PUNKCAKE NEWSCAKE September '25 - Frontline: War of Echoes released, our first mixtape is out, mini pharma, and more!

Hi punks!

Ah september, the first month of fall, the long-awaited end to the summer heat, the rain.

This is all very nice, but what about the games? Well, we released Frontline: War of Echoes at the beginning of the month! It was technically supposed to be our August game, but here it is anyway. Our actual September game, Remy's Flippin Dungeon is still in development, but also a new free game got made and released: mini pharma!

Frontline is a game of capture-the-flag, where each time you get a flag, you switch teams and time gets rewinded so that you must play against your past self, and then your past selves as you take more flags.

It's a strange one but it's great chaotic fun, and it will keep you coming back for higher scores as you try different strategies, and different equipments. Because as you get better scores, you unlock medals, which in turn serve as budget to enable powerups for any level.

We're very happy with this game, even though it is exactly the type of game which tends to perform poorly in terms of sales. But we have no regrets, and we are thankful that our game-a-month model lets us do this!

Frontline: War of Echoes is available now for Windows, MacOS and Linux on Itch io and with our Patreon subscription through our website! It will also eventually make its way to Steam, where you can already wishlist it!

This month also saw the announcement and release of the PUNKCAKE Délicieux Vol.1 physical mixtape! A crystal pink cassette in a printed case with designs from Julia Godrie.

This cassette has been a project for well over 2 years! Various developments made it take a much longer time than what was originally anticipated, but it only means that the final product is as good as it could be. The cassette and the case truly are very beautiful, and if you own a cassette player, you can enjoy a carefully curated selection of the best tracks off our first 12 games, all in that sweet lo-fi cassette sound.

We're really happy with this small product! Eris and I even made a small video to promote it, which was fun! The cassette is indeed delicious, but please don't actually try eating it.

The PUNKCAKE Délicieux Vol.1 mixtape is available now for orders and will ship immediately, but only 100 copies were made, so get it while you can!

Over the last two weeks I spent 9 days making a new game called mini pharma for the Falling Block Jam 2025!

This gamejam was all about making a game inspired by the classic arcade puzzle game format of Tetris, Puyo Puyo, Dr Mario, or even Wario's Woods. I was very excited about this jam, as I feel this is a relatively unexplored field in games, and so I had planned to take a small break from Remy's Flippin Dungeon to participate to make a little something during the first weekend of the jam. Of course in the end I spent the full 9 day period of the jam making mini pharma.

But I am very happy with the result! It's a game of organizing medical ingredients and feeding them into recipes at the bottom of the screen to heals some folks. Only you have a pretty restrained space, and ingredients don't stop coming, and the wrong ingredients might well get pushed into the wrong recipes!

The controls are somewhat strange: you control a two-slot horizontal selection which can be squished against the side-walls to be made vertical, and you can use this selection to either swap what's in the two slots, or hold them both and push them around. But, you can also hold the swap button and use the direction keys to use the swap function more quickly, and particularly to carry an ingredient along a horizontal line very effeciently. Once you know how to use all these it's really satisfying to play, but some of these controls are more intuitive than the rest and I think an easy trap players might fall into is to mostly rely on the simple swap or on the push. To avoid this I ended up adding a very quick tutorial, but even that may not be quite sufficient.

Still, I do think this makes a solid prototype for a future PUNKCAKE release, and I'm excited to get started on it after I finish Remy's Flippin Dungeon!

For now you can play mini pharma for free directly in your browser, here!

Remy's Flippin Dungeon is pretty close to being done by now. In fact it's mostly missing content, with all the systems being finally in place.

I have an event that lets you trade one of your cards for another one, an event that lets you make duplicates of your exisitng cards for a price, another where you blow out sacred candles for stat improvements, and more! I also have a new character system that makes every character more unique beyond the base stats and decks: each character now has a trait that activates at certain timings or conditions. For example, a warrior using a non-hit card regains their forces to strike harder on their next hit, while a wizard gets some free mana whenever their deck reshuffles. This system is designed to encourage specific playstyles, while also leaving room for improvisation based on the cards you find during your exploration.

More cards and more enemies is what I'm working on now. And once this is done, with a simple gameover screen and a fancy titlescreen, this game should make its way to your hands finally!

Finally, this is what Benjamin is working on! It's a game where you control a tiny knight with a heavy broadsword, and time moves when you move.

I don't have much to say about this one, Benjamin is just playing around with it and hasn't quite decided a final direction for it just yet. It might even be abandoned for another project, but if it doesn't then this is the game that should come out after Flippin Dungeon!

That's it for this month! I personally had a lot of fun making mini pharma, but it's now time to come back to the Flippin Dungeon and actually finish it. We're still thinking about what we should do next year, and having uploaded a web-playable game for the first time in over a year makes me think that maybe adding web exports to our engine Sugar might be a good idea. That way we could have demos directly up on our Itch pages, which might make it easier to spread the word about our games. What do you think?

Thank you all for your support! See you soon for more games!

-Rémy🍬