Greetings and salutations everyone, and welcome to another dev diary for Dream & Sugar! First of all, we wanted to thank everyone who came out to see us at Origins and GDEX 2022. We had a blast talking about our game and letting you guys play it! We’ve taken all the feedback and conversations back to our team and we’re using it to make the game even better than ever!

Speaking of which, some very exciting news today. We’re proud to announce that the first of the four game routes has been completely implemented! Our amazing coding team worked round the clock to get it done, and we now have a build where you can go from start to finish all the way through! Obviously that means the team’ll be moving on to the other three routes, and we’ll keep you posted when they reach completion as well. It’s an exciting milestone for us, giving us a better understanding of the scope of this behemoth we’ve put together. Game development continues to be a wild ride and an incredible learning experience for us at Couch Lion as each new day brings new challenges that we eagerly overcome!

If you’re more interested in art, feel free to check our third iteration of the Dream & Sugar patch notes! In it, our bug-squishing wizard Tom goes into more detail about where we started with character designs and where we are now. He includes original sketches of characters, as well as going into detail about working the first passes of art into the actual game engine. It’s crazy to think how far we’ve come since then! These days, the CGs are all but finished, the characters are long since finalized, and the game continues to look stunning thanks to our incredible art team. The unique mixture of 3D spaces and 2D characters was a look we always aimed for, since it best aligned with our skills, but it’s given Dream & Sugar an identifiable look that continues to excite us.

Testing continues, always forging ahead to find more bits of game to polish. Now with one of our four routes done we’ve amped up testing more than ever. As always, if you find any bugs or blips in the demo on our website (CouchLionStudios.com) feel free to reach out to us and we’ll send our best exterminators! Our musical masterminds have also been hard at work, and just this week added a new song to the Dream & Sugar library that will appear in the final game!

Last but certainly not least, we’ve been exploring Ren’Py’s ability to change certain words via context. Namely, how to change she/her to he/them or they/them pronouns in our game. That’s right folks! In the final version it’s possible that you can play as whichever human your heart desires! There’s talks around the office of Nora, our canonical protagonist, having a Noah side, so keep on the lookout for that. Inclusivity is definitely important to us here at Couch Lion Studios, so when the concept was broached to us we started looking into ways to make it a reality. We’re still at the practicality stage, trying to figure out how to make our engine and technology play nice with the classic boy/girl/other question marks, but be assured we’re on the case!

And that does it for today! Whew that was sure a lot to get off our plate, huh? Always a joy to share our progress and processes with you guys. As always we’ll continue to keep you informed, and don’t be afraid to check out the Patch Notes in conjunction with the dev diaries! They’re more production focused, for all those of you who prefer the more nitty gritty details of our journey. Thanks again to everyone who saw us at GDEX and Origins this year, and we look forward to seeing even more of you next year! Until next time, roar loudly, lions. Roar loudly.

• Couch Lion Studios