Ren'Py WTM Academy [v0.351] [Ninoss]

[Magister Crudi]

For interaction with the wider community, I think corrupting the moms is a good first step towards that, which is coming in the next update, so I think Ninoss has the same idea in that regard.

Yeah, I'm not sure what he has in mind but it sounds like a good start. But it currently seems to me that once you've overcome the initial financial and PTA-related prestige hurdles all of the tension drains out of the game and it becomes a repetitive grind towards the next set of photo-shoots. By introducing conflict from the outside community - with the risk of a non-financial game-ender - you can maintain the tension while developing the plot. You can see how your suggested premise lends itself to threats from religious fanatics - maybe even Christian terrorists. And you can see how it might be defeated via the notorious predilections religious hypocrites have for sexual debaucheries and their potential for bribery or blackmail.

The premise I suggested was inspired by the unholy alliance between religious moralists and

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s (mostly academics) to criminalise a wide range of sexual activity on the basis that it allegedly leads to abuse due to inevitable power imbalances between the participants.

Here in NSW sex work has been decriminalised since the mid-90s and that's been a huge success story, especially for sex workers and also in reducing police corruption. But some feminists have teamed up with mostly religious conservatives to try to overturn that in favour of the 'Swedish model' of sex work regulation that criminalises clients and reduces the safety of sex workers while driving them into poverty. Sweden also has very restrictive laws governing sexual consent, as Julian Assange discovered, which sex-negative feminists consider exemplary. I see that as a more likely threat than a return to retro-Puritan sexual repression, but I don't live in a US red state ...

 

[Factor96]

Yeah, I'm not sure what he has in mind but it sounds like a good start. But it currently seems to me that once you've overcome the initial financial and PTA-related prestige hurdles all of the tension drains out of the game and it becomes a repetitive grind towards the next set of photo-shoots. By introducing conflict from the outside community - with the risk of a non-financial game-ender - you can maintain the tension while developing the plot. You can see how your suggested premise lends itself to threats from religious fanatics - maybe even Christian terrorists. And you can see how it might be defeated via the notorious predilections religious hypocrites have for sexual debaucheries and their potential for bribery or blackmail.

The premise I suggested was inspired by the unholy alliance between religious moralists and

You must be registered to see the links

s (mostly academics) to criminalise a wide range of sexual activity on the basis that it allegedly leads to abuse due to inevitable power imbalances between the participants.

Here in NSW sex work has been decriminalised since the mid-90s and that's been a huge success story, especially for sex workers and also in reducing police corruption. But some feminists have teamed up with mostly religious conservatives to try to overturn that in favour of the 'Swedish model' of sex work regulation that criminalises clients and reduces the safety of sex workers while driving them into poverty. Sweden also has very restrictive laws governing sexual consent, as Julian Assange discovered, which sex-negative feminists consider exemplary. I see that as a more likely threat than a return to retro-Puritan sexual repression, but I don't live in a US red state ...

Okay, this premise is actually really good, as it pretty much allows one to have their cake and eat it too by combining religious moralists with SWERFs. I'm definitely more familiar with the U.S. context, where it's primarily religious moralists doing sex/porn restriction of any type.

For the longer game... I have more thoughts for later, but I'd say I think we have a pretty good early and mid-game(corruption girls and finance raising), especially if the sex addict mechanic could return in some fashion. At some point though, we need a graduation mechanic of some type for the late game that has a way for the girls to benefit you, such as by becoming assistants(an idea I talked about way back on Page 20 or so), or otherwise becoming sex addicts. Your premise sounds like a way for the story to play a bigger role and further enhance the mid game, with some potential late game implications.

 

[falco256]

Okay, this premise is actually really good, as it pretty much allows one to have their cake and eat it too by combining religious moralists with SWERFs. I'm definitely more familiar with the U.S. context, where it's primarily religious moralists doing sex/porn restriction of any type.

For the longer game... I have more thoughts for later, but I'd say I think we have a pretty good early and mid-game(corruption girls and finance raising), especially if the sex addict mechanic could return in some fashion. At some point though, we need a graduation mechanic of some type for the late game that has a way for the girls to benefit you, such as by becoming assistants(an idea I talked about way back on Page 20 or so), or otherwise becoming sex addicts. Your premise sounds like a way for the story to kind of bookend things.

could actually trigger it by adding new traits. i.e. Devout or similar, so that if you push them too hard, too fast. they then go running to their church etc.

I'm still hoping that we can use custom text for the individual girls one day though. So that Modder's can make them all seem different depending on the situation. Especially if its the first time you cross thresholds with them.

 

[Magister Crudi]

I'm still hoping that we can use custom text for the individual girls one day though. So that Modder's can make them all seem different depending on the situation. Especially if its the first time you cross thresholds with them.

I'm not sure what you mean there. The 'events' allow coding of custom text, though they're not fully implement in 0.24ac. But if you mean customised responses to exam events, photoshoots, etc I think that would be fairly easy to implement from within girlConfig.ini after a few straightforward script mods, albeit at the risk of bloating save files and loading times. It would get stale pretty quickly though and you'd just stop reading the responses.

Rather than mess with events - which I assume Ninoss is working on - I've been working on a slightly different mechanic I call 'Encounters'.

When you go out the door at certain times of day you have the option to take a walk. The null encounter is simply an hour of time passes. But there's also randomised encounters with students which have generic set pieces that apply to any girl (depending on stats) that can be over-ridden with coded encounters specific to individual students (similar to events). There's several possible encounter outcomes - including getting mugged, losing money and spending a few days unable to leave home, with the possibility of students rocking up to 'take care of you' (there's lots of 'sexy nurse' vids out there) - but the primary outcome would be the possibility of the student you encounter losing or gaining a trait with the right (or wrong) interaction. (e.g. a student is inspired by your teaching and photoshoots to become a cam girl, thereby gaining the 'horny' trait, which is rarer in my mod but allows 'nude' and 'pornographic' photoshoots with sufficient corruption even without the relevant PTA rules and also increases photoshoot 'willingness' proportionate to 'arousal')

Right now I've got incomplete 'Chat', 'Jogging', 'Cafe', 'Park' and 'Library' encounters that allow for differing sets of outcomes but I've stopped working on them until I see Ninoss's new version.

I also have user settable intelligence gain per exam, which should allow for a longer student development arc before graduation.

BTW, I'm not sure why so many respondents want Ninoss to add 'More girls', given how easy it is to add them yourself and the instructions Ninoss provides for doing so. Modders like Jordan have already provided stacks of girls, though most could definitely use more photoshoots. Events, OTOH, have the potential to add a lot of gameplay and story depth and good ones are beyond the scripting abilities of most users. I'm looking forward to seeing how they come along in the next version.

 

[bob0000002]

The premise is fine. It's an extremely common hentai / JAV trope and is perfectly serviceable here.

Injecting a ton of cringe current year politics into it would not be an improvement; lighthearted porn games like this are a nice break from the relentless politicization of the real world and should remain so IMHO.

 

[Magister Crudi]

The premise is fine. It's an extremely common hentai / JAV trope and is perfectly serviceable here.

I'm not sure how well Japanese models of sexual consent & taboos translate outside their cultural contexts. Public mores surrounding sexual consent are both inherently political and intrinsic to the game. You even set the photoclub rules with voting, speechifying and an abstraction of institutional prestige, so I'm not sure where your definition of 'politics' starts and ends.

If the game is gonna avoid descending into the already crowded porn game hell of mindless repetitive gameplay and almost zero replay value it's gonna need some sort of narrative progression and the premise is the natural place to lay the foundations for that. It would assist playability if it was relevant to real world dilemmas so players would have a natural 'feel' for how to progress the game and respond to new situations. An epic game series like "The Elder Scrolls" has vast lore and mythos to contextualise it, but a one-off porn game doesn't have that kind of luxury so it's probably best to work with what we've already got, whether or not you choose to call it 'political'.

"The government has suddenly implemented free use sexual consent laws with no explanation and without triggering widespread rioting" doesn't really cut the mustard. It's so far from our usual expectations it can offer no real guidance as to what to expect next, unless perhaps we're steeped in hentai and JAV lore. The notion students' parents would vote to have their daughters sexually exploited for commercial purposes doesn't fit into any reality I've encountered so I'm at a complete loss as to their motives and can't know how to sensibly respond to plot developments involving them.

 

[bob0000002]

I'm not sure how well Japanese models of sexual consent & taboos translate outside their cultural contexts. Public mores surrounding sexual consent are both inherently political and intrinsic to the game. You even set the photoclub rules with voting, speechifying and an abstraction of institutional prestige, so I'm not sure where your definition of 'politics' starts and ends.

If the game is gonna avoid descending into the already crowded porn game hell of mindless repetitive gameplay and almost zero replay value it's gonna need some sort of narrative progression and the premise is the natural place to lay the foundations for that. It would assist playability if it was relevant to real world dilemmas so players would have a natural 'feel' for how to progress the game and respond to new situations. An epic game series like "The Elder Scrolls" has vast lore and mythos to contextualise it, but a one-off porn game doesn't have that kind of luxury so it's probably best to work with what we've already got, whether or not you choose to call it 'political'.

"The government has suddenly implemented free use sexual consent laws with no explanation and without triggering widespread rioting" doesn't really cut the mustard. It's so far from our usual expectations it can offer no real guidance as to what to expect next, unless perhaps we're steeped in hentai and JAV lore. The notion students' parents would vote to have their daughters sexually exploited for commercial purposes doesn't fit into any reality I've encountered so I'm at a complete loss as to their motives and can't know how to sensibly respond to plot developments involving them.

That'll be a hard pass from me dog.

If I wanted to listen to a lecture about 'relevant' issues I would consume literally any non-pornographic game or other piece of media made in the last two decades. If your fetish is biting social commentary then I won't judge but to me that shit is boner kryptonite. It's cringe and wholly unwelcome.

 

[WarblGarbl]

I feel like a quality story is a bit counterproductive if this is to be a sandbox game with user added content being a big draw. No matter which way you slice it the premise is going to be unbelievable due to its extremeness. Utilizing the outside community to present mechanics to deal with besides money would be nice though. I just wouldn’t want to see a lot of devtime fleshing out a world that doesn’t need it.

If a modder could add lore that’d be great, but I’m not really sure about the capabilities of modding.

 

[Factor96]

I think the above discussion is why I'd recommend the game stick to a minimalist plot, and have more in depth stuff for mods to mess with.

The premise is fine. It's an extremely common hentai / JAV trope and is perfectly serviceable here.

Injecting a ton of cringe current year politics into it would not be an improvement; lighthearted porn games like this are a nice break from the relentless politicization of the real world and should remain so IMHO.

My issue with current premise is it just seems unnecessarily more complicated than the original one: A school screwing over its students(a bit more literally in this case), to make money. Currently, I feel we're in a bad middle ground between the zero plot you want and the more complicated premise that Magister Crudi wants.

 

[Magister Crudi]

If your fetish is biting social commentary then I won't judge but to me that shit is boner kryptonite.

I don't find congressional speeches particularly boner enhancing either, but that's exactly how WTM Academy starts. I think it would be more honest if you just laid out what you personally find 'cringe' inducing and based your objections in that rather than pretending there's some sort of objective category called 'politics' or 'social commentary' which needs to be expunged from porn games to make them playable.

If you need some sort of mindless, repetitive point-and-click task rewarded with porn for your boner to put in an appearance I can easily code something for you that will do that with any pics or vids you care to download into a particular directory and you'll have an endlessly expandable and replayable porn game that should suffice for the rest of your life. There's plenty of porn games out there that are little more than that ('Grand Smash', 'Celebrity Brothel' and 'Naughty World' all come to mind) so I guess your needs are already well catered for.

But Ninoss has gone to the trouble of developing an innovative and fairly complex game mechanic that can serve as the basis for an entertaining ongoing experience that engages with more than just your boner and allows for relatively simple and potentially endless expansion of porn data that can keep it interesting and replayable for a long time. Personally I think it lends itself more to a scenario in which the player owns a photo studio and grooms women he meets in his day to day tasks to be his models than it does to a school in which students need to be 'corrupted', but I fully respect Ninoss's right to use a scenario he likes rather than allowing it to be dictated by game mechanics.

But as it stands WTM Academy doesn't offer much in the way of development of characters, narrative or game challenges. It's not hard to permanently overcome the initial hurdles of money and prestige and pass all the PTA rules, after which it quickly decays into a repetitive cycle of corrupting new students to access new exam event videos and photoshoots while prestige and funds keep growing beyond any in-game relevance.

To escape from that there needs to be additional challenges that put in an appearance as the game progresses and for them to be engaging and rewarding there needs to be a sense of achievement in overcoming them other than enduring mindless grind. Creating a narrative whereby players can use their own lived experience as a basis for solving challenges provides that.

So if the Academy is under threat from religious hypocrites you could use your own knowledge of how they operate to find your way to a sexual blackmail situation that would neutralise them. If it's a political opportunist you might increase Academy or personal funds to the point where you can make substantial campaign donations to keep them happy. If it's parents worried about their daughters' morality and reputations you could counter that with programs that seem to enhance students' career prospects and social respectability. And you could have the development of student stats enabling you to use your students to help solve those problems rather than just access more photoshoots (e.g. by agreeing to visit a religious protester in his hotel room while you set up a camera outside his window).

To be rewarding the challenges and their solutions have to have some basis in a situation - real or fictional - the player feels familiar enough with to be able to imagine a path forward. I'm not familiar enough with Japanese culture to know whether "the government has just passed free use laws for no apparent reason" would work that way in Japan, but I sure know it doesn't work in any Western culture I know of.

A game premise is exactly that and nothing more. It offers a narrative framework in which the game can continue to unfold in a coherent and consistent manner but there's no need to revisit it once it's been established any more than it's necessary for the current implementation of WTM Academy to keep cycling through sittings of Congress.

 

[Magister Crudi]

I feel like a quality story is a bit counterproductive if this is to be a sandbox game with user added content being a big draw. No matter which way you slice it the premise is going to be unbelievable due to its extremeness.

Good observations, but I don't think WTM Academy is sandbox or likely to become so. The game mechanics don't lend themselves to the hugely divergent narrative paths that characterise sandbox games.

What I'm interested in is unlocking the huge potential for user created content Ninoss has built into the game with a bigger game framework that would take advantage of bigger data sets to keep the player experience sufficiently interesting to make it worth implementing them. Bob seems to want games that provide an escape from the 'cringe' of politics but I'm more interested in games that provide an escape from the tedious grind that characterises so many real world workplaces. A good sandbox game is a great way to do that, but a more linearly structured game like WTM Academy can still offer a lot with a sufficiently progressive narrative.

 

[WarblGarbl]

Good observations, but I don't think WTM Academy is sandbox or likely to become so. The game mechanics don't lend themselves to the hugely divergent narrative paths that characterise sandbox games.

What I'm interested in is unlocking the huge potential for user created content Ninoss has built into the game with a bigger game framework that would take advantage of bigger data sets to keep the player experience sufficiently interesting to make it worth implementing them. Bob seems to want games that provide an escape from the 'cringe' of politics but I'm more interested in games that provide an escape from the tedious grind that characterises so many real world workplaces. A good sandbox game is a great way to do that, but a more linearly structured game like WTM Academy can still offer a lot with a sufficiently progressive narrative.

I was thinking sandbox with the sense of doing what you want compared to a visual novel like on the rails type of narrative. It might just be because I hate visual novels I get them mixed up though. There could only be one narrative path for this game, I agree.

 

[Magister Crudi]

I hate visual novels

I've got nothing against them in principle and can see how they could be excellent interactive variations on graphic novels like Gaiman's Sandman series. But they've gotta start with some actual writing skills and I'm yet to see much of that in the visual novels I've found online.

 

[jwdante123]

I like this game.

 

[asmf888]

when is the next update?

 

[Gdiggers]

when is the next update?

I hope I'm not stepping on Ninoss' toes by answering, but version 0.28 is basically in testing phase right now.

Multiple game crashing bugs have been fixed but because of additional features, not sure how much Ninoss wants said on those, more bugs than expected have been encountered.

If you want more specific details, the discord has everything. (especially for Patreon subscribers who get early access )

 

[Magister Crudi]

It's getting busier for me over June, so I'll probably keep fiddling with the modded version of 0.24ac I've got for another week or two waiting for 0.28 to go public so I can see how much work there would be applying the mods to it.

I'm open to suggestions as to whether I should clean up a public version for testing and comment right away, on the understanding it'll be obsolete and incompatible as soon as 0.28 drops.

 

[AngryBabboon]

OK, here's the updated modpack.
As always, not all actions are exact or fit the classroom setting. The goal is to fill as many of the exam actions as possible.
(Just place the girl's modpack in the "girls" folder in the WTM game. Make sure you have no more than the current max of 22 girls.)

Mega (old link)

Mod is split into 4 sections; Schoolgirl age, Mature Women, Girls around their 30s (middle), and Ebony.

Take who you want.

(If you have any requests, hit me up. Just make sure they're someone I can source the content for.)

EDIT: NOV 11/2022

There is an update to this modpack (and a central source for modpacks going forward) at:

You must be registered to see the links

Any chance you are gonna reupload it to gofile? tried downloading it from mega... and yeah good luck with them lightspeeds

 

[Sonico]

I hope I'm not stepping on Ninoss' toes by answering, but version 0.28 is basically in testing phase right now.

Multiple game crashing bugs have been fixed but because of additional features, not sure how much Ninoss wants said on those, more bugs than expected have been encountered.

If you want more specific details, the discord has everything. (especially for Patreon subscribers who get early access )

Sorry to be a bother with this subject again, but any news on how have things been going with the update on Discord?

 

[Gdiggers]

Sorry to be a bother with this subject again, but any news on how have things been going with the update on Discord?

If all goes according to plan. Ninoss says it'll be updated next week.