VN Ren'Py When We Were Whole [Development Thread]

[Lightfellow]

Alexandra "Rainn" Theodorou

Full name: Alexandra Theodorou
Age: 26
Height: 177 cm
Weight: 54 kg
Nationality: American, Greek
Origin: Gary, USA

Alexandra Theodorou, better known by her stage name, Rainn, was once on her way to becoming a household name.

Hailing from Gary, Indiana, she rose through the ranks of the music industry with a smoky voice, a Grammy nomination, and even a couple of movie credits under her belt. She wasn’t yet at the top – but she was getting there.

When her producer’s phone was hacked, the leaks made headlines worldwide: private videos from his cloud account showed everything he’d orchestrated behind closed doors – orgies, gangbangs, and more, with Rainn at the center of it all. The footage made it clear she wasn’t exactly a victim, and the industry dropped her without hesitation.

Her producer went to prison. Rainn’s career went up in smoke.

But for Rainn, that fall came with clarity. She realized how much she truly loved sex – unashamed, insatiable, almost to the point of compulsion. Instead of hiding, she leaned in. She reached out to a discreet, high-end madam named Kathleen about joining her elite club, but Kathleen turned her away – not because Rainn wasn’t good enough, but because she was too famous to keep quiet while her hands were full with more urgent matters. Instead, Kathleen sent her to Wendy in St Elvan, suggesting her old frenemy would know what to do with her.

Now the newest arrival at Saint's Folly, Rainn wears her past like armor. She trades on her name and notoriety, drawing the wealthiest clients with the same skill she once used to fill concert halls. She’s bold, unapologetic, and fully in control of her own spectacle – this time, on her own terms.

 

[Lightfellow]

Will be posting all the future pre-release dev logs here as well, but there's no sense in clogging this up with all the previous ones, ill just link all of them in this post:

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[Lightfellow]

Kris render in celebration of the Halloween contest win


Many of you probably know, but there was a Halloween Render Contest held by the AVNL Times guys, and it

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. Super happy with the result, can't wait to see the issue itself to take a look at the others' renders.
Also, big welcome to everyone who followed this page after coming over from AVNL Times. Welcome and thank you!

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[Lightfellow]

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Hello. Like I promised, here’s this week's dev log.

It’s mostly good news, which is a nice change of pace.

Last week was super productive. For the first time ever, I managed to break the 30+ renders per day for 2 days in a row. My goal is usually 100 renders per week, and I’m already on 37, so let’s see how far I can push it this week.

Almost done with writing the 10th major scene, and the release chapter is taking its shape quite nicely. I will need to make some minor adjustments to most of them when I reach the render stage, as sometimes you just capture an interesting moment that doesn’t fit the script, and I’d rather adapt it rather than discard anything cool.

Been also steadily picking out the tracks for all the written scenes. This is a challenging prospect because I simply can’t afford anything expensive, so for the time being, it’s just free stuff that fits the most. It still sounds good (and fits super well in places), but if my game ever gets successful, I will absolutely shell out for the fitting tunes.

In other news, I playtested Celeritas.vn’s game Formula Zero, and

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. It’s a phenomenal game, and C is an amazing dev and human being, so I really recommend checking it out.

For today’s main course, I have an introduction to another side girl, this time around of a MILF variety. I have already shown her recently, but I haven’t done the proper introductions yet.

Lo and behold, Bérénice "Béa" Élodie Claire Beaumont.



Bérénice Beaumont was born in Nice, on the sun-soaked coast of the French Riviera. Her future looked to be just as golden, as she was an up-and-coming actress with incredible range, a camera-ready face, and the kind of presence that tended to turn all the heads around. But the entertainment world is as ruthless as it is dangerous – a couple of wrong contracts, shady promises, and under-the-table deals, and too-good-to-be-true opportunities, and she ended up in the dark and sweaty brothels of Paris. From there, it was London. Then St Elvan.

That’s where she met Wendy. Béa was only 20 when she was elevated from the lows of the backstreets in the Russian Quarter of the city into the opulence of Saint’s Folly, and she never left. She worked as a prostitute for a decade and a half, but for the past five years she’s taken on a very different role – a liaison and handler for the brothel’s elite clientele. If Kaz is Wendy’s right hand within Saint’s Folly itself, Bérénice is the left – the one with access to all the cookie jars. She curates the guest list, finds new wealthy and discreet patrons, and ensures every deal, meeting, or visit runs exactly as intended. Politicians, businessmen, legacy heirs – they don’t get in unless she says so.

Béa knows how desirable she is and is full of supreme confidence and the looks to match. She’s a performer at heart, shifting between sultry charm and ruthless precision depending on who she’s speaking to. Some girls are afraid of her, whisper that she’s heartless, and that she’s there as a plant by someone with true power. The others think she’s brilliant and aspire to be like her. But no one is quite sure who she really is. Except maybe Wendy, who trusts her without question, and that alone is a sign enough.

She’s quite a complex character, and easily the most challenging side girl to write, up there with Magnolia. She’ll be a constant presence in Saint’s Folly, as her decisions shape a lot of what happens with the majority of the cast.

That’s it for me for this week. Not sure if the next dev log will be next week or the one after. Will depend on how locked in I am.

As a bonus, have this Megumin cosplay by Amaia.

 

[MagicMan753]

The pain of seeing Bea, and her only being a side girl hurts so much. She is so beautiful and perfect. I feel that is the one thing missing among the main girls, a older lady/milf. Either way can't wait to spend time with her.

 

[Lightfellow]

I feel that is the one thing missing among the main girls

For what it's worth, I do understand this. But at the same time, that wouldn't make a lot of sense in the story that I want to tell, so there had to be a line drawn.

 

[Lightfellow]

Patreon poll winner: Kris at the pool

 

[Prussian56]

I cannot wait for this game to release man, the designs and renders are so good.

 

[Lightfellow]

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Hello!

As promised, the newest dev log is here. And today I have lots to talk about, and for a change, all of it is positive. Coming from a pretty bad sickness that’s been bugging me for a couple of weeks, this is quite welcome.

Let’s talk about progress first. Two scenes are fully rendered and finalised (meaning no more rewrites and re-renders), with post-work and even webp conversion. One issue I have faced is that png to webp conversion leaves lots to be desired in low-light scenes because of the lack of usable pixels; there’s a lot of binding and such, so I will have to use lossless conversion, which will make the size of these scenes a bit larger than what I would have ideally wanted. Still, the disk size of the game is the last thing I worry about, we’ll deal with it somehow.

I found quite a nice rhythm with renders, and I can pretty comfortably reach 150 renders per week, with a careful optimism that I could even do more if needed. We’ll see. Fifteen scenes to go.

I have an IRL update as well, to go with this game progress info. I got a job offer from one of the major esports publications, which I, after careful consideration, accepted. Will be starting in the immediate future (tomorrow), and I don’t yet know how big of an impact, if any, this will have on the development of WWWW. In theory, this job will take up to 4 hours per day max, which will leave lots of time to work on the game. I wasn’t really maxing all the available time anyway, so it should be good. At the very least, this offers more stability, fewer worries, and alleviates the need for immediate success of this project. That said, if WWWW somehow reaches the threshold I have for going full-time, I won’t hesitate to do it.

Additionally, there’s a chance that I will have to travel for five days in early December to attend one of the esports events that’s happening in Europe. Obviously, I won’t be able to render during that time, and I’d lie if I said I’d have any time to write either, but changing the scenery can only be beneficial in the long run. Still, this trip isn’t 100% confirmed yet, but it’s very likely. Will keep you posted.


Now, let’s talk for a bit about the game itself. One of the most frequent questions I receive is, “What’s the setting?” To which I always reply, “It’s an alternate history England,” which doesn’t say much by itself. So I will peel the curtain a bit on what it is and how I approach it.

So, the setting is an alternate history England. More specifically, England’s South-West corner, Cornwall. Initially, the story the game is based on was set near the White Cliffs of Dover, but I moved it to Cornwall because it being a little bit more remote made a lot of sense for the story.

The main location is going to be a fictional city of St Elvan, which is located somewhere between Marazion and Porthleven. For its name, I looked up an existing saint venerated in Cornwall and Brittany named Elvan (also called Elwen or Elven), and used his name for the sake of authenticity.

One of the main inspirations for St Elvan is the city of Oxford, both in size, population, and its importance: St Elvan, like Oxford, has a big Cathedral, as well as a huge-ass university, which is also completely based on the University of Oxford, down to how it’s set up and how it operates.

In-universe, it helped Cornwall be much more important in the grand scheme of things than it is nowadays. Additionally, it served as a place where many displaced people from all over Europe settled after the end of WW2. So it has a significant Eastern European diaspora, a Balkan one, and lots of people from East Asia as well, just to spice things up.

I went to the lengths of justifying its “city” status by it being named one by the Queen for the Millennium celebration in 2000, along with Brighton and Hove and Wolverhampton.

Local Predannack Airfield is now Helston–St Elvan Airport, serving both local and international flights.

Its constituency (St Ives) has its own member of parliament, the city proper has a mayor, there are industries and businesses that will probably show up in the game.

The original village was once known as Treelva, first recorded in the Domesday Book as a minor fishing and copper-mining hamlet, until the 13th century, when the local chapel dedicated to Saint Elvan was expanded into a cathedral with the support of a wealthy Breton bishop.

All in all, I have around seven pages of write-ups for St Elvan. Most of it was sourced during research, because I have never been to England, so I expect to make some mistakes that will make the most Britishly-inclined among you palm your faces, but I still believe in my ability to create something authentic and believable.

Like, most of the shit I have won’t even be present in any verbally-communicated way in the game, and I will obviously have to cheat with visuals because there’s only so many assets in DAZ that I can believably sell as “England,” but I still think that having a rich and developed backstory will allow me come up with ideas and scenes more easily.

An additional thing I wanted to mention is that, come 2026, I want to implement the finalised tier system for Patreon. All the current tiers will remain there, with the highest one granting access to the game releases after the early access period. Two of the highest tiers that grant the ability to influence the game in a minor way will be disabled until 0.1 is out, but the rest will be up and running in the finalised state. I will talk about tiers more down the line, but I wanted to make sure I’m super upfront and transparent with everything I do.

Anyway, thank you for reading all this. Next week will probably be me just getting used to the new workplace, so I will see you in two weeks instead. Cheerio!

 

[Lightfellow]

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Hi!

I know I've been silent for the last two weeks, but I've been mainly just settling in at my new job, testing how the work processes interfere with the game, and doing testing on the render counts.

Dev work slowed down, but what I learned is that my new work should not interfere with my dev time almost at all going forward.

Next week, there's a chance I'll be traveling for work, but it's not 100% confirmed. If not, I expect to do some good progress.

Will keep you in the loop if anything changes. Proper dev log will also depend on the trip.
The work continues, though, and that's what's important.

Cheers and thank you!

 

[Lightfellow]

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Hello!

Merry Christmas, everyone!

This was a roller-coaster year for me, starting out as one of the worst in my life and ending on quite a pleasant note. Lots of it was family-related, the rest had to do with my job, and one of the few things that kept me afloat was this outlandish idea to make my own AVN.

When I was starting out, I intended to make a HS2 game, I even had prototypes for Mei and Alisa.



But I realized it very quickly that these visuals won't work for the story that I want to tell, so, after some convincing from BlueEyedSamurai and PinkSpectre, I jumped over to DAZ. As it turned out, this was a great call, because for some reason I’m not half bad at it.

My immediate and fast progress was very much assisted by invaluable feedback from such talented devs as Scotterbrained, Batman_sid, Barrabass, Mister Maya, DigiDec, Kentyrr, C., Termz, nuii_pointer, aforementioned PinkSpectre, and many others. They praised my progress and always had critiques and suggestions ready.

My needs back then were quite varied — sometimes, I couldn’t remember which button to press to do something in DAZ, and other times, I struggled with catch lights not appearing in the characters’ eyes. And every time, there was someone who spent their valuable time to explain how to fix my issues, how to improve my lighting, how to compose my shots better.

Once upon a time, I tried becoming an amateur photographer, and some of the lessons from back then helped me out somewhat. I watched some guides on composition, on color, on light, and delved into specific DAZ3D tutorials, just to get better in the shortest time possible.

I won’t toot my own horn, but some people have described this progress as quite extraordinary. And I even have accolades to back it up. The very first render contest I’ve ever entered was the AVNL Times Summer Render Contest, where I placed just outside the podium in 4th, with some judges having my render as one of their favs. Before I entered the contest, my only goal was to just show my skill off, which I, admittedly, didn’t have a lot of back then. Still, this is the render that got 4th:


The second contest that I entered was the AVNCommunity Bikini Render Contest, which, unlike the AVNL Times one, was entirely fan-voted. There, I made it all the way to the three-way grand finals and lost to Mister Maya’s awesome pic. Still, I was quite pleased with my render:

And the final render contest in which I participated to date was the AVNL Times Halloween Render Contest, which I won. To say I was happy is to say nothing. It capped off nine months of practice and more than validated all the effort I spent in my own eyes.

But one of the most important encounters I’ve had was with Puggy, a renowned animator in our space. Curiously, I knew about him way before we even spoke for the first time, as he had some really nice R34 animations I was quite a fan of. But I digress. After a couple of interactions in the developer voice chat, he suddenly messaged me one day with an offer to help me grow. Being an animator, he’s quite good at posing and compositions, and that’s what he felt was my biggest weakness at the time. He taught me quite a lot about hand poses, body language, and lots more. Ever since then, he has been a constant encouraging presence, be it in the form of feedback, or “GAME FUCKING WHEN?” Thank you for everything, Puggy. Can’t wait to bother you with my stupid animation questions.

With this bit of reminiscence out of the way, let’s discuss progress for a moment. After coming back from my trip, I had some interesting progress. One of the breakthroughs was finally making a working phone messaging system, thanks to C. Now I can finally fill in the gaps in my code that I left there for later.

And it’s not just functional, it actually looks semi-decent. I will still need to tweak it for a bit, but it is still a huge relief. If you’ve seen how it works in Formula Zero, expect something similar.




I finished setting up Scene 3 and started on Scene 4, but they’re not rendered yet. I will most likely start rendering what I have in January.

Speaking of January, I will have a small vacation from Dec 30 to Jan 3. My friends invited me to spend the New Year together, and it was too good an opportunity to pass up. So my next dev update will most likely be around Jan 10. But before that, I will talk about changes to the Patreon tiers before I go.

Anyway, thank you all so much for being here, the project is steadily gaining a tangible form, and I can’t wait to share it with you when it’s done.

Have this title sequence as a treat:

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Pause the playback if you want to read it, I clicked through quite fast.

 

[balboa2151]

Hello Lightfellow, I’m following you on Patreon waiting for the first release, I was scrolling through this forum and I noticed that you previewed some of the side girls, some of them are freaking gorgeous especially Imane, Amaia and Alexandra, any chance of these gorgeous side girls maybe being main LI’s??? Thank you, and the renders look amazing ❤

 

[Lightfellow]

Hello Lightfellow, I’m following you on Patreon waiting for the first release, I was scrolling through this forum and I noticed that you previewed some of the side girls, some of them are freaking gorgeous especially Imane, Amaia and Alexandra

Thank you! I'm glad you like them!

any chance of these gorgeous side girls maybe being main LI’s???

Unfortunately, no. However, this doesn't mean they will be treated as inferior in any way. They just have their own role to play in this story.

Thank you, and the renders look amazing ❤

Thank you!

 

[camube]

i used to patron games but a lot of games i patron, while good, gets abandoned due to one reason or another. One of the recurring reason games i patron gets abandoned is due to the sprawling of scenarios based on previous choices, and the number of love interests).

So lately, I see a high number of love interest to not be a positive because in the middle of development, the plot branches a lot, furthering development time, and sometimes the writer just stuck.

So i have a couple questions for you

Why 7 love interests? Are you prepared to tackle how many alternate events you need to write in the middle of development due to the number of LIs?

do you have a rough idea how many chapter When We Were Whole is going to take?

 

[Lightfellow]

Thank you for taking interest in my game!

Why 7 love interests? Are you prepared to tackle how many alternate events you need to write in the middle of development due to the number of LIs?

The answer is both easy and complicated. What I will have is the main story that will happen regardless of the character choices, and all of them will be involved in it in decent capacity. This is not a pure slice of life game where hanging out with girls is the story. There will be variance, but it's won't be 7 different games essentially.
That said, I am prepared to write necessary scenes for the characters where needed and required.
It will be felt when you're on someone's route.

do you have a rough idea how many chapter When We Were Whole is going to take?

It's difficult to say right now. If I take the scenes from 0.1, look at how much they cover, and what I want to do with the characters, my guess would be 13-15 chapters. But it could be 10. Could be 18. Genuinely can't say right now.