PUNKCAKE NEWSCAKE July '25 - Late again! Sorry!

Hi punks!

Well, July is already coming to an end and we just weren't fast enough to release our new game in time.

The July game is just late. It's coming, and there will be another separate game for August, which hopefully we'll manage to release in August, and not in September. But let me tell you what we've been up to!

Last month Benjamin was hard at work on Frontline. This month, Benjamin... went on vacations. Yeah, uhm, I actually don't have much more to say about that. Honestly it's the first time one of us actually takes a month-long vacation in the history of Punkcake, and you kinda have to respect it, time off is important, and the best ideas usually come when one feels rested.

Benjamin is coming back to us next week, and he should be finishing the Punkcake version of this game soon! You can still play the pico-8 version of it for free of course. And I should probably tell you that the new version will have a different title! It'll be called Overdubbed: Clone Wars!

I have also been on a trip this month! But a shorter trip, just one week, and technically a working trip, though it was pretty chill. I was invited to spend a week in a German countryside castle, called Schloss Dagstuhl! I was there with a bunch of academics and a few other gamedevs for a research seminar!

It was such a nice time! I met a ton of lovely people, had lots of super interesting conversations, came up with a new way to design games (not a joke, and I will tell you more about this at a later point) and actually made two analog games that you can play! One isn't uploaded yet, but the other is called Breath Checkers, and it's a relaxing 2-player game of drawing and breathing made by Gillian Smith, from Santa Cruz, California, and myself, from uh, Bordeaux, France. You only need a piece of paper and two differently-colored pens or pencils to play it, and it's really nice to play with a partner or a friend!

We actually made this game with the new way to design games that we worked on! We're really happy with the result and we'd love for you to give it a try. You can find the game here on Itch, it's completely free and the rules hold on one page, which you can either print or just read from your favorite screen.

And if you do try it, it'd be really amazing if you put the resulting drawing on the #I-made-this channel of our Discord server! Seeing what people make with the game is such a joy, I would be really grateful! (but of course you don't have to and it would already be amazing if you just played the game even without letting me know about it)

Defeat the dungeon with double-sided cards you can only flip once, in Remy's Flippin' Dungeon! (soon)

I am back from Germany now, and even though I can't quite claim to be fully rested, I am working on this game again! The plan was to keep this game in Pico-8 as a way to make development easier so that I could finish the game for July, but... Well... The game isn't done.

It turns out that having a simple game concept does not in fact necessarily mean the code will be easy to write. And Pico-8, with its code limit, makes me want to write my code very carefully, which takes even more time. In the end, the game is progressing well but it is still some time away from being finished.

This means that sadly this game is going to come out in August instead of July, but once again, it will remain the official July game, as Overdubbed is still supposed to come out in August too.

But on the other hand, this delay also got me time to use the new way to design games I mentioned earlier, on this game! The result of this is that I found some weaknesses in the game's existing design, and I think I found solutions to them, so you should get a better game in the end!

The plan for this game is still to have both a free browser-playable version and a paid extended version, and both will come out simultaneously on Itch io, and then later on Steam.

Something else we worked on this month: a new video format for the Newscakes!

Eris has been editing these together, with assets from Julia, and my own voice! She's also editing these posts which is a great help. We have been wanting to do more with the video format since the very beginning of Punkcake but never were able to actually find the time to do it... until now! Having Eris taking care of these has been really great, and the result is really great and makes me want to do better voice-overs.

Marketing games is really hard when you're also trying to make the games themselves, but we're excited to be trying new stuff, and we might try and do even more with this format in the future!

In the meantime, we're also happy to tell you about the PUNKCAKE Infinite Key Request for streamers, video creators and press! This is a form people can submit to receive keys for our games so that they may cover them! Having people make videos and stream gameplay of our games is still one of the best ways to make our games better known, so we're hoping this can help. If you have a favorite streamer, or some streamer friends, please send them the form, tell them it's from the devs of Shotgun King!

I think that's it for this month. As you can see, we do keep busy. We should have two new games coming out in August, first Remy's Flippin' Dungeon, and then Overdubbed: Clone Wars! We're looking forward to letting you play them!

Thank you all so much for your support!

Have a great month of August! Much love!

-Rémy🍬