AFK: Army For Keyboard — An Idle RPG That Lives in Your Taskbar

AFK: Army For Keyboard is the desktop game Lumethis develops as an R&D project. Your hero army fights automatically in a thin strip inside the Windows taskbar; combat keeps running while you work on something else. Click the strip and the fight goes full screen.

The game is built as a fake desktop operating system: sections such as Army, Inventory, Cube, Runes, Arena and Clan open in separate windows, sit side by side and can be dragged. A start menu, taskbar buttons and a tray (gold, stones, stage, clock) complete the language.

The project is under active development. Core systems, the online arena and the clan infrastructure are working.

Highlights:

• No framework, our own engine: written from scratch in framework-free vanilla JavaScript (ES modules); combat, interface and effects are all generated in code.
• Nine heroes, three on the field: weapons, off-hands and elements are locked to a class; there is a front/back line split and a bench rotation. Each hero has their own skill tree spread across eight tiers.
• Deep progression: five acts × ten stages × four difficulties, 60 monsters, 35 item types and ten quality tiers (Common → Cosmic), an 85-node rune tree, a prestige tree, pets and achievements.
• Loot as a flow: user-written rules handle drops (ask / send to Cube / melt); the decision queue stays bounded so the bag never stalls. Enhancement from +0 to +25 carries real downgrade risk, and the success rate is shown before you confirm.
• Layered combat model: critical hits, an element cycle, a multi-step damage reduction pipeline (dodge → block → resistance → armor → reduction → absorb) and status effects.
• Asynchronous arena: you send your army, the server re-simulates the fight with the same deterministic engine the client runs and returns the replay; the result is verifiable and unaffected by latency.
• Clan layer: a shared progression tree, member contributions, war trophies, announcements and applications; chat channels and private messages.
• Endless tower: a climb with no ceiling; every floor has its own element, a time limit and milestone rewards.
• Windows desktop package: a portable application via Electron; the interface runs in twelve languages.
• Steam: a store page is in preparation — targeting Windows 10 64-bit, twelve languages, single-player and online PvP; the link will be added here once the page goes live.

Data-driven design: everything about balance — hero stats, monster tables, drop rates, the rune tree, tower scaling — lives in data files rather than in code. The visible consequence is that the game's wiki is generated from that data: the tables at afk.lumethis.com are never written by hand and change on their own when the version changes.

Technically this project showcases our range in game and desktop application engineering, performant real-time rendering, deterministic simulation and complex systems design. We described the current state of the game in detail in the blog post.

If you are considering a similar desktop or game project, get in touch.

Note: the game engine and all game systems are written from scratch in original code; character and monster sprites are derived from CC0-licensed packs.