(Time Range: 2021-03-06 19:59:04 -0500 to 2021-08-30 20:14:33 -0400)

Chapter 1: The Second Patch Notes Is Chapter 1 Because Zero-Indexing Because Programming

Hey again! It’s time for another exciting Dream & Sugar Patch Notes safari. This time we’ll be delving into the tangled coppice comprising March through August of 2021. 

Back that far in the past, we left ourselves some notes as we changed things, but once we get past November 11th 2021, we will be drawing information from the current active repository, and will have not only full file change information but will also be able to roll back and show retroactive progress screenshots and more! We expect Patch Notes 4 to be the final patch notes with this reduced level of provenance. DREAM & SUGAR TIMELINE Game Original Conception - October 24, 2020

Patch Notes 1 - Until March 1, 2021

Patch Notes 2 - Until August 30, 2021 - <You Are Here>

On March 6th, the first scene (Nora meeting with Riley at Brewtiful Coffee, the initial opening of the current demo) was set up. This was still in the realm of prototyping, we were figuring out how to properly supply images to line up with the script dialogue, and how to organize the Ren’Py project folders and assets. In short order just a few days later, some of these prototype folders would be filled with placeholders for Riley, Bennett, Annabelle, Pierce, and Hugo. And a placeholder CG so we could start prototyping CGs in general!

What's a CG, you don't ask? Happy to tell you anyway! Back in the ancient days, visual novels were these crazy-kooky artifacts, they could hold their stories and pictures very tightly in physical space. They protected themselves from entropy and damage with defensively hardened outside-words and exterior images that were less essential but highly representative aspects of the interior story contained. These artifacts took many forms but generally comprised of lots of separate pieces of paper forced together through various ad-hoc means and coated with ink in different shapes and forms. With this approach, storytellers of the past could "Graphically" depict whole characters or scenes that anyone could interpret, but if the viewer understood the arbitrary framework being used by the creator (like you are right now!), then other ink shapes could even symbolically convey abstract ideas, concepts, and information (both factual and hypothetical)

Some time later, human beings invented "Computers" so that we could break away from the informational limitations of static, ink-coated pages, and the spatial limitations of physical objects, in order to achieve the Otome milestone as a species, so that we could properly earn the (eventual, begrudging) respect of intergalactic civilizations. The earliest computers could primarily just form "text", different arrangements of the small composited pieces of symbolic information. The earliest Protome were without "Graphics" of any kind, leaning entirely on the dynamic manipulation of the text to tell interesting stories. (Past "dynamic-text" attempts in physical space result in extremely large piles of paper that you have to cross-reference and navigate to properly consume the story, a real drag to say the least!) Some Protome would attempt to strategically rearrange text symbols to form crude artistic images at times, but this satisfied few, and eventually, Computers would be upgraded to directly display Graphics without having to abuse text. Though the earliest Graphics were still quite crude, this was a big deal at the time, you just had to be there. Graphics quickly became an embedded part of the entire visual novel experience. So now, whenever modern Otome go out of their way to emphasize the visuals over the text for a special moment, this is referred to as a "CG" (even though everything happening before and after the CG would equally be considered Graphics taking place on a Computer.)

OK, tangent over, now that I can use the term CG with impunity, skip back to where we were: a few days after March 6th. Now skip ahead about 19 more days, and we receive long-awaited storyboards from the citadel atop Core Design Mountain to help implement some of the initial CGs in line with the existing story. There is a spreadsheet through which the source script is filtered, that produces copy-pastable Ren’Py script content, and it will get slowly expanded to include some of these additional layers above normal dialogue / choices (CGs are one of these possible accessory layers, there are also things like character entrances and exits, scene transitions, and audio).

Several days after that, on April 3rd the character folders got reorganized, and we did some initial expression-mapping. This is the beginning piece of the different character emotions and overlays we use regularly in the script today, when characters smile or blush to correspond with dialogue! The first 75% of the storyboards were also built out for initial playtesting.

A week later, we’re blocking out the initial scene where the player meets Hugo. Hugo’s official “character variable in the Ren’Py central code” birthday would therefore be April 10th. I am not sure offhand what Hugo’s actual birthday in the story would be, but for our purposes as computer storytellers, he only "existed" at this point. The character Khya also has a partial birthday between April 10th and 24th as placeholder assets are added for them, but still has not been defined as a ‘character’ yet.

One other important game feature birthday is May 5th, which is our first stab at the painting minigame! It got tucked at the end of the story and was a simple overlay screen with a “take-screenshot” button and an exit button. It also didn’t work on Mac haha. Get Mac'd on, I guess.

Then nothing happened for a whole month! (Yay hobby / moonlight development!)

On June 4th the code got busted for a bit and our primary dev Quinn at the time needed to shuffle machines. June 6th saw a mechanism added to the paint minigame placeholder to save screenshots to a reliable persistent location on Windows, with a default filename. This is not true anymore at the time of this writing, but it used to be possible for the game to remember what you drew after you quit and reloaded the game! Would be nice to get back to that real soon. Also we added ourselves a way to skip to the minigame so we could test it faster than playing through the whole thing. We also started removing some of the sillier placeholder images that we wouldn’t be allowed to use for real. Gotta clean up and be a little bit less unprofessional!

This Patch Notes ends with a 2-and-a-half month jump to August 30, where voila, a bunch of random "Paint / develop" changes get merged in from some mysterious "elsewhere" that we don’t have history for. It seems to have been a second pass on the paint minigame prototype, with a little more functionality and a proper background for it to sit on, instead of being packed into a little overlay window in the top-left corner of the screen. I think I may have done that revision. I don't remember... Brain a little bit hurty... I know it did a lot of specific positioning math to line up with our 720p demo resolution. And it had more buttons to click on. But it still used the original canvas and brush-drawing code that the original one did, and was still the dead-end of the game at that point.

That's all for this one! It covered nearly 6 months of time. Chapter 2 (Patch Notes 3) will only be one month long, September 2021, because that will be the month of our sprint effort to create a playable slice of the game that could be shown publicly at the end of that month, at GDEX 2021!

'Til next time, there will also be another Dev Diary to hold you over, so be on the lookout for that!