Hello scholars,

We’re excited to announce that after almost a year since Alpha 3, we are releasing Academia : School Simulator Alpha 4! This marks a ton of development since Alpha 3, but first let’s go over what’s new since our last update.


Teachers now have specific traits that affect their classes. Will you choose a knowledgeable but super strict teacher or one that is not as smart but knows how to make their class fun? This provides even more challenge when selecting the best teacher!


You can now customize the school even more to create a specific challenge for yourself! Will you start a school for rich kids or low income kids? Are you up to the challenge of starting a school with a neighborhood with lots of goons? Will you choose advanced students over those that have struggled with their classes? It’s all up to you!


We changed how the edit zone panel details work for a better user experience, and also added a way for you to personalize the name of each zone. You can even name a toilet after your best frienemy!

Each Alpha update aims to make the game more user friendly and polish up the UI. We have made numerous changes to improve the play experience for you and simply make the game look a little nicer. Some of the UI changes include:

Updated School Creation Panel
Updated End of Year School Evaluation Panel
Updated HUD provides easy access to important information
Updated Todo List shows problems you need to address in your school like broken objects


Yes it’s a little ridiculous to announce clouds, but they just look so cool I could zoom in and out all day!

For those that have been waiting to try the game since Alpha 3, here’ everything we’ve added to the game since last year!


Events will appear randomly throughout the game to give you moral dilemmas, opportunities, or just happy events where your students tell you that you did a great job!


When you feel like you have run your course with your current school, why not sell it and start fresh with a new principal, a harder difficulty, and a different school pet? Selling your school gives you a larger amount of money to start with, based on your school valuation.


You can now adjust the quality of your food if you want to save money, or feed the students better food for better learning. And keep an eye out for your delinquents, because they may start a food fight!


Are you a Drill Sergeant, a Reverend, a Capitalist, or just a plain old hardworking principal? Choose a principal based on your personality and play style.


Hire an accountant and a lawyer to draw up the paperwork and buy new plots of land to expand your educational institution!


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.


You can now link certain zones to each other, to maximize efficiency! With Zone Linking you can now specify which classrooms will go to specific cafeterias and common rooms, as well as principals’ offices. We’ve also added links from kitchen to cafeteria, so you can more efficiently control your kitchen staff.


Adding to the challenge in the game, the goons are a bunch of tough guys who hang around your school and turn your kids into delinquents! Chase them off on your own, or empower your monitor to do the dirty work for you.


We added the lawyer and vice principal staff to expand the options available to you. The lawyer staff allows you to expel students and mass fire the other staff, and opens up different research trees. The vice principal helps your principal manage the sheer number of delinquents in your school!


It’s tiring to walk all the way to school. Sign up your students for the schoolbus so they get to school well rested and ready to learn!

That’s only the major stuff, there’s a lot more other things that we’ve added since last year! Thanks so much to all of our players for continuously giving us feedback and support throughout this Early Access process. We are slowly inching our way to the full release of the game, and we hope you look forward to the coming updates!

Hello Overlords,

While we initially promised a release date of May 2020, we’re sad to announce that we will be pushing back release by a few months, to August 2020. Even though we’re pretty evil, it felt a little bit tone deaf to be releasing a game about ruining people’s lives while the world seemingly falls apart on us because of the covid-19 pandemic.

You won’t have to wait too long though, because we’re only moving the launch to August, by which point hopefully the world will be on the road to recovery (so we can wreck virtual worlds guilt-free). We’ll take that extra time to add more polish and content to the game so that you’ll get a much better game upon release.

In the meantime to whet your appetite, check out this new and improved trailer we made! We hope it gets you as pumped up for Early Access release as we are!



That’s all from us for now, stay safe, stay indoors, and wash your hands!

Hello Scholars,

Our latest update is here, called Eventful Days! The biggest difference here is now you will experience random events! Read more below to find out what’s in store for you.


Every few days a random event will occur where you will have to make a decision. You can ignore the event at the cost of prestige. You can see a hint of what some of the events will be in the illustration we made, but we don’t wanna spoil too much! We hope you guys like the events we’ve made so far, but feel free to suggest some events that you think might be fun/interesting!


This is a longtime request, you can now sell your school to start over with much more money. The amount of money depends on your school valuation, which you can see in the reports screen. Restarting lets you pick your difficulty, school principal, school logo etc.


For those that can’t be bothered to find the and kick out the goons, we added a research that takes care of it for you!

As we build up to Alpha 4 release in April we are improving the UI bit by bit for a better experience. Some of the stuff we’ve been doing include:

• Updated Cashflow Panel (now shows number of objects, added icons for easier navigation)
  
• Decluttered settings menu and move some icons to the HUD for easier access
  
• Update the save and load panels (autosaves now show more useful info)
  
• Graphics settings in Settings Panel
  
• Those and a lot more small tweaks have been added to the UI.

In this release, we changed how the character images are managed. They are now separate images such that they can be added to main atlas (a big image that collects the smaller images) that the rest of the game uses. We did it this way so that future character skin mods would no longer break whenever we have character related updates.

However, this means that all the current character skin mods like uniforms would be broken until the mod developer fixes them. We're truly sorry for this. The game will not break when you've installed these mods. They just won't get applied since the images that needs to be replaced are now different.

We've also updated the reskin modding guide in light of this change.


One major thing we did with this build is that we temporarily removed the "Sell to the Grid" Research. We know some of you have been using it as a "unlimited money" workaround, but that was never the intent. We will be thinking about how we can add it again in a more sensible fashion in the next update.

- 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
- Fixed wrong locked reports button colors
- Fixed weird behavior of the clinic zone details panel
- Fixed events bugs
- Implemented camera shake for the earthquake event
- Reduced goon visit chance as event cost
- Removed concrete tiles from default map
- Prepare pending event during loading
- Added tooltips for the student population rollover icons
- Improved UI panels (Save/Load panel, User Reports, Top right HUD, Settings, and Custom Logo panels)
- Changed earthquake camera shake duration
- Fixed bug where next day transition happens in game over screen
- Fixed slow/laggy feedback panel opening
- Removed unnecessary divider in save and load panels
- Redesigned mods installation panel at the start of the game
- Fixed bugs in display settings
- Updated object costs
- Fixed load game error due to missing carried object
- Implemented sound effect for earthquake event
- Fixed custom school logo black and white colors seems broken
- Fixed students not going to the school bus at the end of the day
- Fixed worker not fixing toilet cubicle

Hi all, just wanted to share with you that Squeaky Wheel's first published game, Ruinarch, will be coming to Early Access in May 2020!

Ruinarch is a devilishly fun simulation/sandbox game where you are an evil demon overlord creating havoc and invading fantasy worlds. A rich and fertile land lies before you, ripe for the picking. Take over regions one by one, spreading your influence inexorably towards the heart of the kingdom. Turn heroic defenders into pitiful wretches by unleashing an array of demonic spells upon them, creating a hellish chronicle for the ages.

If that sounds like fun to you, please do wishlist the game now!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/909320/Ruinarch/

Hello Scholars,

Thanks to the magic of math, Academia : School Simulator is roughly 20% off if you buy it with the Academia : School Simulator + Political Animals Bundle. This limited time sale is ongoing until next week, so get it while you can, and share with your friends!

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!