NEWSCAKE: Hot Wax, Horizons, Thinking about the future (the future being 2025)

Hi punks!

Well, still no new release in November. Hot Wax has been a bit of a hot mess. The game is still coming together and I still think it's a good game, but I lost most of my motivation to be working on it, so I'm just pushing through and taking any opportunity to be doing something else.

In the end I spent half of the month working on our game engine Sugar. I was wanting to add support for Steam leaderboards (and I did) but I ended up also working on some other things that will be helpful to us going forward. Among other improvements, we now have a brand new save system which we should be able to use for all our new games and which should prove both faster and more stable than everything we've been doing so far!

On Hot Wax, I actually managed to make the few gamemodes I had in mind originally, and after some iteration they all turn out to be pretty fun, so that's pretty great. Now that I can have Steam leaderboards I'm working on adding a Daily challenge mode which will give you a leaderboard ranking. Apart from that, a few sfx are still missing and I have a list of various minor adjustments I want to make on the game, but mostly it's all done.

This game really blew out of the scope we'd like to have for Punkcake games, but it's hard to tell when I should have made different decisions. I wish I wasn't spending so much time on it, but at this point it also feels like I might as well keep on going until my todo list is finally empty? Anyway this will be a bit of a jumbo Punkcake release, we hope you'll appreciate it!

And despite not being super motivated for it, I still want to finish Hot Wax before moving on to Build The Sun, and I'm finally running out of things to do on it anyway, so the release will happen soon!

Meanwhile, we did a beta release of Horizons: The End Of Words over on Steam, for Patreon subscribers only. This has gone rather well, though we only got feedback from two or three players, but at least they were thorough! We have an almost-final version of the game now and we're mostly waiting for me to finish things up with Hot Wax before releasing this one too.

Horizons is also going to be a sort of jumbo Punkcake release. Here again it's difficult to tell where exactly things got out of hand. The game features two modes that are very complete each in their own way. The Mission mode is closer to the jam version, with an arcade feel and lots of challenges to complete. Meanwhile the Journey mode is more of an open-world experience with a lot of content to discover as you expand your web of words throughout the galaxy. Both are fun!

Benjamin has already moved on to working on his game from last Ludum Dare: Combo Critters. The title is very likely to change because it turns out that it's also the name of a game from a cryptomoney-peddling studio. As much as we'd enjoy annoying them, honestly we really can't be bothered to risk getting sued over a game's title. As to the game itself, Benjamin is hard at work making it better than the jam version. We'll likely have more to show you next month!

With 2024 coming to a close pretty soon, we're also thinking about what we want to plan for next year. It's a pretty tough one: we announced we would release 9 games in 2024 and so far we only released 2. Sure there were also 2 Shotgun King updates, and we have two more games that are nearly finished, but we're still way under our goal. But we're stubborn. We still want to make lots of games. We feel like the issue isn't so much the quantity of games we're wanting to make, but rather us going way out of scope with them, which is definitely the case for both Horizons and Hot Wax.

So for now we're thinking of making smaller games and tone down the focus on tutorials and other non-essential QoL stuff like that. There will be at least one exception as I'm really wanting to spend a few months on Build The Sun and the team is okay with that, but even I am itching to make smaller games.

Probably we won't be coming out with another menu for 2025. Considering how far off we were with the one for 2024, we'd rather prove to ourselves that we can manage to make more games again before promising anything to you. We do have an objective though. It remains the same, really. A new game every month. Let's see if we can manage.

Let us know your thoughts!

We're pausing billings for December. You're all already paid up for both Hot Wax and Horizons.

Have a great month of December!
See you soon for a game release or two!

-Rémy🍬