Arkhados is fast paced multiplayer action PvP arena game where players move around and try to kill each other by casting various spells. Arkhados is entirely skill based, meaning that there is no automatic targeting and no random elements like critical strike chance or dodge chance.

Arkhados is very fast paced. There are no mana costs which makes gameplay very fast. Games usually last less than 10 minutes.

Arkhados currently supports only deathmatch but teamplay will be added later and I believe that it will be the most enjoyable game mode for Arkhados.

It's programmed in Java using jMonkeyEngine 3.

Arkhados 0.5 trailer from William Linna on Vimeo.

In order to compile, you need stable release of jMonkeyEngine 3 and shaderblowlib. You also need to meet all dependencies of jMonkeyEngine 3.

If you want to contribute, great! Here's big list of ideas I'd love to see in Arkhados. Some of there are something that I'm going to implement myself anyway but I can't do all of them since I have to focus on core features.

I will add more to this list and give more details on unexplained items.

The list is unordered.

My artist's skills are severely limited so my power upon these ideas are limited.

If you want to contribute or suggest art, remember that only free/libre art is accepted, like Creative Commons Attributions (CC-BY) and Creative Commons ShareAlike (CC-BY-SA). This means that assets that prohibit commercial use or derivation will not accepted in Arkhados.

Replace one of the character models with better model Currently I'm using very low poly models for characters for various reasons. For mage I couldn't find more detailed 3D model with armature animations ready.

I animated Venator myself because there was no other choice but the quality of my animations is pretty bad. It would be nice if they were replaced, perhaps one by one.

Make nicer lava material

Find or create good music In Arkhados every hero uses different set of music. Currently Embermage has only 2 soundtracks.

You can find good music with good licenses from opengameart.org and jamendo.com . And remember to use ogg-format because mp3 is patent encumbered and not supported

Create nice portraits for heroes It would be nice to select hero by clicking on nice portrait instead of button with text like "Embermage" or "Venator". Portraits could be used on user guides too.

Improve fog of war Arkhados has fog of war but it should be improved visually and perhaps optimized. One way to optimize it would be to make framebuffer smaller but so far I've failed to do that.

Add nice trail effects Shotgun bullets would look lot nicer if they had some kind of trails. Another nice use for trails would be to show nice red trails when Venator swipes. I will add Pudge-like hook spell later so trail system could be useful for that too. Maybe.

In-game menu Very basic feature. Allow players to access menu during game so that player can configure keys, graphic settings etc. and immediately see how it affects.

Refactor code

Fix bugs

Dummy players It would make testing much faster if there was a nice way to add dummy characters.

Artificial Intelligence

Contribute on ArkhadosNet Arkhados uses ArkhadosNet for networking. I'm sure it could be improved and having some kind of tests for it would be very good.

Redesign and reprogram lobby NOTE: currently lobby means the screen where players go when they join the game. Later it will the screen where player can chat with all other players and see the game list.

Current lobby looks bad and lacks important features. For example, players can't select teams, they can't see heroes graphically, chat is very clumsy to use etc. The UI code is also very tied to logic. It is clear that adding features to current lobby would not be good in long term.

Here are some requirements for new lobby

• Ability to extend it when new requirements are added.
• Nice way to see portraits of heroes and selecting hero by clicking it. There should be possibility to get information about hero like spells, stats and perhaps even 3D model etc.
• Possibility to select game mode like deathmatch and team deathmatch.
• Changing map should be easy. There should be visible preview image for every map.

Arkhados needs central server where player can meet and easily join another games.

Since Arkhados project won't have money to actually host the games themselves, matchmaking server should also pick one player to host the game and help the host and other clients to connect to each other. Doing this involves NAT hole punching.

One challenge for this matchmaking server and its NAT hole punching feature is to actually find server / service that allows listening and sending to custom UDP port.

Design new map

Design new hero The more there are heroes, the better (to certain limit of course). If you have good idea, you can design character and give me a link. Just remember that I can't do everything. For example, if there isn't decent model with rig and preferably working animations, I wont add it, unless someone makes good enough model and animations for it.

And the hero must be compatible with Arkhados' philosophy too so there can't be any random elements like dodge chance and no instant hit spells.

Create custom UI style for Arkhados Currently Arkhados' UI uses Nifty GUI's default style. We should change the font, add decorations, add nice background images to different menus, change colours etc.

Arkhados is mostly GPLv3 licensed. All source files contain license header.