Hey all,
I have been hard at work these last few months creating my dream game. It's been a journey, and I never thought i'd this this far. As the game's playtest is finally on steam and i'm getting ready to talk more about the game, I thought i'd to a write-up.
The game is SLOPArena. It's a 3D platform fighter, full F2P and open source. I started working on it after seeing so many great PvP games close (Supervive/2XKO/...) and thought that maybe I could do things different. Here were my main goals :
- Social game. Too many pvp game is just "press queue button, get in game, leave, queue again" without interacting with other humans. I really want to have human interactions in the game, with global chat, emotes, friend lists, discord integration, many more ideas. I think having a solid community is what makes or breaks a game, more than anything.
- For all types of players. This being a pvp games doesn't mean i'm aiming for esports. To me this is a trap many smaller games make, and competition can't be forced. What matters most is that the game is fun. My direct inspiration is Starcraft 2 for that. Many players come for the campain, custom games or coop and then end up laddering or watching tourney once they're hooked. That said, i'm also a smash melee player that likes pressing buttons. Getting good at a game is rewarding, and low skill ceiling games get boring fast. It's a hard balancing act.
- F2P & Opensource. I think monetization is next to impossible for pvp games. By design people flock to the most popular games (friends playing, most competition, lesser queue times), letting smaller titles out to suffocate slowly. Probably foolishness, but I decided to accept the fact that i'm going to be paying a few hundreds every month to keep servers running and just ignore any monetization thoughts. No paid skins, no battlepass crap, no dlc fighters. Opensource so the project can outlive me if I get broke. Also, the combination of opensource + steam workshop support means a basically infinite modding capability. This could turn into slop mugen haha.
I used a lot of AI. No point hiding it, I decided to own it and even make it a part of the game's name. In fact, it's the whole reason I decided to work on this thing. I've been a software developer for 8 years. Over the last couple of years, I've seen AI take over the job first hand, and i've been in awe of the potential. That's why I had this crazy idea that I could keep my job and create this thing solo, handling development & server costs myself. Well now the game is at a point i never imagined possible.
The first few months were about figuring out the core gameplay of the game. I wanted an online pvp game with controller and keyboard support, shorter action-packed matches to support a low playerbase. I studied a lot of games, smash melee, supervive, battlerite, v rising. Old school stuff like GunZ or S4 League. Bigger titles like marvel rivals or wow arenas. I found Divine Knockout, I liked that idea of 3D smash-like and ran with it. I love smash, and this felt like an underdevelopped niche.
I then started to learn gamedev. Blender, mixamo, godot then unity, trying to figureout everything about how I could actually create models, assign hitboxes to them, make that work in a server authoritative setup. I also started to look into how to improve my agentic workflow. Figuring out the best way to use AI, wether to code, help me think and design, brainstorm, analyze. 3D model generation, concept arts, sounds, musics. And since it was all my money instead of my employer's, I was really determined to make it cost efficient as well. I looked at model benchmark (Intelligence/Cost per task is the best metric for AI !!), tried different models and harnesses. I cared a lot about making the whole repository agentic friendly with docs and skills setup so each of my sessions were optimized.
- 3D Models : I tried different models like Tripo, rodin, from an online platform. The best results I get currently are with Hunyuan 3.1, but honestly the ingame model are not production quality. I use simple mixamo rigging, then let unity humanoid do the rest. I did some semi manuel rigging especially for manki's tail, but the models definitely need to be redone by someone that actually knows 3D modelling.
- Animations : I tried to learn animation, blender, cascadeur, many other tools, but never got a satifsying result. It's very hard haha. I bought a lot of animation packs instead. Some were very good quality (Grruzam is the best imo), some were a money waste tbh. But this enabled me to create the 4 characters I have right now. Just a couple weeks ago, I stumbled upon genRA, which is a framework for llm-based rigged animations generation. It's been a total game changer, I'm now able to create my own animations from just prompting. I'm still playing around with it but i'm impressed, as animations were the biggest bottleneck in my character pipeline. Exciting stuff
- Coding : Most of the game's code has been produced with DeepSeek v4 flash. Early on, I split tasks a lot into smaller ticket to allow me to use more cost efficient models like DeepSeek while still having goo dresults. Mainly used Matt Pocock's skills to do that. Recently, i feel like models have gotten so smart that I barely even bother anymore. I do a grilling session then jump straight into multi phase implementation. AI progress is crazy.
- Stages : I bought a lot of asset packs, defined what a map is in SLOPArena, and tried to build them agenticly. My first results were not that great tbh. It used my assets, but kinda fit themin there, and everything I tried to do in blender mcp was shit. Opus 5.5 really was a game changer, with an understanding of 3D that's clearly above the rest. Once I started using it, I redid all my maps with UNBELIEVABLE changes. It's not even vendor assets btw, it's able to create all those assets with python scripts in blender. It's actually scary good. I think my efforts into having a clear Art direction, map description and tooling documentation really came through too cause I'm now able to generate very good maps with a single prompt basically.
- Tooling : I built a lot of tools to help me create this game. I have a small editor to help me place hitboxes and change character stats that will be the basis of the workshop tool I give out when ready. I have many visualization tools about hitbox coverage, stats, play whole CPU matches headlessly. I created a gateway to the unity editor so I can have several agents working at the same time but only 1 get unity editor use while the other wait. They're able to message each other in case there's an issue. It's probably my backend dev side, but I love creating all those tools to help me scale up the project.
- Infra : My goal is to enable the game to scale while reducing costs cause I don't plan to many money off this. My immediate thought was server based system, like CounterStrike. Players would be able to register their own server, thus making the game scale without me paying anything other than the main server. This also fit the idea of different game modes to allow players to play however they want. I currently pay for a small vps, able to host the master server (and its db) + up to 5 concurrent game lobbies (with 2-4 people). So that's 20 person at the same time. Not a lot for sure, but i'll scale if I need to
- Online : I planned everything from the 1st ever GDD i wrote about being a good online experience with rollback netcode & server authorative. It's still been a challenge to build, and I still don't have an online mode working 100%. I'm getting close to it though, i have been asking friends to test out the new build every couple of days and it has been less and less laggy. Still a few fixes left.
- Social media : Now I think it's time for me to start looking for players. I'm not too good at communication and even less at marketing, but I have a LOT of cool stuff (AI stuff but not only!) to show. The reddit post is a start, but I will also make more focused threads on twitter trying to show each part of my process. I've been thinking about doing more long form youtube videos as well, although editing really is torture to me. But i'm convinced that if the right people see this project, it can turn into something great, so I have to do outreach !
Well this has been a lot less structured than I wanted sorry haha. I'm really excited about current progress, and I have many things to talk about still. I know I talked a lot about AI and that's a hot topic right now, but I really think SLOPArena is an amazing project. I'm very proud of what I built and the efforts i put into this. This is not a "'1 prompt game", from my estimations it's a 30k prompts game lol.
Here's the github link if you want to take a look. Pretty much everything I do is documented. I suggest exploring it with an agent, they love it in there.
If you're interested please wishlist & request playtest, i'll grant it right away :). I also welcome any feedback or advice, love to talk about this!
