormones not enough for you? Well with this update we are letting you build your own grave by getting certification for up to 700 students! Just get your lawyer to sign the paperwork and you’re good to go!


We added mod filters to the in-game mod searching tool to better enable you to look for mods!

-Fixed counselor bug
- Improved interested students implementation
- Updated reading learning chance
- Fixed load time issue
- Fixed achievement bug regarding "Abandon School!" and "Peeing in the Bushes" achievements
- Fixed gang member bug due to dropped out students
- Fixed vegetation and other bugs in the new Buy Land mechanic
- Fixed student's clinic behavior bug
- Added animation to prestige change
- Fixed Buy Land bugs
- Fixed Utility-generating objects bug
- Fixed game crash when loading
- Fixed counselor bug
- Fixed Japanese localization bug
- Fixed school bus bugs
- Implemented new student population cap
- Added correct values for water and electricity cost for utility-generating objects
- Fixed bug where students don't use the bench in bus stop
- Fixed UI bus relating to bus stop
- Fixed agents spawning in the middle of the map
- Fixed utility-generating objects bugs
- Updated trash can capacity and litter levels to create trash bags
- Fixed game going past the night time because dropped out students are still in school

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!