After failing to fund a PC/console project, a former Treyarch level designer has built and shipped offline extraction shooter Rift Raider Extraction in seven weeks.
Mystic Realm Games founder Brian Douglas left Treyarch in 2014, having worked on Black Ops 1 and 2. After a spell at Free Range Games, he was laid off in March 2025, and has been working as a solo founder ever since.
Before releasing Android only shooter Rift Raider Extraction, Douglas spent around six months trying to raise capital for a PC/console project codenamed Project Lich, building a vertical slice solo before bringing in a small team of trusted industry contacts to help pitch it. But it proved to be a difficult process.
“It was easy to see which groups used AI to vet the pitch and which groups took notice,” he said. “Almost nobody played the actual demo to see that we had some magic happening with a controller in hand. After about six months of painful rejection, I gave up on Project Lich, at least in the short term,” Douglas added. “There’s only so much ‘no’ a person can take.”
He said the team remains on standby via Discord, hopeful of returning to it or another project together. With no funding secured, Douglas borrowed $10,000 from his parents and turned to a much smaller, faster idea instead: Rift Raider Extraction.
“In seven weeks’ time I went from concept to ship, using Unreal Blueprints, Photoshop, and a few visual assets from the Unreal Fab Store as needed, all heavily modified to suit Rift’s needs on Android,” he said.
Android won out over iOS for the launch platform partly out of necessity. “You can’t ship on the App Store without having a Mac computer, and so with just my PC laptop available, Google Play was the only real option,” he explained, adding that Android’s larger share of the mobile market also factored into the decision. An iOS version of the game is incoming, though, Douglas told us.
The game is monetised through in-app purchases for in-game currency and cooldown tokens, an opt-in rewarded video ad, and interstitial ads introduced after launch.
“I just turned interstitial ads on now that I feel the game is in the right state to support those with confidence,” Douglas said. He’s also in the early stages of a branded tie-in with a comic book series, though he declined to name it ahead of a signed deal.
The game is small, but Douglas is happy with the traction gained so far. Rift Raider Extraction has surpassed 8,000 downloads to date, though technical difficulties have dented its player count, which is at around 1,200 active players.
“The most successful part of Rift’s user acquisition currently is the app store optimisation efforts,” Douglas said. “Organically, the game is drawing attention with about 1,500 page views a day and a 12% store conversion rate, which is extremely good for an unmarketed indie game touting an experimental game type.”
Douglas is continuing to apply for design jobs at studios large and small, but has been told he’s overqualified for mid-range and senior roles. “I am eager to see Rift Raider Extraction become a success and will happily continue to support it,” he said. “I do not consider it a hobbyist project – it is front and centre on my CV.”
Douglas’ experience follows a run of tool-assisted mobile projects from solo developers, including Deniz Sancar’s 38-0-0 and Josh Pavey’s 38-0, both built with Claude Code. Retired pro tennis player Iain Atkinson also used Claude Code to build and release his own tennis club management sim, Tennis Tycoon.
Rift Raider Extraction differs in that respect, as Douglas has separately insisted that the game was built without AI.
