After roughly 2 months of ill health, I'm very happy to finally be back in my office and working on RIZN. I spent all of last week working on Runiq Online, finishing up the new features that I had started last year as a way of ensuring that I was well enough to get back to work. Now that I seem to be in the clear to work full-time again, I'm ready to dive back into freelance work next week as well.

This past weekend I opened up the RIZN project in Unity for the first time since 2022 and was able to make some good progress in my goal of releasing the Alpha this spring. I am not 100% sure whether I will hit that goal or not - I am still assessing things and a lot will depend on my freelance schedule going forward - but I will get there before the mid-year mark and am still confident in my plan to release the full game this fall.

The first I've added is the ability to collect recipes for crafting items. Up until this point, all items were available from the start but I figured this would be a good way to add barriers into the gameplay and control the pace of progression a bit more. Recipes are collected by locating posters randomly placed around the city, and once collected they will give the player the ability to craft those specific items the next time they come across the appropriate workbench. This will work especially well for story mode since I can use a predetermined list of recipes to offer up, and will add a new layer of replay value to survival mode by making recipes available in a completely random fashion.

I've implemented updates to the aggro system for rizn as well. The simple system in which rizn that passed a raycast test for line-of-sight and were within a specific range has been ditched, replaced with a new system that takes more variables into account. First, the distance calculation is now based off of the volume attribute for the firearm the player is using, so when the weapon is fired, any undead within that range will aggro. Rizn still have a base aggro distance as well, but on top of the raycast test for line-of-sight is an additional calculation to determine whether the player is in front of the zombie as well. This not only makes the silencer mods much more valuable, but gives the player a bit of a stealth bonus when using melee weapons; on top of that, there will be more instances in which zombies will ultimately flank the player since the sound of gunfire will draw them out from behind obstacles regardless of whether they have line-of-sight or not. By staggering when rizn aggro, there are more opportunities for the player to be surprised since they can no longer count on zombies coming after them all at once.

And finally, I've added a laser sight weapon mod which can be attached to the assult rifle. Pretty self-explanatory but I figured it was worth mentioning.