What is Paranormal Investigators?

Paranormal Investigators was the original project that was planned for release sometime in 2023–2024. I was developing it with another developer, and together we released 50 Floors: Paranormal Investigators Prologue.

The game was pretty much a straight-up copy of Phasmophobia, but with a stronger focus on perks and video recording. Players were supposed to shoot a report for TV4, edit the footage directly during gameplay, and keep the video feed stable.

There was also a storyline where Richard Bates was supposed to kill the entire filming crew and escape through a portal. That would have allowed us to introduce new characters and launch “seasons.”

Unfortunately — or honestly, probably fortunately — we went our separate ways. It was an extremely toxic working relationship, and because of it I basically disappeared from development for more than a year. In late spring 2025, I made a small prototype where the entire game was viewed through a vertical smartphone screen, with comments covering half of the display. That was when I realized Paranormal Investigators needed to be completely reworked.

Is there anything from Paranormal Investigators left in JunkTok?

A lot, actually.

Smileville, Underwood, Inc., the creature designs, and the lore around the Underworld all carried over into JunkTok. Richard Bates’ murder is also canon, and it had an impact on the world of the game.

Perks became abilities. I also expanded the whole creature concept: most of the monsters that were planned back then still exist in some form.

So Paranormal Investigators, which takes place in the lore in 2004, affects the events of JunkTok: Paranormal Investigators Challenge in 2016. As weird as that sounds, everything that was once planned for updates is now considered canon.

Why this art style and this kind of graphics?

I made a big mistake when I tried to make Paranormal Investigators look realistic. We had realistic characters, and they genuinely disgusted me. So I deliberately decided to go for more cartoonish characters instead.

I grew up on Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network, so that’s where a lot of the inspiration came from. Especially the leg design. Tarantino moment.

As for the graphics, they’re mostly about optimization, because I still don’t fully understand how to optimize games properly. I also like what I call the “Half-Life effect.” It’s when rough or simple graphics make your brain fill in the missing details, so you end up remembering the game as looking nicer than it actually did.

Why is the game set in Germany?

Because the original game was set in America, I decided to change as much as possible and moved the setting to Germany. Also, I lived and studied here, while I’m originally from Kazakhstan, so I like that kind of mix in Werblin: American skyscrapers, German names, and Soviet apartment blocks.

Of course, real Berlin is not the city I would want to live in, but I have only the warmest memories of it.

Frankfurt am Main is awful. Never go there.

Is this game leftist propaganda?

Yes.

Will there be playable male characters?

No.

Is this AI slop?

Partially, yeah. I even call it AI slop myself, and I don’t really see anything wrong with that.

To be clear, I wrote around 85% of the code myself, while ChatGPT/Codex helped me clean it up and optimize it. I don’t want to hide that. They’re good tools, and without them the game’s performance would have been much worse, especially compared to my previous projects...

The music was generated specifically to capture how dystopian and stupid this world is, where evil corporations won and the entire world became corporate-fascist.

The same goes for the ads. But I won’t lie here: I wouldn’t have been able to make images that realistic from scratch on my own. Edit them, process them, add text — yes. Create them myself — no.

Thankfully, the lore saves me here: it’s not a lazy developer using AI slop — it’s evil corporations using AI slop.

So are you nordska or nordissimo?

On Steam, I have three different developer names listed: Arsonist Studio, which no longer exists, nordska, where I worked on desktop companion apps, and nordissimo, which is the name JunkTok is being released under.

I don’t want a wider audience digging through my other projects, so I cleaned up my itch.io and “changed” my nickname. I urgently needed money to finish JunkTok, so, hey, we’ve all sinned a little.

Why is there so much DLC?

Capitalism, baby.

I just see that people are genuinely willing to buy visual trash to stand out. So why not? Considering the base game is pretty cheap, an extra dollar here and there won’t hurt :>

But I will never, ever sell gameplay content. All gameplay content will be completely free.

What’s the difference between the blue verification badge and the gold one?

Players get the blue verification badge if they buy the Supporter Pack.

The gold checkmark will be given to special players and content creators. I’ll be making that list myself. You might not even know that you ended up on it, or why, so :>

Did you make the game alone?

Yes.

But without my girlfriend and the help of her younger sister, I probably wouldn’t have finished the project at all, so I’m extremely grateful to them.

Also, my mom supported me financially this whole time. Without her, I would have had no roof over my head.

What are your plans for the future?

If the game takes off — and I really, really hope it does — I’ll add all the content I originally planned. And I have 182 items on that list.

But I understand that after the game releases on Steam, it’s no longer 100% mine. More like 50%, sort of. Players are now much more important than my huge developer ego, so their opinion will have to come first. Eeeeehhh.

Either way, I want to give more and more of the game to the community: give players proper tools, fully integrate the game with Steam by adding Workshop support, and make some of the systems open-source.

What will you not do?

I won’t fight cheaters. I won’t add real ads, lol. I won’t move parts of the game server-side. And I won’t collect player data.