Games RIZN: A third-person zombie survival game

Hello everyone! My name is Al Ridley and I have been working as a freelance Unity developer for about a decade now. During the last 3 years I have been spending my free time creating RIZN, my third-person zombie shooter/survival game in which the player starts off already infected and must collect brain samples for crafting stims to stay alive while also using research stations to try and find a cure for their affliction.

Itch.io: https://eatsleepindie.itch.io/RIZN
IndieDB: https://indiedb.com/games/RIZN
YouTube: https://youtube.com/c/eatsleepindie
Discord: https://discord.gg/SqhFmNkn

You'll play as one of 30 characters, each with unique stats, and make your way through Scourge City which is inhabited with more undead than you'll ever be able to count. The world has been infected with the R1Z-N virus which has turned almost all human beings into the zombies known as rizn, and as the virus courses through your veins, the world will begin to lose all color, the only exception being blood. Most rizn are one headshot per kill, but there are several with special attacks and armor that will make things more challenging as you progress. The game features weapons that can be modified in any way you see fit, so if your playstyle favors a shotgun with a sniper barrel and laser sight or a burst rifle with a mobile phone for a scope, you're covered.

The game world consists of procedurally generated quarantine zones that offer up shops, hospitals, armories, safe houses, and more. Items can be collected and workstations are provided for modifying weapons and crafting. The game features four modes: Story mode follows the path of one of two characters as told through a graphic novel; Survival mode features a generated city where the main goal is to survive for as long as possible; Horde mode offers up wave after wave of unending zombies while you earn weapons that quickly increase in power; and Circus mode is my go-to stress relief that features clown zombies whose heads explode into confetti where every weapon is made available for you to take out your bad day on some rizn. Using custom rendering and culling techniques, I've been able to spawn 1,000+ rizn in any given quarantine zone while maintaining vsync and last year celebrated March 14th by spawning 3,141 in a barebones scene, all ready and waiting to be ragdolled and delimbed.





Build grenades out of soup cans, rockets out of cannisters of WD-40, and bait the oncoming horde by cramming a brain sample into an explosive and then enjoy the carnage as limbs and torsos fly into the air and clear a path for your progression. If you run out of ammo then there's always both one-handed and two-handed melee weapons available, and if you ever find yourself in a pinch then just grab a severed rizn limb and go to town; they're not very durable but they'll get the job done if you're out of other options.

RIZN started as a simple experiment with some new ideas I had for a third-person controller but I quickly found that the cartoon gore and absurdity of the gameplay was more than enough to keep me interested and motivated; three years later and the incredibly basic controller I started with is now almost ready for its first public release on Itch.io. Along the way I have found some incredibly fun ways to mess with these rizn, including using a big rig with plow attachment to flip cars onto them (inspired by an episode of Mythbusters) as well as driving through crowds of the undead with a combine harvester that turns them into limbs and goo. I've even built a panjandrum in honor of the amazing Adam Savage, who I Synty-fied in order to get the giant metal wheel rolling. My day job consists of working with some incredibly talented artists to bring my clients' ideas to life, but for my solo project I wanted to do this completely solo, the only aide being what was available in the Asset Store when I needed it. The techniques for spawning so many rizn are all custom work, the third person controller was built from the ground up (and is a bit removed from traditional third-person setups), and I've done my best to cobble together a UI resembling a graphic novel.

My goals have always been pretty simple with this project in that I never really had any; I just built a thing that I enjoyed working on and as a result, I never stopped. I love my day job and had no intentions or interest in ever releasing my own game, but after a while I reached a point where I figured others might enjoy playing it as well. I am hoping to have the first playable version (limited to a handful of characters and Survival Mode only) ready for this spring, but it's going to depend on work because freelancing always takes priority. There will eventually be a free demo but that is far from a priority at this point, and with any luck I'll have everything done for this coming fall. In short, I enjoyed blowing up hordes of zombies and I hope a few people out there will enjoy doing the same; anything beyond that is icing on the cake.

 

Dope