Frequently asked questions

The test builds are free, and there is nothing else to buy: no store page, no pre-order, no currency, no cosmetics and no payment path of any kind. Pricing for a finished game has not been decided, and we will not pretend otherwise by putting a wishlist button somewhere.

There is no date. RYVAKAI is at pre-alpha 0.1 and builds are published when they pass their own tests, not on a calendar. Anyone who names a year for a project at this stage is guessing, and we would rather you judged us on the last build than on a promise.

The published client is a movement lab: one grey-box test level built for traversal feel, with sprint lanes and distance markers, jump blocks, mantle ledges, slopes, a wall-run gallery, a wall-jump corridor and a slide ramp. It runs on a native keyboard-and-mouse keymap. It is not the open world, and the point of downloading it is to tell us how it moves.

For the cooked client: 64-bit Windows 10 or 11, a discrete GPU with DirectX 12, 16 GB of RAM, an SSD with room for the unpacked build, and outbound UDP on port 7777 for multiplayer. That is a target envelope rather than a benchmark, because no cooked client has been profiled across a range of machines. For reference, a packaged run measured 55.6 to 59.0 frames per second on our own build machine. Windows x64 is the only platform; there is no macOS, Linux or console build.

Yes, and it was built that way from the first line: the server owns damage, death, loot, resources, inventory, crafting, structures and cooldowns, and the client predicts movement and plays cues. Right now it runs as a listen server, which means one player hosts the session and is the authority for it. A true dedicated server needs a source-built engine and is roadmap work, so we do not describe the game as having one yet.

Yes, and we say so on every plate. The concept art and the reference meshes were produced with image and mesh models. They are pre-production reference, they are not in the game, and they have no skeleton or skin weights, so they cannot even be animated. Production characters go through retopology, rigging and skinning by hand. Every asset is checked against a written originality test by someone who did not write the prompt, and the art manifest records the model used and a hash for each file.

No. RYVAKAI is original IP with its own vocabulary: Veil, Vitality, Stamina, Techniques, Essences, Forms, Covenants, Wardens, Echoes, Varkuun. Anime-influenced ninja fantasy is a genre and we work inside it, but a specific expression has to be ours. There is a written reject list covering the obvious borrowings, and anything that reads as a renamed version of an existing character, garment, symbol or technique is thrown out and redesigned rather than recoloured.

Yes, including monetised video, with no permission needed and no embargo to observe. Please name the build version on screen or in the description, because these builds change quickly and a viewer should know which one they are watching. If something looks broken, it probably is, and we would rather see the clip than not.

Assume yes. Character data may be wiped between builds without warning while the save schema is still moving, so treat every test character as disposable. When wipes stop being routine we will say so on this page rather than let you find out.

Post it in the Discord with the build version, what you did, and what happened instead, then attach the launcher’s log file from your local app data folder. Reports with those three things are usually reproducible here the same day. Movement and camera feel counts as a bug report too.

Unreal Engine 5.8.1, C++ first, with movement as real custom movement modes inside the engine’s own prediction and abilities on the gameplay ability system. The backend is Go with PostgreSQL and Redis behind Caddy, and it holds accounts, characters, authoritative saves, structures and the server registry. The full project source is downloadable.

A very small independent team, working in the open, with no publisher and no marketing department. The people who write the changelog are the people who broke the thing it fixes, which is most of why this site reads the way it does.