Hello and welcome to the inaugural post of the Dream and Sugar Patch Notes! This is a companion series to the D&S Dev Diary, and is intended to provide technical and historical context about the development of the game and the demo.

In this series of articles, we will be tracing the history of the project and highlighting any fun or interesting occurrences as it has evolved. At some point, this series will catch up to the current public demo, and we'll be talking about unreleased progress! (And then, if/when we catch up to our literal current development state, who knows?)

These posts might range anywhere between pretty loosey-goosey and anecdotal, to a fairly formal literal changelog based on Keep A Changelog, We try our best to use Semantic Versioning and have gotten more rigorous about it over the course of development.

Chapter 0: Auroregenesis

Within the context of many prior years of being friends and professional associates, a group formed to tackle the 2020 GDEX Game Jam. Much fun was had, a proto-otome (protome?) game in Unity was made, and plans took root to solidify the group into Couch Lion, start a new game project called Dream & Sugar, and the rest is history! (As they say.)

The original concept of Dream & Sugar comes from our co-founder Aurore, and talking about it would be more in the purview of our Dev Diary series!

The first priorities for a nascent game project are good team communication (to map the paths ahead), agreement on the core tools (to define the constraints of our work), and traceable source control (to track the trail we're leaving behind). Being able to roll everything back at any time is crucial to be able to experiment and apply creative approaches to software.

After setting up the communication channels, we began pre-production meetings to settle on what our core tools and basic development goals would be. Our experience with Unity in the game jam was more out of a mutual baseline of experience with the tool, rather than because it was the right tool for Dream & Sugar.

We decided to go with Ren'Py, a visual-novel engine based in Python / PyGame, even though none of us had very much direct experience with it beforehand. Python is a very approachable programming language, allowing more of the team to be productive on the scripting side, and the Ren'Py system overall naturally covers the majority of what we needed to build, leaving us a lot more bandwidth to focus on story, design, and asset creation!

After settling on this, we agreed to use Trello to manage the work tasks, to meet on a regular basis and communicate through Discord, and to manage the Ren'Py project through a Git repository.

On December 28, at around 5:40 PM EST, we had the initial empty Git repository set up with an empty new RenPy project! We nabbed a .gitignore (file that tells Git what NOT to sync up between everyone) from the Ren'Py / Lemma Soft forums. (Shout out to user Autumnotopia for their great example!) We also set up Git LFS to track all our large image and sound effect files without duplicating them in the history with every update! (Other Source Control systems like PlasticSCM and Perforce are more artist-friendly by default than Git, but the group as a whole had the most past experience with Git out of the options) January 2021, the first month of actually building the game, was a lot of getting initial concept art in and starting to block things out. An example of how the core idea was far past our plan for implementing: the first FOUR characters added for testing art assets are all not supposed to appear until later, beyond the end point of what we decided would be the demo! The "lion's share" (heh heh) of the underlying story script was made available to read and use on March 1st, so January through February were entirely blue-sky design and foundational implementation.

The absolute basic paint-minigame placeholder was added on January 23rd, (along with a broken gallery that got put on the backburner for higher priority tasks and didn't get repaired until Feb 27th).

Also, we started thinking about the core gameplay stats on Feb 7th and set up their core definitions so that as we add the script, they'll always be there to think about and work into the design. We also gave ourselves a nice developer-only view of the current stats for easier testing and debugging!

The sharing of the initial story draft with the team on March 1st feels like a natural place to end this first post. The project didn't give itself a version number (0.4) until October, so there will be plenty more super-early production to talk about before I start inserting more numbers into these words!