NEWSCAKE April '25: If Letters Had Pants, Mergeborn, Serpentes, Tic-Tac-Toe
April game is late, but we got something else for May, and two other on-going projects!
Hi punks!
We've been putting off making an actual newsletter for ages, but here it is at last! We'll be posting about our progress on the various games once a month, (that's also what this post is) and we'll also make sure to post release announcements on here!
We're not sure we'll stay on Substack indefinitely, but this is good way for us to finally start an actual mailing list. If we ever move off of Substack, we'll just take that list with us and use it again with whatever newsletter solution we switch to. As much as we're thankful for platforms like Discord and Bluesky, and now Substack, nothing really beats the security of a mailing list. What I'm saying is: Please do subscribe to this newsletter! It would really help us in the long run!
Okay, moving on to the games! The April game is late but it is nearly complete! I also have news from Benjamin's merging game, as well as from an older game of Benjamin's called Serpentes, and from Eris's new project!
If Letters Had Pants, Would They Wear Them Like This? is a roguelite wordgame where you have to find words in a random grid of letters. As you dig through the letters, you open up possibilites for more words which will help you reach the score goal for the round. At the end of each round you get to pick pants for one of the letters. These pants will give you bonuses when the letter is used in a word, and of course the pants can synergize if you manage to use them together!
But you're not just digging through the letters, you're also digging through the dirt! And let me tell you, it's crazy the things you find there. Crazy enough to sell some of them just to open a museum and preserve the others! As your museum completes you'll unlock fun descriptions of the items, but also game modifiers to change up the rules of the game!
It is, honestly, a wordgame for people who don't necessarily love wordgames. You can have fun with it if you know lots of long words, but you can also have fun with it by simply playing around with letter spatialization and combination. The game is also double-dipped in a good dose of humour, with lots of little jokes and funny interactions all throughout. Plus, Pentadrangle has been making some really great tunes for it!
Making this game has been quite the ride, but I've been having lots of fun with it and I'm really happy with how it's been coming together. As I wrote in the intro, it is nearly complete and I'm expecting to release it next week! I do apologize for the lateness, but it will still count as April's game, because we have something else for you for May!
Mergeborn has been coming along nicely! This is a game about defending a castle with mergeable heroes. Merged heroes can be merged further into even more heroes, and it all makes a fairly wide merge tree. Benjamin has been working on this game fully since the release of our last game Fire & Brimstone.
We finally got a playable version this month, so there is progress, but until now the game had a very sandbox-y feel and lacked structure. Benjamin, bothered by this, has decided to rework things so that the game would both be easier to pick up and also more fun to discover over time. Of course this also means spending more time on the game and so it will only be the game for June or July. Should be a very interesting one though!
But we did want to have a game for May. And since I'm still finishing the April game, Benjamin decided to finally do what he has only threatened to do in the past: pausing his current project to make a Punkcake version of Serpentes!
Serpentes is a Snake game Benjamin made in 2015. Fruits appear on the board and your goal is to eat them, but each fruit has randomized properties, and the only way to know them is... to eat it. It is very fun and extremely quick, really the best kind of arcade game.
I can't say I know too much about Benjamin's plans for this new version of the game, besides some new fruit properties and new gamemodes, but you can still play that version from 2015! The free version is actually the full game, but in the 2.50$ version you can select two starting bonuses instead of just one. We may actually do something similar with the Punkcake version!
This is another new game that Eris has been experimenting with! It is a worker-placement game set around a tic-tac-toe game. Turns pass when you play the tic-tac-toe, and as you get resources, make new symbols, and capture enemy ones, you also get to build buildings allowing you to specialize symbols with specific roles and behaviors.
The concept is really fun and Benjamin and I have been pitching a lot of ideas for it. We're very excited to see where this will go and I'm looking forward to telling you more about it next month!
And that's it for this month! As you can see, lots of fun projects on the horizon! Even though the April game is late, we're still strongly intent on having a new game for every month of the year.
Thank you very much for reading. In case you found this post randomly and don't really know about us, we have a Patreon where you can get our new games for cheap as they come out! The games themselves come out on Itch.io and, later, to Steam!
Thanks for the love and support! I'll see you soon for some release announcements!
-Rémy🍬