2023 update and our plans going forward! (Patreon)

TL;DR: We've decided we would keep making one game a month, but only every other year, starting in 2024! Also we've been working on our website, and we're going to start putting all our existing games on Steam sometime soon!

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Hi punks!

It's been a pretty weird year for us so far. The subscriptions have been on hold since the beginning of the year because of the accumulated delay on last year's games. If you recall, we were 4 games short, and now... well now we're 3 games short. The only game we managed to put out this year so far has been Furious Farm: Total Reap-Out. There has been quite a few other prototypes, like this flying finger survivor-like, or our Ludum Dare entry Superfetch Dog, and a few more that we didn't show you yet. But so far it's been difficult to get enough steam to push any of these very far beyond the state of prototypes.

On the one hand we are glad to not have the pressure of the subscriptions this year, because that would force us to work harder than we feel is reasonable. On the other hand, this situation clearly shows that we really needed this time to take it easier after the 14 games we did put out in the last two years, and especially after Shotgun King.

This has us face the fact that our model as we tried to make it work before 2023 is unsustainable. Releasing a new game every single month for the foreseeable future, while also handling marketing, maintaining our game engine, tending to our community, and giving some occasional love to Shotgun King, is not a three men job.

Yet at the same time, we are very attached to the one-game-a-month rhythm, and also to all the other tasks I listed above. We did try to get other people to work with us and make more Punkcake games as guest developers but so far none of our attempts came to fruition there.

So we have come up with a new solution which we think is a good compromise between our irresponsible ideals and our physical and mental wellbeing: Starting in 2024, we will make one game a month for a whole year, then take the next year to rest and do maintenance on everything, maybe prepare some new prototypes, and then in 2026 start over again with a new year of games, and so on every two years.

This means we get to show off with full years packed with quality games, and then we also get the time to recharge our batteries, and work on our tools, and make Steam releases, and prepare prototypes and things for the next year of games.

This also means that the subscriptions will only be active one of every two years. Our Patreon page will simply be deactivated on off years, and reactivated just before each new active year.

As for 2023, well we'll still be making those three missing games for 2022, the subscriptions will remain paused until the end of the year but you can still subscribe to get the new games. That's not all though, we've actually been pretty active behind the scenes: I've been working on our website for the last few weeks, so that it would better represent our project. We also have quite a few games lined up and ready for release over on Steam. We have tentative plans to start releasing one every week sometime soon, we'll keep you updated on that! The linux and mac ports of all the games are still on our roadmap, and so is adding Steam Workshop support to Shotgun King. We even have a cheeky secret announcement coming at the end of this month of July, but we'll tell you more about that then!

We don't intend to stop Punkcake anytime soon, so we want to find the right way to make it work. We're pretty hopeful that this change of pace will help us do that!

I'll leave it at that for now. As I'm writing this the whole team is preparing for the GMTK gamejam which starts tonight. Maybe we'll be making the seeds of a new punkcake game or two this week-end!

Thank you all for your continued support and love! We hope you're as excited as we are for the future of Punkcake!

Have a lovely weekend!

Rémy🍬