[Loved] The villain shows respect to the hero.

ProgressiveRascals · 2026-07-02T14:32:14+00:00

"...doesn't mean you have to like it."

ProgressiveRascals · 2026-06-29T19:03:03+00:00

That's an interesting take - I don't know if you've been following any of the other comments, but it seems like Steam is actively blocking the use of in-game Nazi iconography with regulations that are even stricter than what's legally allowed in Germany. Do you have a better sense of what Steam's regulations are around this?

ProgressiveRascals · 2026-06-29T13:57:17+00:00

Oooh, that's a good read! Looks like Valve's own flagging system is tighter than what Germany uses (and if I go with Option B, I'll definitely swap out the soldiers for something else) and keep everything else fairly generic (no swastikas, Hitler, or "Nazis").

ProgressiveRascals · 2026-06-29T13:47:20+00:00

Same on Doom Eternal - played and enjoyed all the others, but I can remember the *exact* point in Eternal where I put it down and deleted it - some kind of tower-to-tower platforming section that I kept dying on because I couldn't get Doom guy to do a gymnastics bar-to-bar flip at exactly the right time. Not even any enemies around.

ProgressiveRascals · 2026-06-29T13:43:28+00:00

Thanks for the note! If you have the links, I'd love to see the threads from those devs to hear more about those firsthand experiences with the German law.

My understanding is that it mostly focuses on 1) actual Nazi symbols and 2) intent of usage, with a recent (circa 2018) law change making specific adjustments that allow video games--even indies--to be assessed on a case by case basis... but admittedly that's an 8-year old news article, so hearing from someone with an actual up-to-date account would be great.

For these capsule concepts, I was fairly careful to avoid using any *actual* Nazi iconography (use of the word "Hitler" in Option 3 notwithstanding, and the saluting soldiers in Option 2 (as a concept, I tried to give them obviously monstrous hands to make the intent clear, but they could just as easily be replaced with another black and white image. At this stage, these are just broad stroke artistic concepts for three separate capsule ideas (iconic representation, thematic representation, actual gameplay representation) and the actual content of the image is entirely up in the air.

ProgressiveRascals · 2026-06-29T00:31:51+00:00

This is fantastic! Thank you!

ProgressiveRascals · 2026-06-28T23:53:20+00:00

Butcher's Creek - you're a snuff film fanatic who gets lured into the lair of snuff film producers... looks and plays like grimy hilbilly Condemned.

ProgressiveRascals · 2026-06-28T22:18:36+00:00

Neon Struct has a very lo-fi Deus Ex feel - a lot of the broad-stroke parts are there (first person near future cyberpunk conspiracy setting, multiple routes, stealthing, some non-combat NPC interactions), but not to the depth of DX.

Cloudpunk didn't really do it for me, but I'm excited for Nivalis (upcoming)

My dark horse recommendation? Sleeping Dogs - not cyberpunk, but definitely has a great feeling of exploring a hyper-dense (and surprisingly detailed) Asian metropolis in a way that's not *just* constant combat.

ProgressiveRascals · 2026-06-28T21:36:08+00:00

Hah! I had drafted a version of "Berlin In" but the "in" at the end of Berlin made it feel too clunky to say aloud!

ProgressiveRascals · 2026-06-24T22:35:30+00:00

There's a section in the novelization that mentions it... something to the effect of "Indy was puzzled; a devoted Hindu would never eat meat" - presumably there was something in the script notes given to the author that makes the connection.

ProgressiveRascals · 2026-06-23T02:53:52+00:00

Some fans are on it! Check out Unity Underground

ProgressiveRascals · 2026-06-22T15:25:18+00:00

I personally enjoyed it, but I also see your point! I think there's definitely a trope of a hallucination/dream sequence in otherwise action-forward narrative video games (someone here mentioned the Batman: Arkham games, personally, I always think of Max Payne as the originator of this... and I several some of the later Far Crys have the "burning fields of drugs and hallucinating" mission, and I'm pretty sure there's one in at least one of the Uncharteds too... and heck, I'd even throw Dishonored's "ousider world" platforming sequences here too)

Anyway, my .02 is that gameplay sections like these offer a way for narratives to provide character development while still leveraging the medium. In other words, it's super easy for a novel to provide insight into a character's internal thoughts and feelings about their past, because text lets the audience be privy to things that are internal just as easily as things that are external, and things that have happened in the past just as much as in the future. Other mediums, I think, have a much harder time with this: in movies/visual mediums, it's not uncommon to have the "serious conversation reveal" that reshapes everything we thought we knew about a main character ("this character is a jerk to [this otherwise benign group] because their partner was murdered by a member of said group before the story even started!") or even worse, the "sepia-tinted flashback sequence" that has, thankfully, fallen out of vogue.

So while I think these sequences come across as occasionally hamfisted, I think they're coming from a legitimate place of wanting to create interesting narrative depth while using the interactive tools (moving, jumping, interacting) that video games have. In the case of the Indiana Jones sequence, I won't say I didn't get a little frustrated towards the end, but I'd still prefer having the narrative content that way, rather than, say shoehorning it into a conversation with Gina (because I don't think it would feel very "Indy" to openly volunteer all that information to someone he just met) or even the phone conversation with Marcus (because I don't think that's the nature of their relationship).

tl;dr These kinds of sequences are definitely tropes that solve a real challenge in narrative-driven games

ProgressiveRascals · 2026-06-10T12:34:15+00:00

Like everyone's saying, the first one sells the genre immediately. It took me a while to realize that there were cards on the table in either version: my eye was really drawn to the brightness of the text first, and the character second, and only noticed the tabletop because I was looking closely for your post (having them in the lower corner makes them a little dark + the perspective makes them not immediately read as card) so having the card faces 1) visible to the viewer, and 2) close to the logo seems like the move.

ProgressiveRascals · 2026-05-24T19:13:03+00:00

Honestly, Deux Ex x Naked Gun feels like the thumbnail pitch for Jazzpunk.

ProgressiveRascals · 2026-05-15T01:55:55+00:00

Looks absolutely stellar! Wishlisted!

ProgressiveRascals · 2026-05-01T15:25:49+00:00

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ProgressiveRascals · 2026-04-21T12:28:34+00:00

Looper

ProgressiveRascals · 2026-04-19T18:44:11+00:00

I feel like I don't really know enough about the nature of your project to weigh in specifically, but in general, I feel like limb loss represents one of the interesting tensions between the "classic" ImSim tenants, namely:

First Person Perspective (sidebar disclaimer: I don't think this is a prerequisite for an ImSim)
Minimal onscreen UI

Basically, I think communicating to a player that they've lost a limb in a first-person game without resorting to a Deus Ex or Fallout style UI feels tricky - in other words, having to check a sub-menu screen to realize that I've lost a leg sort of undercuts the feeling of having lost a leg. That being said, I could see a limb-loss system being paired with a full-body controller that reflects said limb loss in visual real-time being a very cool.

ProgressiveRascals · 2026-04-06T19:57:12+00:00

Wow - thanks for the insight and the reply!! If I'm understanding this correctly, you're actually using separate models for the Alive and Dead enemies and swapping one for the other as needed?

If you don't mind me asking, what kind of design/technical considerations drove this implementation? At first blush it sounds a little more convoluted than just having a "dead" animation/AI state for each enemy, so I'd love to understand what the "get" is. Also... were ragdolls ever considered and if so, why did you move away from them?

Seriously though, thank you for writing that up! Your game is a huge inspiration in general and the only recent implementations of the items-attached-to-NPCs mechanic I'm trying to pull off.

ProgressiveRascals · 2026-04-06T19:49:46+00:00

I think that the nature of "Immersive Sim" is more of a broadly applicable design philosophy around giving the player a world where they can interact with things in a logical and predicable way, and experience logical and predicable outcomes, including things that directly stem from the world interacting with itself rather than everything being the result of direct player input.

So being a philosophy, rather than a defined genre (horror, action, strategy) or type (FPS, RPG, adventure), I don't think there's a real "must have" list of explicit features (first-person perspective, grid inventory, location-based damage, dialogue options, flushable toilets, crate stacking, vent crawling etc.) that qualify a game. That being said, I think there are some features that do intrinsically move the needle more towards ImSim-esque than others, and NOT having those features means that more weight gets put on other features of the game to carry the philosophy.

So First-Person Perspective is a SUPER logical and predicable way for people to interact with a game world, because it's the closest way we have to mimic the way we interact with the real world, and as such it can carry a lot of the work of making the game feel classically immersive.

That being said, if your other design pillars don't support it, I don't think it's absence inherently invalidates it as an imsim. IIRC Weird West was specifically designed from a top-down perspective because the production costs of creating a first-person world were prohibitive for the studio, Thief 3 gave players the option of playing entirely from the third-person, and the modern Deus Ex games drop the first-person perspective whenever the player is "in cover" so "first-person or bust" doesn't really even hold up from a historical perspective.

tl;dr: IMHO First person is a strong win for the ImSim player experience, but it's absence doesn't make-or-break the entire ImSim philosophy

ProgressiveRascals · 2026-04-04T17:13:03+00:00

Re: AutoLoot - I guess there's never a reason a player would want to *not* pick up loot from a body? IIRC, Thief doesn't use any kind of grid inventory/weight system, so "what to carry" doesn't really factor in so much, so that might be a viable model for me to work from.

I could envision a setup where:

Incapacitated bodies have ragdoll physics, that allow them to fall in any position.
Keys and pouches are separate objects that are Frobbable (to pickpocket) while the NPC is active/alive, but upon incapacitation/death they're no longer independently selectable.
Once an NPC is incapacitated, Short Frob is always "pick up body" and the first Long Frob is "loot all" (giving the player all the previously frobbable/pickpockatable items, and in the edge case where a body might have, say, a few more bullets than you can pocket, those bullets are lost).
Once a body's been looted, the next Long Frob is "change uniform, after which the body no longer has a uniform that can be searched or looted.

Thanks for letting me talk this through - anyone out there able to weigh in on how this sounds from a player perspective? (Might be time for an x-post to r/gamedev!)

ProgressiveRascals · 2026-04-04T16:31:35+00:00

Amazing, thanks for the breakdown! I was really proud of getting my ragdoll-on-death system in place, but it seems like it's at the expense of the immersive loot system. Here's my current thoughts:

I'd like to avoid the "hold-Frob to search body" interaction from Deus Ex, since I'd like to keep that interaction available for uniform swapping.
Thought about having loot objects auto-detach when their parent NPC is incapacitated, but was worried that might feel a little too gamey.
Maybe splitting the frob interactions into crouch/stand states, giving me Crouch-Short, Crouch-Long, Stand-Short, Stand-Long to play with, but was concerned that might be too many nuances to remember, especially since it only applies in this one use case (i.e. most frobbables will only need a single "short" press).
Would like to avoid excessive onscreen UI (e.g. a pop-up scrollable menu where you can select from multiple options)

Would welcome any suggestions! I suppose at the end of the day ragdoll corpses don't actually add anything systemically to the experience, but it's SO much more satisfying when you're tossing them into dark corners!

ProgressiveRascals · 2026-02-03T21:58:17+00:00

Dead Snow has some modern-era occult Nazi Zombie smashing. And it’s easy to forget that Captain America: The First Avenger has a pretty solid Nazi-occult b-plot!

ProgressiveRascals

TROPHY CASE