It's fall!
The season where the leaves change colors, the air gets cooler, and…
…Maybe we’ve changed during the fall season, too?
The first thing we’d like to talk about this fall season is that we’ve recently added a few people to our team in order to smooth our development process! They’re all very talented, and we’re all very glad to be working with them!
Samwow, who some may know as the creator of the Pizza Tower Mod “Other Tower” is doing Level Design.
SH2K (SlappyHappy2000, the person behind “Uncanny Cat Golf” has been making music for Sugary Spire (more on that later...)
And 
PaperLoogi, creator of the “Cherry’s Manor” mod for Pizza Tower has been helping us with backgrounds and tilesets.
They’ve all been doing some incredible work on Sugary Spire so far, and have helped us out with development immensely! We’d like to take a second to thank them all for their contributions so far on the project!
But first, we’d like to talk about Sugary Spire's progress, starting with level design issues that Samwow has been working on.
We’ve been working a lot on our World 2 levels lately, with the help of Samwow who has been brought on recently for level design. During development, some feedback we got was that our levels had felt “off” in some way, and we never really wondered why until we realized how mazelike they could feel. Some people even thought they felt like caves, which wasn’t an issue for Sugarshack Mines, but was for our other levels.
With that being said…
Me Samwow. Me do level design. Me talk about the Level Design Cave Problem.
Level go up down all around because design often use loops to excess. Make difficult to open up because do so create dead space that is confounding and oversized because of how looping design work. Also mean door is best solution to connect room to room most of time, making design confusing to Samwow. Solution is to make room directional and to use looping design less. Essentially, room move in one given direction overall, and not change direction mid-room because of loop. This make progress easier for player to gauge and allow room borders be scaled to eliminate dead space while remove ceiling in playable area, make level feel more open without be so. Also less door and more directional transition better for sense of forward progress. Me hungry and tired give food promised please.
With that out of the way, we’d like to talk about what we've been working on recently.
Anyways... we know many may be wondering how Sugary Spire’s progress has been going since the release of the last newsletter. We’re proud to say we’ve gotten a lot done since then.
…But despite that, we feel that we don’t have anything significant to show for-
…Huh?
We do?
For Mt. Fudgetop?
Right.
Here it is:
Since the last newsletter, we’ve gotten a fully complete layout with visuals for the first half of Mt. Fudgetop! We’re extremely proud of how quickly we were able to put it all together.
Initially, we released our first post-demo playtest build on August 31st, 2025, which included a rough draft of both World 2 levels without any visuals or real polish. We released another playtest build about a month later on October 4th, 2025, and were able to clean up Mt. Fudgetop and Chocoa Cafe’s layouts during that time period.
We’re very happy to be making such progress lately. To put it into perspective, Mt. Fudgetop started production around May 2025. We were able to fully develop, diagnose issues with, and finish visuals for the entire first section of the level in only five months! From the first rough draft layout to the better layout the level has now, it also only took us about 32 days to tweak it, a massive step up from the kind of time level design took us before.
We feel that overall, we’re getting better with creating levels and diagnosing issues with them. We’ve been attempting to put out a playtest build just about every month, giving us enough time to set realistic goals and make steady progress.
As for Chocoa Cafe…
Chocoa Cafe may not be nearly as perfected as Mt. Fudgetop, but overall our World 2 progress has been a large step up from the year it took us to create all four levels in Exhibition Night!
Speaking of Chocoa Cafe, visuals are still being made, some old assets are being cleaned up and/or entirely redone, and we’re still making some small tweaks to the level design.
Despite this, we feel very confident in our levels for World 2, and have already started designing rooms for a World 3 level with rough placeholders!
CableChords, one of our former composers for Sugary Spire, is currently working on an album including embellished versions of her tracks for the project!
She released two singles for Fructosa plus an additional bonus track earlier this month, which you can check out here:
The versions of the songs used in Fructosa are Cable’s personal embellishments for her respective tracks. We’re not going to be using most of them in our game itself as some are too long or don’t fit certain in-game environments (Fructosa’s version of Glucose Getaway clocks out at around 7 minutes!) but we hope that it gives people more of a reason to check out and support her work! There may even be a track or two people have never heard before…
She’s also taking music commissions, which support her greatly! If anyone is interested, the link for her kofi is down below:
(ko-fi link)
Those with keen ears may have noticed that the music you heard in Mt. Fudgetop’s teaser was new. We’re glad to say that Mt. Fudgetop’s first track, “Aw, Fudge!” is currently being remastered by Pteracotta, as it’s been a shocking three years since that track was created!
We’re also proud to say that SH2K has been doing an incredible job redoing all of the secret themes!
In the spirit of the holiday season, we’ve chosen to release the first “Secret Studies” mix.
You can listen to that on SH2K’s youtube channel below.
We hope you enjoy them!
One of our artists for Sugary Spire, Luke, got the chance to talk about how we do art for Sugary Spire at the MVCC’s ThINCubator in Utica, New York.
We thank the team at CNY Game Dev greatly for the opportunity!!!!
Sadly, we don’t have a recorded version of the presentation… but we can say that Sugary Spire, in some capacity, made it on a local news station! You can check the video out for that below:
We’re more than glad to say that Sugary Spire’s second floor has made significant progress. It’s going to be a long time before the game is finished, but we’re very happy with the pace we are going at as of now.
Earlier, we mentioned that a World 3 level was being worked on with placeholders. We’re happy to say that we’ve been intricately planning ahead as well as programming for World 3 while we start to finalize World 2.
Maybe it’s time Pizzelle goes all in..?
As we continue to make Sugary Spire, we thank you all for your support. It means the world to us that people enjoy what we make and eagerly look forward to what’s coming next. We can't wait to do even more in the future!