NEWSCAKE January '25 - Horizons released, Smol Gods coming next month, and more!

Hi punks!

We're starting the year off with a bang here, we just released Horizons: The End Of Words, an open-world space-exploration word game! And we have a whole bunch of other projects in the oven, including Smol Gods, which will release next month, Build The Sun, a crocheting game, a remake of Fire & Brimstone, and more!

Horizons: The End Of Words just came out two days ago! We've been working on this game for a couple of months in 2024. I mentioned it before but this is definitely one of the more sizeable Punkcake releases. It features two game modes and both have a considerable amount of content. Mission mode is more arcade-style, with 28 different modifiers to spice-up the challenge to taste, while Journey mode is an open-world experience, with various types of space stations, challenges and even minigames!

Pentadrangle did a really unique job with the soundtrack for this game as well, with a whopping 16-minutes-long gameplay track, inspired by Mike Oldfields' Tubular Bells albums. And Eris made easily one of the best release trailers we've ever had for a Punkcake game.

Horizons is available for Windows, MacOS and Linux, on Steam and on Itch io. Of course our Patreon subscribers can claim their keys on our website as usual!

Smol Gods is the new name for the game Benjamin made for Ludum Dare 56! It was originally called Combo Critters, but it turned out that the name was taken by some cryptocurrency-peddling studio. We didn't want to take the risk to get into trouble with them, so we decided to think of something else. Smol Gods is what we came up with!

It's a strategy card game where your goal is to build the strongest hand of gods! Each god is unique, some synergize with other gods, or can be hindered by others. Some have powers to activate during battle, and some twist the very rules of the game.

The game plays in two phases. A draft phase where you and your virtual opponent make up your hands by drawing and discarding cards, and also picking cards from the discard zone. And a battle phase where you play your gods one by one and activate their powers and synergies.

As you level up, you will unlock more and more gods as well as bigger hands and discard zones.

Pentadrangle is still making the music for this one, but otherwise the game is fully finished, and so it will be our release for February! You can even wishlist it on Steam now if you'd like!

Patreon billings will go through on February 1st for this one!

I am back on Build The Sun! Well, temporarily. But still! Build The Sun was originally my game for Ludum Dare 56, and I was very happy with it. I was so happy with it that I managed to convince the team to let me spend a few months on it to do justice to the game's potential. However that means that I'll have to take care of many other things in parallel to working on this game. As you may already know, I'm the one orchestrating the releases for the game, and also working on our game engine, and doing this newsletter, and I'd really like to make some smaller games as well. So I expect to be working on Build The Sun on and off along the year, with hopefully a release during the second half of 2025.

And since I will be investing quite a lot of time in this project, I figured it would be smart to do some marketing for it! But we hate ads, so instead I started a devlog! For now it's only the first episode where I talk about the state of the Ludum Dare version, but I'll be doing more, talking about different aspects of the game as I work on it.

And I did actually get some work done on the game itself. I fixed the two crashes that I knew about, and I started optimizing the game and making small changes, like visited caves now having a little lantern in them, so that you can see the little guy with the miner's helmet that you sent in there actually comes back holding a diamond! That was already the case, but with the miner guy disappearing into the cave, you didn't have any light anymore, so you wouldn't see the diamond popping out of the cave. And then the diamond would eventually show up somewhere inexplicably as the little guy holding it regained the light of one of your camps. It's a small thing, but it's the type of oversight that really bothered me with the jam version, so I'm glad it's taken care of now!

Anyway, sadly I will be pausing development of Build The Sun again for now, because Eris, Julia and I are going to where Benjamin lives to spend a week together and make some new games! I actually have this game idea that's been sitting in my head for at least two months, and which I'm really excited to finally put to execution! Hopefully I'll be able to tell you more about it next month! (but also I will definitely be posting about it on Bluesky if you wanna follow me there)

Eris is working on a crochetting game! What you can see above is a rough prototype she made in Pico-8. There's a lot going on on there, and none of it is really definitive at the moment. But the machanic of reproducing given patterns is really compelling and we think could make for an interesting cozy type game. We've been exchanging a lot of ideas over the concept. Hopefully we'll have more to tell you about this one in the coming months!

After finishing Smol Gods, Benjamin started on another game! He has been remaking Fire & Brimstone, a Pico-8 dungeon-crawler he originally made 9 years ago. Over that time he's had a lot of ideas he's been wanting to try and implement in that game. And now he's doing it!

We'll definitely have more to show you for this one next month. This game is likely to be the Punkcake release for either March or April!

Finally, I also personally spent some more time on Shotgun King this month to bring it to a place where there no more outstanding issues on it! That is, no more crashes and no more game-breaking bugs. And this means we can at last send this version over to the console team so that they get the process going for porting the 1.5 update to consoles!

A small note for Hot Wax! I know some of you are waiting for the Steam release and the last three gamemodes that will be added to it. The good news is that's I'm starting to feel like working on this game again. The bad news is that it's not my immediate priority for now. Besides, and to be transparent, the Steam wishlists for the game have been climbing up slowly but steadily, so in the end waiting a bit longer may actually benefit the game when it finally releases there. In any case, I have not forgotten about it, it will happen in the next few months for sure, maybe as soon as late february, and maybe a little later.

Hot Wax having already been our monthly release for last December, when it came out on Itch, the Steam release will not count as a second monthly release. This means it will come on the same month as another Punkcake full release.

For now I'm mostly looking forward to making another new game next week while hanging out with the team. Then in February we'll be releasing Smol Gods, and then who knows! The one thing that's for sure is that a lot of games are coming your way this year!

Thanks for reading, and thank you so much for continued support! I hope you have a great month of February! See you soon for more games!

Take care,

- Rémy🍬