2023 Punkcake Retrospective + Updated plans for 2024! (Patreon)

Hi punks!

It's that time of the year again where we look back and say to ourselves "what the fuck was that?" And yeah it's been another weird year for us, 2022 was really hectic so this year we took it easy, kind of. We paused the subscriptions for the whole year and we released 3 games that were supposed to be part of the 12 games for 2022. We're very happy about all three: Furious Farm, Superfetch Dog and Hexle! We also released all the games on Steam, I did a massive rework of our website, Shotgun King came out on consoles, we did a few gamejams, and what's that? We're still missing a game for 2022??

Yes well, it's on its way, in fact it's nearly done now, but yes it'll only come out in 2024, and no you still won't get charged for it since it was supposed to be one of the 2022 games, but that's the last one, we'll charge you for the next ones.

It was good to not have to do a new game every month this year. The pressure was definitely less intense and we got to take the time needed to do other tasks and take care of our personal lives. We're pretty happy with our website's new coat of paint, and it also feels nice to have all our games on Steam. We also managed to start a few game prototypes which may well come handy at a later point.

In july we tried to take a good look at how things had been going for us since 2022, and it looked like going back to one-game-a-month forever after would simply prove unsustainable. So we took the decision to try and do one-game-a-month only every other year, starting with 2024. And so here we are at the end of 2023, with 2024 looming over us from a few days' distance...

And the truth is, we are woefully unprepared! There's been a lot going on for us these last couple of months, both Punkcake stuff and personal stuff, and so things were pushed back, and now January is already looking to be very eventful for three different reasons, one of which being the last missing 2022 game. (we'll announce the other two very soon, please bear with me)

All this to say there's no way we're making a new 2024 game in time for January, so after much deliberation we decided to go for plan C.

We're not going to be making a new game every single month in 2024. Instead we're going to announce a roadmap with a number of games and other things for each season! We're still working on it, but I can already tell you we'll still be making a lot of games in 2024, even if it's not 12. For now it's looking like 9 or 10, and we're pretty excited about it!

So what happens with the Patreon then? Well at first we thought we'd be using Patreon's 'per creation' system, but it turns out we don't have access to it on an established account like ours. And then after some more research it seems the 'per creation' system is actually pretty confusing since you end up only paying at the end of the month rather than when a creation drops as we initially thought.

But as it happens we're trying to be quite a bit more organized this year. We have tentative dates for all the games (and the other stuff) we're planning to release, with some spare time to absorb delays, so hopefully we'll be able to tell when we're about to release a new game or not. So we'll leave the Patreon as it is and we'll pause it for the months when we're not expecting to release a new game, kindof like we've been doing this entire year.

There is one exception, and that's this coming January. We will be releasing the last 2022 game, and like the other 2022 games we released this year, we won't charge Patreons for it. If you're subscribed when it drops you'll simply get it for free.

In any case, we'll do a monthly report to let you know where things are standing for us and whether you're getting charged or not for the next month. Our roadmap should also be a good forecast of when you'll be charged or not.

And that's about all I have to say for now! We're very excited to get started with this new year! There'll be another post soon with our 2024 roadmap!

Thank you so much for all the support and love this year! We can't wait to give you more games to play!
Have some wonderful holidays!

-PUNKCAKE Délicieux 🥞