PUNKCAKE NEWSCAKE August '25 - Öoo, Frontline, Remy's Flippin Dungeon

Hi punks!

Our new guest game, Öoo by Nama Takahashi, came out in August, our own new game Frontline is set to release next week, and our other new game Remy's Flippin Dungeon is on its last stretch of development!

Öoo is an exploration puzzle-platformer where you play a caterpillar made of bombs! It's extremely clever, and it keeps teaching you things about its mechanics all throughout the game, and even after with some nice post-credits content.

It truly is a great video game, with no less than a 99% review score on Steam, out of almost 2000 reviews, and we are so pleased to have it as part of the Punkcake catalog! Plus it's only 2 hours long, so it's perfect for a busy adult -- but it's 2 hours that were designed over 2 years, so it's great value for both your buck, and your time!

For now Öoo is still the game you get when you subscribe to our Patreon! But get it quick if you want the discount, because this will change soon, with the release of...

Frontline: War of Echoes! This is the new game from Benjamin, based on his Pico-8 prototype from 3 months ago, in which you play capture the flag against the ghosts of your past actions. Every time you reach the enemy flag, you switch teams and must play against and with your clones who re-enact all your previous flag-taking, all at the same time.

Last month we said we would change the game's title, but Benjamin has since changed his mind back, and so we're back to the original title, Frontline!

This game is nearly done as I'm writing this, and it is a very strange one. At first it just feels like you're playing a weird experiment, which is true, but as you try different strategies, and as you actually reach higher scores, and unlock new abilities, the game quickly becomes extremely fun in its raw and chaotic way. It's a very unique blend of brain-scratcher and action game.

And we are preparing to release it next week! It will be on Itch and on our Patreon subscription, and then in a couple months it will reach Steam!

Remy's Flippin Dungeon, is turning out to be my most ambitious Pico-8 project ever. Not so much technically, I already did a lot of exploration there with Hot Wax last year, and with my older voxel experiments, but more so in design and with just how much breadth and depth I can fit into Pico-8's limits.

The game's concept is simple enough: you start with a small collection of card faces, which combine into a deck of double-faced cards. As you pull these cards one at a time, you have to choose between playing the face you're seeing, or flipping the card to play the hidden face. But there's no flipping back.

Outside of this, the game takes the form of an RPG where your hero is delving deeper and deeper in a dungeon, fighting monsters and getting help from the environement and mysterious other characters. All of the game plays through the flippable cards, and your actions have consequences on your deck and your few stats for the rest of the run. Different characters will mean opportunities for different builds, but so will the events that present themselves to you.

It is a game all about choices, and so of course I want these choices to matter, and to remain interesting over as much time as possible. This means a lot of carefully crafter content, as much as I can fit into Pico-8's limitations.

Because Pico-8 is limited. This is the very reason we usually use our custom engine SUGAR, which is inspired by Pico-8 but lets us choose our own limitations. But it's still nice to come back to the source now and then, and this project is a particularly interesting fit for it. Apart from the 128x128 screen and limited 16 colors palette, Pico-8 has a code limitation where each code element, like variable names, symbols like parenthesis, plus signs, equal signs, and keywords like "function", "if" etc, all these are counted as tokens, and Pico-8 only allows a total of 8192 tokens in a game. This is designed to keep the games small and fun to work on, but of course some people also take pleasure from optimizing their game to death to fit as much game as possible within the token limit. I am such one weirdo, and this game has proven to be a really engaging exercise in re-thinking my systems to make them as code-efficient as possible, while keeping it easy to work with, and of course striving to produce the gameplay I envisioned, and possibly more.

I think I have already rambled enough about this game, but I will say that this game is on its last stretch of development, and that I am very motivated to see this game through completion in the next few weeks. I sincerely can't wait to deliver the game to you!

That wraps up the Newscake covering august! We are still one game late on our monthly calendar: Ooo took the July spot, and Frontline is technically our August game. We have some hope to release Remy's Flippin Dungeon before the end of the month and get back on track, but we'll see what happens. In any case, our goal is still to finish the year with a total of 12 games released in 2025!

Thank you all for your support, have a wonderful month of September!

-Rémy🍬