Princess Maker 2 Mod for WG

Project Ideas & Discussion
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Lurker of several years here, excited to actively step into the forum!

I found the Princess Maker franchise about a year ago through someone’s comment that it had some limited WG content. I was a little disappointed in how limited that turned out to be, but I saw enormous potential in it. I also really like the game itself.

I’ve been playing with the idea of re-programming the game in RenPy, and I’ve even gotten the basic foundation of the UI up and running. However, the rest of the game will take quite a commitment of time and effort to recreate and modify. Before I go any further into that commitment, I wanted to run the idea by this community. Specifically, I have these two questions:

1. Does this fly legally?
I’ve heard it said that since Princess Maker 2 Refine was released on Steam, the original English beta is no longer abandonware. However, I question that. The game is still available to play on a number of abandonware sites. (Classic Reload, Playclassicgames, Abandonia…) One would think the producer would have it taken down if it were not to be considered abandonware.

In the end, is it licit to use the game sprites (from Spriters’ Resource) and other assets, while attempting to recreate the game mechanics of the original, given that I will not sell my finished product?

2. How would a WG raising sim be received?
I’m planning on these changes to the base story: instead of the gods dropping a child on you for no reason, they give her to you in order to promote fat acceptance. That is, they foresee that if current trends continue, the future is one where fat people are shamed, and only thin girls glorified. They ask that by fattening Olive, and raising her to be well-liked and influential, you help prevent such a sad future. (I’m on the fence about adding some time travel elements.)

I know some people already object to certain more risqué elements of PM2, such as the Undress item, and the father marriage ending. Throw in weight gain - with its larger sprites, gameplay consequences, etc. - and I’m not sure how it would be received. I could easily do away with some such elements if necessary.

Don’t get me wrong, I would never promote the intentional fattening of a minor in real life, but here it would be in a game, and by a quasi-father, even if consensual. What say you?

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If the princess is underage by US law. It won’t be able to be hosted on the site.

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Thanks for the speedy reply. Just to be perfectly clear, this will be the case even without explicit content?

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We don’t allow minor content on the site, you’d need to change out references to their ages and potentially all of the sprite work. @grotlover2 would have the final say on that.

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It’s a little grey legally if there’s no explicit content, but we also don’t have budget for a legal defense team here at WGF so in the interest of us not going to prison… yeah, what Kilif said.

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Kind of a bummer, but not unexpected.

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Why not just rework the game with a different character that isn’t a minor? If I’m not mistaken, the character is a blank slate anyways. The major downside would be the art would need to be updated, but given how slight the WG is in the sprites anyways, you’d need to do that anyways.

Let us know if you have any further questions or concerns, we’re always happy to try and work around this kind of stuff.

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Well, I suppose it would be possible, though the original plot is heavily dependent on the raising aspect. I’ll have to think on this a bit more. Thanks for the suggestions.

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Raising is not much different from teaching and guiding and an adult princess would still not have the knowledge or skill to accomplish whatever plot you’d like to put in the game without that guidance from the player in my opinion. So I feel the general concept can still work and you could go as fetish heavy or light as you like with an adult character here.

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As a really nice bonus, you could actually end up with a product that you would have ownership of, not just a mod.

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Making PM2 but in Ren’Py wouldn’t be a mod, it would require a complete remake, assuming you can figure out its source at all.

Making your own thing is definitely the recommended path, perhaps with a few customization choices prior to gameplay if you really want some level of control over the MC’s upbringing.

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The fact the princess got no formal training at a younger age would be a pretty fun thing to play around with narratively. You’re used to preparing decades of elocution lessons and this brat just shows up out of nowhere almost at her age of majority.

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If you’ve gone through the effort of remaking engine you may as well put in the last 5% and get custom unique art assets.

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Just throwing a name out there if OP does want to just make their own game: Princess Feeder

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These are all great suggestions, guys, and I’m grateful for the support.

I’ve never programmed a game before, and thus I was planning on getting my feet wet by simply following the structure of an already-made game. The further I get away from that, the less confidence I have in my ability to make it work.

For one, I’m a terrible artist, and was hoping to be able to modify the existing sprites for WG. Besides which, a lot of my motivation came from my love for the game as it is.

However, your ideas have already helped me come up with some alternatives, and I definitely see the advantages to creating something of my own. I was already planning on a very long-term, slowly progressing project, so I have plenty of time to figure out what I want to do.

Yeah, the original code is encrypted beyond retrieval, so some of the mechanics would have to be estimates. However, I’ve already worked out a good deal of it, besides what was available on the fan wiki.

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Well
You could borrow the concept and the framework obviously the player character wouldn’t romance their own kid so that’s denfenstrated out of sheer principle, well depending on how many fetishes maybe involved the story could explore the living situation and requires of the life style if there were no life threatening issues, the space, clothes and mobility of larger physiques be they in the form of weight gain or parts of the body growing larger in comparison to the others, if inflation(air or water) or berry is involved then it could go into what maybe required to live in such a situation, clothes, assistance, how they deal with it so on, and with berry how they may deal with juicing and managing their fluctuating size
The player could be the royal alchemist or just an alchemist depending on the origin of the princess in story and the situation could be set up by a choice in that the alchemist locked all his projects in a hurry for one reason or another but forgot one and their child would stumble in and ultimately get affected by it thus setting the stage, mayhaps this can not be hosted on weight gaming but it isn’t a necessity to do so you could create a blog or other sight that handles it, discord and deviantart are options as far as I know
If you do make this game this hound wouldn’t mind acting as a sounding board or what help this inept philosopher can offer, or a beta tester though how that would go is up in the air
But this idea has potential just not fetish potential, deconstruction and viewing the more mundane and real effects on every day life like katawa shoujo I believe it was called, could be wrong but in general
I can’t wait to see what unfolds dear sir

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Fortunately, aside from examples on Lemma Soft Forums - Index page most renpy games on weightgaming are also more or less open source, though I would encourage asking people that haven’t explicitly permitted borrowing/reusing code.

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So, after reflection, I’ve made a decision on the path I’m going to take with this.

My original idea for this game wasn’t necessarily fetish-related at all, really. A number of Princess Maker 2 players have mentioned that the weight system in the game is broken – in fact, I think it’s a programming error. As a quick example, leaving the daughter on the so-called “Slim Down” diet the whole time will result in her becoming in-game overweight, at a BMI that is real-life underweight.

So, my original plan was simply to improve on the original by correcting the overweight formula – it actually is only a matter of changing one plus sign to a minus sign – and removing the upper weight cap, which is 80 kg. I also hoped to improve a few other little things annoying to the fanbase.

From there, I got the idea to add more stages of overweight-ness, with new sprites, new events… and the idea took off.

However, the original correction of the weight formula would be welcome, I think, to just about all PM2 fans.

Soooo, my current idea is to stick with my plan of beginning with a re-creation of the original game. No matter how I decide to continue the project, having that much done, and having gained that much programming experience, will be a huge aid.

Thanks for the offer! I may take you up on that in the future.

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Thank you for considering this hounds offer, hopefully if you make another project with what you’ve learned from the corrected version of this princess maker I hope to see how far it goes
Just don’t burn yourself out in the process ya hear

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