r/ArenaFPS • u/xDenny8 • 6h ago
Video Sinned Arena - an arena shooter set in hell that I've been making solo for the past 3 years
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Hello,
I'd like to show you my game, Sinned Arena. It's an arena shooter and my homage to Quake 3 and, mainly, Unreal Tournament (1999) - which to this day I consider the greatest FPS. As a small solo indie developer, I wanted to make my own game in this genre. It's a passion project, so I'm not trying to be "better" than those classics or to sell millions of copies. My goal was to make myself happy, and hopefully a few others along the way.
So what is it about?
You're trapped in hell along with other unfortunate "prisoners", forced to fight each other in various arenas for the demons' twisted pleasure. And the demons won't just let you die - they keep reviving you and force you to fight forever. Your only hope is to defeat the champion, and if you do, you've been promised a way out.
How is it different from other arena shooters?
You and the other fighters use Relics - upgrade items for your character or your weapons. You can collect them, but you can also lose them. Between matches you're not sitting in a menu. You're in the lobby/courtyard of the demon's castle, where you can talk to the other fighters to get pieces of lore and challenge them to 1v1 duels. The point of a duel is to take a Relic from your opponent - win and it's yours. But they can challenge you too, and if they win, you lose one of yours.
My main focus is the single player experience, even though this genre screams multiplayer. It's very hard for an indie dev in this genre to maintain a healthy multiplayer playerbase, so my original plan was to add multiplayer after release. But feedback from Steam Next Fest showed me that players kind of expect multiplayer right away in a game like this. So I delayed the release by a year and got it in for launch - though it doesn't have full parity with single player just yet. Multiplayer currently has Deathmatch only, and no Relics. That will come later.
As for single player, I wanted the bots to feel like real humans, so no matter the difficulty, they're never faster or slower than you, never deal more damage than you, and they don't even know where the pickups are - they have to actually find them. There's definitely still room for improvement, but non-cheating bots were my ultimate goal.
I could write pages about the game but this is already long enough.
The game releases on July 28, 2026 for $8.99 (with 15% launch discount), so if you're interested, take a look at the Steam page.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2789980/Sinned_Arena/
Thank you