My name is Antonio Uribe, also known as Fáyer and I'm a game developer from México. I programmed the first version of the game and I'm the game director, but the game has been made in collaboration with other friends. Vanila made the art, Inu helped with development, Majo made the music and Rich made the sound effects plus several other friends that helped in different smaller things.
PancitoMerge is a drop-merge game similar to suika game with a mexican bakery theme. The idea came to me once I was watching someone play a suika-like and I immediately thought that a version with mexican pastries would be cool, so I noted it in my notes app where many other game ideas live and, as always, forgot about it.
A year after putting the idea in my notes app, I had a window of free time so I went to check my ideas to see if there was anything and I found this one, it sounded simple enough so I decided to prototype it. This was around February 2025.
I prototyped the main idea and then went to Vanila, the artist, to pitch it to her. I already knew her art and since I had the idea I couldn't picture the game with anybody else, she was perfect for it. She was excited to collaborate so we continued working until we finished the first version of the game like around mid March, just in time to show it around GDC. That's the version that has been up in my since then.
The main plan wasn't to make a game game, it was just to make this idea and put it out there for people to enjoy, but thousands and thousands of people played it and they wanted more, so we discussed and decided to do a bigger and better version of it, which is the one that we are currently working on and that should be out before the year ends.
I chose to make the game in Godot because I was just finishing Dig! Dig! Dino! a game that was part of Playdate's second season. DDD is made entirely on their SDK using Sublime Text for some extra tooling but nothing that fancy. So I wanted something a little bit more flexible and Godot seemed like a nice option. This is my first "big" project on it and I'm quite happy using it.
Since the beginning this game has been developed with ease, we don't push ourselves too much and we've taken our time to finish it. That being said, there were a couple nasty bugs related to physics that kept coming back but recently Inu (development support) decided to rework the core of the game and it feels quite solid.
Keep going! There's nothing that teaches you more than actually making a game. So, follow your intuitions and develop your ideas!
If you are into these games, please wishlist PancitoMerge, it does really help us! And thanks for the space to share our journey!
Antonio ❤️
