2022 Punkcake Retrospective + Plans for 2023 (Patreon)

Hi punks!

First of all, this is very important, we wish you, and I cannot overstate this, a happy new year!

Can you believe 2022 is already over? We certainly can't, we released 7 games this year, which means 5 games are missing!! what the hell?!?

Well the 8th game is in development. I (Rémy) am working on it, but I'm also currently in the process of moving, which unfortunately has to take priority right now. But what about the other 4?

See, 2022 was pretty weird, we started the year off already somewhat late on schedule and pretty stressed out about that delay. Both the stress and delay would keep accumulating throughout the year in a vicious circle. But in April something in particular happened. Ludum Dare was on and we saw it as a great opportunity to make a game faster than usual: we were gonna make a game in one weekend for the competition, and then we were going to work two more weeks on it and have it be the next Punkcake release.

That game turned out to be Shotgun King: The Final Checkmate. It was, by our standards, insanely popular. In the end it required much, much more than one week-end and two weeks.

Shotgun King did two things for us:

• It gave us financial security, which was very welcome and which we are still extremely grateful for!
• It put us back massively, needing the attention of the whole team for weeks on end, making it super urgent to create a legal structure for Punkcake, making us review priorities on a weekly basis due to the sheer chaos and suddenness of the situation...

Of course Shotgun King was overall the best thing that could happen to us this year. The game went viral, people found it to be original but also fun and well-made, they loved it, and we finally made enough money to really pay ourselves.

That's really great, we can't overstate how grateful we are that Shotgun King did as well as it did. However we had set out to make a new game every month. We were already late on schedule. After Shotgun King we were more late then ever, and also very tired. And it wouldn't stop there!

We wanted to keep Shotgun King alive since people loved it so much! So a few months later we worked on a massive content update. It was going to be a DLC at first, but we really couldn't be bothered to make that possible technically and then to do the proper marketing for it... Instead we released the update for free and upped the game's price to 10$ instead of 6$. People loved it, the game's ratings score went up, sales were going strong... and more delay accumulated on the monthly releases.

And as I was saying, it's a vicious circle. The stress from the delay is making us slower, and unhappy, so the delay only gets worse.

So here's what we decided to do going into 2023:

First of all, all Patreon supporters are getting a new Shotgun King key, to make up for one of the months we spent on the content update. Obviously this is going to be a second key for a lot of people, please feel free to give it away to a friend or family! We'll ask you not to sell it (pretty please), but ultimately it's yours to do with as you like. You can redeem it right now over on our website!

Second of all, we're stopping monthly subscription billings until we catch up and are done with all the missing games of 2022! Let's take a look at our release calendar...

~ 2022 PUNKCAKE Releases ~

• Jan. - Shroomchitect
• Feb. - Rush for the Ages
• Mar. - Shotgun King: The Final Checkmate
• Apr. - Ecstatic
• May. - MOONPONG: Tales of Epic Lunacy
• Jun. - Pigments
• Jul. - The Turgenev Study
• Aug. - In The Face of God (coming soon)
• Sep. - ???
• Oct. - ???
• Nov. - Shotgun King Content Update
• Dec. - ???

So that's one game to finish, and three more to make entirely, and then yet one more to start off the subscriptions again in 2023. But that's not all! Since we're taking off the pressure of the subscriptions, we'll also finally be able to work on the Linux and Mac ports we've been talking about since forever. Those are coming, for all the games, I will make it happen, I swear. We'll also be giving some love to our website to make it both more informative and more functional. We want a nice little calendar on there where you can see which game is for which month, and other neat stuff like that...

We have plans aplenty! We are pausing the subscriptions but we will still be doing things and releasing games, only hopefully under less pressure than usual!

If you happen to be an annual subscriber, don't fear! Your subscription will also be put on hold, so that when we start them again you will have as many remaining months on your subscription as you do now. We already paused the billings for January, so you're already in a free month without having had anything to do, congrats!

Also, if you’re not a subscriber, you can still subscribe now and get our latest released game (though currently it’ll be the second round of Shotgun King), you’ll be charged once for the subscription but you won’t be charged at the end of the month until we unpause billings.

Ok I think this is it for now!

As always, thank you all so much for your continued support and love! The positivity we're constantly receiving is so encouraging and nice to have, we could not ask for a lovelier audience!

And once again, we wish you and your close ones a wonderful new year!!

Take care, see you soon for more games!

-PUNKCAKE Délicieux 🥞