Lost Echo’s Preview 44 – The Sugar Dynasties

For the second week of March, I continued working on the internal game system for Lost Echo’s. This time, the focus was on a new experience: The Sugar Dynasties.

The Technical Blueprint

I spent some time reworking Astro Miner to make it more generalized, using it as a blueprint to create basic classes for the Main Menu, Main Game, and Victory screens. My goal right now is to throw together a variety of games as quickly as possible to test the framework.

Both games now share the same model. This allows for a seamless experience where I can get up from the couch, move around the station, and then return to the game to continue inputs. It also handles the station’s power states (on/off) correctly.

The Lore of Sugar Dynasties

For the next game, I’m once again basing the memory around this game based off of Crystal Castles, but adding in a twist by adding in the Sugar Dynasties.

The Sugar Dynasties is a story I thought up over a decade ago taking place in a magical land of chocolate and candy split between 4 kingdoms, but just never thought I had enough points connecting everything together to make it into a full story. It felt like a good way to quickly fit in the characters, enemies and events into a game, and I don’t know, maybe I’ll continue running with the idea that it’s a fictional book series within the Spirit Tamer Universe until I can properly flesh it out one day.

Gameplay Progress

So far, I’ve implemented the core loop:

The Goal: Play as Coco Joe and collect tiny gumdrops while avoiding evil ones.
The Win Condition: Once all gumdrops are collected, a cake appears. Touching it allows the player to “ascend.”

Future Expansion

I have several ideas for where to take this next:

More Kingdoms: Adding three additional levels to represent the four kingdoms.
New Enemies: Introducing ice-cream men and gingerbread men.
Power-Ups: Adding items that morph Coco Joe into the Black Chocolate Knight.
“Multiplayer”: Adding an option for Player Two to play as White Chocolate Sally.

Wait, isn’t this a single-player game? Yes. There would be no way to control that second character. I’m including it for both thematic reasons and because I find it funny.

Lost Echo’s Preview 44 – The Sugar Dynasties