Arena

Arena is a Deathmatch Simulator Game

That is the motto of Arena I came up with in 2018 February when the game has seen its release. I have made a promise to keep pushing out free updates on a regular basis, which then started taking place weekly - on every Tuesday. Not missing a single deadline, Arena has received 25 updates since the release at the time of writing and I have no intentions to stop. :)

This Game is Chaotic and That is a Compliment

Arena is a matchmaking-sandbox with four major variables: guns, mutators, game modes and achievements. Furthermore there are options for game pacing, maps and randomization, but I cannot afford to pay the writer to talk about those.

Arena has your everyday handguns, shotguns and assault rifles to play it safe, but then something broke and camouflaged smugglers started flooding the game with blowtorches, fireworks, magical Moonswords and shurikens that can execute shadow steps. Not that the regular guns are boring - revolver-whirlwind is actually a thing and the engineers made sure to arm assault rifles with grenades too.

Mutators - if the term does not ring a bell, think Big Head, or Low Gravity - minor settings that change something about the match. You can have as many of these turned on as you want! Their name really says what they do - further examples are Dual Shoot and Rapid Fire. With tons of different combinations, they do make every play unique.

Admittedly, game modes are not the strongest point of Arena right now as it only features Deathmatch and Last Man Standing. However, you can play both in teams instead of the no-mercy free-for-all mode. I have plans for 3 more game modes (again, at the time of writing - this number may rapidly go up), including one which is a survival-PvM crossover.

Finally, Arena has achievements to help players set goals. No, there are no "kill 1000 bots" or "win 100 matches" achievements. Those require intensive grinding and are boring. Achievements are all unique, require some thinking, experimenting with the game settings or just keeping an eye open for secrets. Some tell you what to do straight away while some are more cryptic. Gotta get them all!

This is where the importance of updates kick in - every update adds something new, usually falling into one of these four categories. That is something to look forward to every week. :)

Arena is not Flawless

As much as I would like Arena to succeed, this section is dedicated to some ups and downs of the game.

- The game sessions are rather short, but with all the possible combinations of matches Arena has great replayability.

- The graphics are rather simple pixel arts, but there is a fancy CRT effect for your retro needs.

- The game is single-player only (although that is to change), but you are going be blown away by the slow-motion, double-jumps and rocket-jumping.

- Arena is a small indie game, but only for now. I have plans for large updates (you may check my blog to learn about these).

Also Available in Binary

Arena has been developed in C without any game engines and thus the application is fast and lightweight - requires only 10 MB of disk space, is portable and should perform good on all systems.

Support for OpenGL 2+ is required.

The current builds are for 64-bit Windows but I am more than happy to create Linux builds on demand as well. :)