(Art by Mack)
Five years, 260 weeks, 1,826 days, 43,824 hours, 2,629,440 minutes, 157,766,400 seconds.
However you want to put it, it’s been a long time. This year, we’ve put our foot forward and have done our best to push for progress with Sugary Spire.
We’ve officially been in development longer than Pizza Tower, which is funny to us, but scary at the same time.
Before we show anything we’ve worked on this year, let’s talk.
We’ve been doing Sugary Spire for a very long time now, and we’re still not finished. We wish we were, but unfortunately, time continues to march on…
Realistically, some of us are starting to get older, have jobs, and are going to/are already in college. This means that the more time we spend on Sugary Spire, the more responsibilities we have, which means we have less time overall to work on the project. Despite this, we are intent on finishing the project completely and to the best of our ability.
Since the last newsletter, we’ve made significant progress. Every level has at least some sort of main mechanic fleshed out, and 10 out of 12 levels (as of writing this) have had at least one level layout draft. This is incredible for us, because it’s the most progress the project has had.
Every level draft after Chocoa Cafe has taken significantly less time, meaning that the game has been going at a faster pace than before Floor 2 was finished.
(Art by T.T Crazy)
This year, we also focused on getting individuals who specialize in background work. A lot of the backgrounds and tilesets you see this time around were done by
Badlynn and 
HA19, known for working on projects like Other Tower, Cherry’s Manor, and Calcium Castle.
We also reached out to two other artists, 
T.T. Crazy, and 
Wadacrylic, to help with smaller players and enemy sprites. They’ve been doing an incredible job so far.
On top of this, 
TappoMix has been handling a lot of work for later level drafts. We have him to thank for the majority of levels made since Chocoa Cafe.
To be completely honest, it hasn’t been easy developing Sugary Spire as we get older, but the people we have gotten on our team recently have been a huge help to us, letting us execute cooler visual ideas with better level design than we had before.
Though, we know that for all of this year, we’ve been all talk and no gameplay. We’d love for us to put our money where our mouth is.
…That is, literally, of course. The first new level we tackled after Floor 2’s layouts were in a good spot was Coneboy Casino.
After all of this time, we’re very excited to finally show off something completely new!
In October of 2025, 
Samwow, one of our level designers, was tasked with creating a level draft for Coneboy Casino. When we playtested it for the first time, he had us reassess how we did playtests. Before, we would just kind of huddle every playtester up, watch them play the game, and assume where things went wrong. He gave us the idea of asking targeted questions.
Those questions and answers gave us a better path forward for notable progress on Sugary Spire as a whole. Now, we test level drafts, get feedback we jot down into long notepad documents, and then tweak for said feedback. This has been a very intensive progress, but also a very rewarding one.
To show what we started with, when we gave playtesters this level for the first time, the level looked like this.
Initially, our playtesters said that…
they felt lost "several times, rooms that have you collect a bunch of shit and run in, then double back with the card section feel odd."
"doubling back with the card or collecting stuff to unlock the card feels odd. I hate having to redo the room I just did"
…And Multiple playtesters cited parts of the level where you'd get two slot machine collectibles in a row then have to find the third one, saying it was annoying.
Honestly, people thought it kind of sucked initially. We didn’t let it get us down, though, and then went back to the drawing board. After numerous tweaks, level design iterations, and focusing on what people enjoyed, we were able to create something good. We’re happy to say that Coneboy Casino served as a great litmus test for how we make our levels now.
One of our artists, Badlynn, would also like to talk about the visual process for the level while making it.
: What’s popping and locking, yo!
Coneboy Casino was a pretty difficult level to make the visuals for because I didn’t want the outside to look like a very generic cityscape. This was essentially my second assignment after working on Chocoa Cafe so I really wanted to put in all my effort on this one. We already have a city level with crunchy construction so I really wanted Casino’s intro to look really unique, which is why the tileset is the way it is. (You’ll have to see later.) I was mostly inspired by Calcium Castle and how the some of the levels; such as Huevo Horror, experimented with perspective and geometry. It’s a cool tower made by my close friend CAMIL:)4 and others that you should check out! The art concepts for casino’s intro were made mostly from the goats Ha19 and Welegi! They really shaped up how the final product would look for the outside. I didn’t have as big of a part in the casino’s interior you’ll see later in the video but it was fun seeing how it would turn out. Do I think it looks good? That’s for you to decide.
(Art by HA19)
(Art by Welegi)
(Art by Badlynn)
Also, we’ve released the song for Coneboy Casino as well! You can listen to it below here:
Actually, we forgot something before Coneboy Casino! Wait! Go back!
Chocoa Cafe has basically been finished visually, barring a few small things we are going to be touching up in the future. Here’s what it looks like now!
This level was primarily worked on by HA19. Below is a ton of concept art from him, plus his thought processes!
(Art by HA19)
: Sugary team stand up! June is here, Cafe has appeared.
Cafe right now holds a special place in my heart when it comes to Sugary Spire levels. It was my first assigned level, and also probably the level that I led the most in terms of art direction. However, it was also probably my greatest challenge as an artist so far.
(Art by HA19)
A big difficulty with Cafe was that its level identity was so disjointed and so disconnected on paper, with it being an oasis, a cafe, a dog park, and a mall, and also having pyramids. The major challenge was figuring out the level’s environment, because there were such large gaps between themes. That isn’t to say it couldn’t be done (obviously, you’re looking at it done) but it could’ve easily become a situation where what you see and what you’re playing feel like two entirely different things. But, it also made for the potential to be one of our most interesting levels based on its environment alone. Do I think we achieved our goal? Maybe. Maybe. Here’s some concept art though.
(Art by HA19)
Chocoa Cafe also has a B theme made by SlappyHappy2000, because we decided that the original song playing for the entire level was too short.
They’ve also released that theme as well, which you can find here:
(Music by SlappyHappy2000, Art by SporkyOne)
(Art by Vivianne)
This level has been very difficult to make, and is where most of our time went from February to April of this year.
Early on, we made the mistake of having Dance-Off be the rhythm level. We’ve stuck with the idea since and have managed to make a lot of cool gimmicks with it, but it took us a whopping total of 4 drafts before we were confident in our ideas enough to move forward.
Our big idea for this level is this overarching rhythm gimmick called the Soundwave.
(Art by Fishibi)
What we didn’t realize was what we were going to put ourselves through once we decided on a rhythm mechanic. It proved to be a massive challenge in almost every area of what we do. Programming, level design, playtesting, and refining this gimmick was very difficult!
But to give everyone a deeper look into why Dance-Off has been the “problem level”, we’d like to discuss every iteration of the soundwave and show what we ended up with.
Initially, it started as a fairly simple mechanic. Grab every beat to go forwards, you move automatically, but you could also stop it if you jumped on beat instead.
Playtesters found this nothing to write home about and said that they didn’t find stopping on the wire fun to avoid hazards.
So, we went back to the drawing board, and then made a second pass of it that was just going forwards without any hazards.
Our playtesters didn’t hate this, but they found it nothing to write home about either. We were ready to accept Dance-Off as the “eh” level and were going to write it off as a failed experiment, until one of our playtesters, LuceiBits, gave us tons of striking criticism and told us that we should seek to create a more experimental, fun to play rhythm level.
So, we went back to the drawing board… again…
But, the third time around, we hit a wall. This iteration didn’t last long. We were mixing the idea of speeding up and slowing down the music to make the soundwave faster, and that you would shoot out of it kind of like a pipe when you ended it.
Our level designer for Dance-Off, TappoMix, told us he couldn’t see a full layout with such a gimmick and that it wasn’t engaging. Other playtesters told us it could be good, but then had their gripes with this version when playing it.
Now, all felt lost for us. We had tried out three very interesting ideas, and none of them had worked in Pizza Tower’s gameplay.
(Art by HA19)
What we didn’t realize was that the answer for the Soundwave was right in front of our faces. Two months ago, HA19 had an idea where the player could switch wire tracks with left, right, up, and down on the Soundwave, and that they would move automatically on beat.
The revolution to actually realize this idea came to us at… a late night voice chat at one in the morning…
A few weeks later, we settled on this:
Now, we can confidently say we’re happy with the Soundwave after about two whole months of work for one mechanic, along with the level layout as a whole. Hooray!
(Art by Fishibi)
Funnily enough, Sting Operation’s layout was fully complete before Dance-Off’s, meaning that all World 3 levels have at least one draft. The structure of this level is very different compared to most of our other ones, and the creation of this level was a good challenge for us creatively because of that.
On the topic of Sting Operation, we won’t be showing much, but what we will say is that we gave playtesters the first draft of it expecting them to hate it, but came back pleasantly surprised.
Some feedback we got included:
“There's a sense of discovery and mastery behind it that I haven't experienced in Pizza Tower since the Noise Update, albeit this stage is obviously a smaller version of something like that.”
“layout feels awesome, it's a bit upsetting how easy it is to fall though.”,
"the verticality of it was very different",
and "the bee mechanic was really nice and i like it"
We were initially planning on rebuilding all of Sting Operation from the ground up after the first draft, but it turned out that it wasn’t necessary, which luckily cut down on a lot of development time.
Now that a foundation for World 3 has been made, we can finally work on what’s left of the game!
(Art by Allie)
Everything past World 3 has been very intricate planning and concepting. As of writing this, one World 4 level has gotten a finished level draft while the other two have had their main mechanics implemented.
We’ve also changed the level order of the game, it now goes like this:
Floor 1: Tutorial - Crunchy Construction - Cottontown - Sugarshack Mines
Floor 2: Molasses Swamp - Chocoa Cafe - Mt. Fudgetop
Floor 3: Coneboy Casino - Dance-Off - Sting Operation
Floor 4: Souractive - Licorice - Sucrose - Exit
Sugary Spire’s later levels have gotten kind of ambitious, as we’re striving to create more original levels in terms of layouts, mechanics, and visuals. We’re sure that we’re able to handle what we have planned, though.
(Art by Fishibi)
As for bosses, we’ve thrown around a few vague ideas on how we want them to go, but nothing concrete yet. Same goes for the hub. Since we’re also making a Crumbling Tower of Pizza equivalent, we plan on designing the hub after we get a good draft down for Sucrose as well.
We mentioned at the start of this post that creating a fangame at this scope and size has been such a huge endeavor, but honestly, we wouldn’t have it any other way.
When we started Sugary Spire, we never really expected to be working as hard on it as we do now, or for it to have gotten as big as it has. Five years is a very long time, so we thank everyone for waiting with us. While it may be true that we’re all getting older and that we may not have as much free time to work on this project that we used to, we still love every second of what we’re creating.
We’re doing our best to make sure that the wait for when the game comes out will be worth it.
Thank you all.