PUNKCAKE NEWSCAKE June '25: 10S Forever, new free game: Frontline, and more!

Hi punks!

This post comes a little later than I would have liked, but I've been really struggling with the heat we're having here in France, so this is the best I could do. I bring quite a few news though!

Let's start with our June release, 10S Forever! A game we have not made! This is the first guest game on the Punkcake catalog and we're very happy to say that we think the game is great and worth your time! This has also been a really great experience because we got to support a developper we love, and the people following this developper got to discover or rediscover Punkcake, which is really cool!

10S Forever is a tennis-em-up bullet-hell. It's fast and hectic, and it's super creative and original. If you're a Patreon subscriber or if you subscribe now for 3€, you can redeem and play the game now!

We will definitely be doing more guest releases in the future, but we'll still do our best to keep the ratio of games we've made ourselves higher haha.

Here's something new! Benjamin made a new game really quickly on Pico-8 this month! It's playable now for free!

Frontline is a game of capture the flag where you play against... yourself. Or your selves rather. Every time you do capture the flag, you change color and must capture the other flag, but you must also deal with the very tangible ghost of yourself capturing the flag you just captured.

It messes with your brain, and it makes you think there's no way the mechanics can't be exploited in some way to get infinite score, but nope! Whatever you do it ends up chaotic and challenging in a really fun way.

Benjamin is working on a fuller Sugar version of this game for one of the next months, probably August!

Our April game If Letters Had Pants, Would They Wear Them Like This? What About Numbers? What If They Had Small Shovels And They Dug Stuff Up To Put In A Museum? got a third big patch this month! It fixes the last few issues the game was having, rebalanced the difficulty to something more challenging in the higher levels, and also added a bunch of new content!

This probably going to be the last patch for this game until the Steam release. It's been fun working on it but now I want to work on other things!

Mergeborn is a game Benjamin has been working on since late January, while he was still finishing Fire & Brimstone. Then Smol Gods and Fire & Brimstone got released and he focused on Mergeborn. I made If Letters Had Pants for April, and then it appeared that Mergeborn would still not be ready for May, so Benjamin made another game, Serpentes. And after Serpentes, well, Benjamin's interest for Mergeborn faltered.

The problem when a game's development goes on for too long, in our case, is that we tend to put off a lot of the boring stuff for the end of development. The longer the development takes, the more daunting the boring stuff becomes.

But Mergeborn is a really cool game, and a lot of work went into it already, so we decided I would give it a try! The main thing missing at this point is what we call the "meta game", meaning the overall structure of the game and how the gameplay evolves over time to remain interesting. I had my own ideas for this and Benjamin was all too happy to let me try and put them to execution. And so I've been working on that!

But! Yeah I can see why Benjamin gave up haha. The project is in a pretty weedy place and it's going to take some more work to get it where we want it to be. So after working on this for a few weeks, I too started something new. I intend to return to Mergeborn shortly though and we'll release it sometime in the next few months!

This is the new thing! Like Frontline, this is also in Pico-8. There's a good reason Pico-8 is a strong inspiration for our own engine Sugar, it's just so nice to work with!

In this game, which we'll call Remy's New Game for now, you get a bunch of card faces, which get built into a deck of random double-faced cards. Every turn you get a new card, and you get to either play it and flip it to play the other side. But of course you don't know what the other side is, so you better hope it's better than what you had!

I'm extremely happy with how simple this premise is. Lately I've been racking my brain for exactly this kind of game idea that's very easy to grasp, and to set up, but also lends itself to a solid quantity of content.

I'm also having a lot of fun with the game's visuals. I'm making up a set of bicolour tiles which I use to make a small design for each of the card. The card themselves and the game's UI also use the same tiles so none of it takes much extra space. Constraints! They're great!

This will be our game for July and it will actually remain in Pico-8! This will be the first time we commercialize a game that isn't running in Sugar, but for this one it's just a really great fit for Pico-8, the game doesn't suffer much from the tiny resolution, and adding content is very code-token-efficient. (for those who don't know, Pico-8 has constraints on code quantity as well) Besides this, I truly believe that not having to port the game over to Sugar will do wonders to my sanity.

Our current plan is to have one version of the game that will be free and mobile-compatible and feel complete, and we'll also have a paid extended version with a good deal more content, and this is what our Patreon subscribers will get!

This is yet another discussion, but we're also thinking of making the extended version 5$ instead of 6$. We've been debating whether we should keep to our 6$ pricepoint for every game, and we've come to this conclusion: a 6$ game is what we'd like to have every month and it's what we'll keep aiming for. But sometimes a game takes much longer than anticipated, or simply its price is completely besides what someone would pay for another game in that genre. So we decided we would try and get smarter for the price of each game. The Patreon subscription of course is staying at 3€ per month, and we're very intent on keeping that as the much-cheaper alternative. 5$ is probably the cheapest we'll go, whereas some games might go up to 10$ or maybe even 12$. Time will tell!

These, the engine change and us de-locking our pricepoint, and also having guest games, are pretty big changes, but the truth is that we're still looking for ways to make our activity sustainable in the long run. Shotgun King is unfortunately not going to be paying our salaries forever so we figure it's as good a time as any to start trying new things! That being said, please definitely let us know what you think, we'd really love to get your opinion on these changes!

That's it for this month! Thanks for reading and thank you as always for your support! We love you.

See you soon for Remy's New Game! (temporary title)

-PUNKCAKE Délicieux🥞