Aim, not lock-on
Arrows travel, drop and can be led or dodged. Melee lands in a cone you have to face. Nothing snaps to a target for you — a headshot at full draw hits two and a half times as hard as the body because you had to place it.
Karnthrone
Aim-based combat and movement that never stops. Three fighters, four arenas, and hits the server decides.
The game
A duel you have to aim
Karnthrone is a third-person PvP action prototype. There is no lock-on and no auto-attack: every arrow is a projectile you lead, every swing is a cone you place. Fights are fast, short and decided by reads — a parry landed inside half a second, a full-draw shot taken while strafing, a gap closed before the bleed runs out.
Three fighters, four arenas, free-for-all and team rounds, and a capture mode in testing. Queue ranked 1v1 or 2v2, alone or with a friend, or open a custom lobby and seat up to four a side — against people, against bots, or both.
Practice and custom games need no server of ours: they run on your own machine, and a friend joins by your address. If the ranked servers ever go dark, the game does not go with them.
3
Fighters
4
Arenas
8
Players in a custom lobby
Combat
Four rules the whole fight runs on
Movement never stops
Bhop, evade rolls and real air control. Drawing a bow slows you but never roots you, so the hunter fights on the move; melee strings and casts briefly plant the body, and that trade is the whole matchup.
Block, parry, punish
The warrior holds a block: 60% less damage for as long as he keeps it up, paid in stamina. The hemomancer parries instead — half a second that negates the hit outright and, inside four metres, throws it back as a counter-stagger. The hunter has neither; distance and the roll are his defence.
The server decides
Damage, crowd control and death are resolved server-side; a client only ever asks. Hits are validated against the server's own copy of the fight, so what you see and what counts stay the same thing.
Showcase
The rules in motion
Those four rules, played out — combat showcases, playtest highlights and short clips, captured in-engine from the pre-alpha. Work in progress; the newest uploads land here as soon as they go up on the channel.
Shorts
Fighters
Three kits, three problems to solve
Each one carries its own resource, its own opener and its own way of losing. Pick the fight you want to be in.
Hunter
Mana · RangedShoots on the move: drawing slows you, it never roots you. A tap fires fast and weak; a full draw hits like a siege engine and slows whatever it touches. Sights let you read the fight from range — and hold you hanging in mid-air while you do.
- Lightning Strike
- Power Shot
- Sentinel
- Smoke Bomb
- Cyclone
- Explosive
- Frost
- Fire
Hemomancer
Mana · Melee casterA three-cut dagger string whose finisher opens a bleed that follows the target across the arena; the charged stab drinks a quarter of what it deals straight back. Blink and Blood Leap close the gap, a parry answers the blow that comes back, and the shield and the blood spells are paid for in your own health.
- Double Slash
- Sanguine Drain
- Bloody Ground
- Blood Shield
- Blink
- Blood Leap
- Parry
- Chains
- Rabid Blood
- Virgin Blood
Warrior
Rage · MeleeRage fills on its own and faster with every blow you take or block; every swing of the axe combo spends it for extra damage, and Battle Roar fills the bar in one go. A fully charged overhead staggers, slows and halves the target's healing for four seconds. A block, a headbutt, a hook and a drop from the sky to force the fight you want.
- Block
- Iron Tempest
- Headbutt
- Skullcage
- Earthquake
- Doomdrop
- Spear
- Hook
- Battle Roar
Arenas
Four places to settle it
Every match is fought in one of four arenas. Shown in-engine, work in progress.
Status
Where it stands
Karnthrone is a prototype in active development. Multiplayer already runs online — a listen server with server-authoritative combat, plus ranked 1v1 and 2v2 queues on hosted dedicated servers — alongside practice matches against bots at four difficulties.
- Playable now Three fighters, four arenas, free-for-all and team rounds up to 4v4, bots for every fighter at four difficulties, online play over IP, push-to-talk voice chat you hear from where the speaker stands, and text chat in the match and on the Play Online page.
- Ranked 1v1 and 2v2 queues inside the game: pick your fighter, tick the arenas you will play and search. The queue picks your opponent by rating and by ping among the players already waiting — never at the cost of a longer wait — and the match goes to the server with the best ping for everyone in it. Queue alone or with a friend — share a six-character party code, or invite a Steam friend in one click. Ask for bots and, after 30 seconds of waiting, they fill the empty seats. Before the match, a ready-up page shows both sides, the arena and the mode. Drop out mid-match and you can rejoin your own seat. The Play Online page shows whether the server is up, how many are online, playing and queued, and your ping.
- Replays Every ranked match against other players is recorded on your own machine, and a custom game is too when you tick Record this match. Search the list or filter it by arena, fighter, mode and result; play a match back, scrub forwards and back, watch through a fighter's eyes or from a free camera, and hide the HUD for a clean shot.
- Rating and ladder Worked out on the server from ranked results — half who won, half by how much — and never against a bot. Every ranked result shows your rating change; a profile tracks your rating over time and your record by arena and fighter; the ladder is cut into leagues of about ten players nearest your rating, and a league badge sits beside every name in the game. Leaving never pays: a match won by a side a player short, or abandoned at 0:0 in its first minute, goes unrated.
- Talent trees Every fighter has a tree of eighteen talents and seven points to spend — more damage or health, faster attacks, a cheaper roll, shorter crowd control. Save builds as named presets and pick one before a match, ranked included; the server checks every build. All of it is open from the first match.
- Throne A capture mode in testing, in custom games: two or three sides of one to three players fight over the throne at the centre of the arena, the side holding it scores, and the first to 100 points wins. The fallen come back in waves, attackers buy items at their own spawn, the side on the throne builds towers, and bots fill the empty seats.
Roadmap
Where it goes next
The goal is a Steam demo, arena only to start: players against players, and bots against players — a small, finished, fair piece of game to build on. One step is left before it.
-
Partly built
Onto Steam
Ranked already knows players by their Steam account, and the game is already set up on Steam behind closed doors; next comes a playtest, and only after it a public release.
-
Ongoing
Alongside all of it
Combat, balance, animation, textures, effects and bots keep being tuned the whole way.
Decided, and not changing
Aim anywhere
A full 360° at any moment; nothing ever takes the camera. Attacks go to the point under the crosshair, read the moment they land — turn mid-swing and the blow turns with you. A few heavy, telegraphed skills lock their angle on commit, precisely so they can be dodged.
Nothing to grind
No levels, unlocks or gear, and nothing paid that touches the numbers in a match. Every talent is open from the first match, so builds differ by choice, never by hours played; what you bring is your aim and your read of the other player, not your account.
Power lives in the arena
Pickups — heal, damage, speed, stamina, CC immunity — lie out in the open, and anyone can go and claim them.
Your fighter is locked
In the queue the fighter is fixed before you know who you face; once you see the lineup you can still change your talents, never your fighter. No counter-picks, and mirror matches are fine: balance carries the matchups, not bans.
Playable without our servers
Hosting a game and sending a friend your address will always work, and so will practice against bots — neither touches a server of ours, so switching servers off can never switch the game off. Ranked will never run that way — a rating cannot rest on a match two people arranged themselves.
Nothing is released yet. There is no store page, no build to download and no date. This site exists so the project has a home while it is being made — when there is something to play, it will say so here.
Community
Follow it while it is made
Both of these are new. That is the useful part: fighter concepts, talent changes and what comes after them will be shown as they take shape, and anything said now still lands early enough to change the build.
Discord
The server
Opened in September 2026: new, small, and the shortest route to the person building it. Development notes, playtest calls, and somewhere to put a bug, a question or a disagreement.
discord.gg/t2RxNt973g YouTubeThe channel
Where the showcase above lives, and where the next ones go. Everything is recorded off the running build, so it shows the game as it actually is on the day.
youtube.com/@KarnThrone