A one-person dev named BrandonWritesGames has been grinding on Dieselpunk 1921 for nearly a year, logging hundreds of hours of collage-making, and he’s almost across the finish line. To prove it, a free condensed quickstart edition drops tomorrow (July 23) on itch.io, packing the full rules, a condensed character creation process, 34 country description pages, and an item list. Thirty-four countries. The Doctor is taking notes.

The pitch is political intrigue in the interwar period, which is basically the Dieselpunk sweet spot: grease-stained trench coats, Art Deco everything, factions that would sell you to the highest bidder before the ink dries, and the slow creep of Very Bad History just offstage. If you’ve ever wanted to run a game set in Monaco in 1921 where everyone is lying to everyone else, this is your game. The full release is inbound; the quickstart is the appetizer.

Go grab the free edition when it drops. Support the solo dev. Give the Doctor a full release to write about. Nothing can beat old age and betrayal. Via: BrandonWritesGames on itch.io

Someone finally did it. Someone looked at the grease-stained, rivet-popped glory of alt-history dieselpunk, strapped it to a mech, handed that mech a machine gun, and said: “yes, parkour.” Diesel Knights is a 6-v-6 mech/movement shooter set in a pulp-inspired dieselpunk world, and it funded on Kickstarter in forty-two minutes. FORTY-TWO. The Formula approves of this velocity.

The pitch is Titanfall’s fluid movement and mech combat DNA, dressed up in an aesthetic that looks like The Rocketeer crashed into Iron Harvest and they both liked it. No battle passes. No loot boxes. Just mastery, momentum, and the satisfying thud of a diesel-powered war machine doing something physically improbable at high speed. The Kickstarter closed at $526,576 from 7,763 backers, blew through every stretch goal, and the dev posted a fresh update on July 20, so the engine is still running. Wishlist it on Steam now, before the Ancient Gods wake up and ruin the servers.

Via: Steam / Kickstarter

Two guys. One enormous dieselpunk spider-turret. A 1920s Castillian monarchy held together with hydraulic grease and bad decisions. IRON NEST: Heavy Turret Simulator just became the number-one most wishlisted game of the June 2026 Steam Next Fest, and its demo is sitting at 99% Overwhelmingly Positive. That is not a rounding error. That is the universe telling you to pay attention. The Formula recognizes this game immediately: take a colossal interwar war machine, lock a lone operator inside it with teleprinters, ballistic calculators, hydraulic levers, and enough moral ambiguity to last a decade, and you have DieselPunk distilled into a first-person box of clanking, groaning, morally compromised steel.

Here is the thing nobody tells you: you will spend approximately zero percent of your time actually firing the cannon. You will spend the other hundred percent reading coordinates, charting ranges on a map the size of a kitchen table, calculating powder charges, manually rotating a turret that weighs more than a battleship, and then questioning whether High Command actually has any idea what they are pointing you at. (They do not. High Command never does.) It is part math test, part immersive sim, part ethics seminar nobody signed up for. The full release drops August 6, 2026. The free demo is still up right now. Go. The Doctor will not be held responsible for the hospital.

Via: Steam

Somewhere in an alternate 1940s, Abraham Lincoln survives, the Reconstruction goes differently, and battleships take to the skies on the back of bold leaps in electricity, magnetism, and gravity. That is the premise baked into every rivet of Steel Seas & Sky Machines, the Portsmouth, Virginia exhibition showcasing the dieselpunk world of artist Tony Snipes and his fictional Portsmouth Aeroshipbuilding Co. Detailed sketches, 3-D models, and digital works, all locked in to an alt-history where the home front didn’t build Liberty Ships, it built Aerocycles and aeroships. The Doctor approves of this timeline.

If you missed the exhibition, Snipes has a live Kickstarter running right now for the Aerocycle Art Book & Model Kit, a product launch straight out of The Yard itself. An art book AND a model kit. In a dieselpunk universe. For actual money you can spend. This is the Omega7Red Formulae applied to “what if WWII-era industrial propaganda was awesome on purpose” and the result is exactly what you’d hope. Go back this thing. Nothing can beat old age and betrayal, but a tabletop Aerocycle might come close.

Via: The Steampunk Explorer

Somewhere between 2008 and the heat death of the universe, Hungarian director Balazs Hatvani has been building Thelomeris: a city of cogwheels and clocks where the citizens exist solely to feed the insatiable Clock Factory, and no one knows who built it or why. That is, objectively, the most on-brand premise I have encountered since I invented the Omega7Red Formulae. ClockPunk. DieselPunk. Noir. A city that is itself a machine that makes more machine. The Doctor approves so hard he pulled something.

And they got Mark Hamill to play the mysterious Stranger and serve as a script consultant. Luke Skywalker. The Joker. That Mark Hamill, in a brooding Eastern European clockwork dystopia. The Formula was applied by a Hungarian filmmaker with impeccable taste, and the result is either going to be extraordinary or the most beautiful catastrophe ever committed to green screen. Either way I win, because both outcomes are things I want to see. The film has been in development since 2008, which means it has been cooking longer than some of my laboratory assistants have been alive. Nothing can beat old age and betrayal, but apparently this movie is going to try.

A trailer exists. Hamill is credited. The city is dark, cold, and run entirely on clock-powered despair. Someone please get this thing released before the gears stop turning. Via: Screen Anarchy