Ryzo Studios is a new animation and impact-focused studio founded by Pixar veterans Erica Milsom and Todd Shaiman. Based in Denver, CO, Ryzo Studios makes stories that move audiences, and then gives them a way to take action on those feelings. Their work is research-supported and lives across three platforms: film and series, gaming, and live events.
“We love storytelling,” explains Erica. “But we kept noticing the same gap. Audiences fall in love with a fictional world, absorb its themes, and then have nowhere to take them. Ryzo exists to close that gap. This is storytelling that inspires, paired with experiences that let kids actually practice what the story was about.”
The Caring Masculinity Fund (CMF) was an essential supporter of Ryzo Studios’ first franchise, covering boys, anger, and how you move through big emotions.
The Roblox game, Rage Fighters, was created to address a growing crisis in boys’ mental health by meeting boys where they already spend their time: gaming, online communities, and animation.
«Rage Fighters takes place in the wild world of our short film Release the Beast – about 14-year-old Aaron, whose gaming characters come to life when he’s overwhelmed,” explains Erica. “In it, players need to master three skills to survive: Pause, Breathe, and Chill. These are real emotional regulation strategies, functioning as genuine combat advantages.”
Ryzo Studios is a startup with a social impact mission and a commercial mandate. This combination can make their development and iteration processes more costly and time-consuming to assess.
“The CMF paid for the critical build and updates needed to make this game connect with players and our impact mission,” says Erica. “This game would not exist without this fund.”
The fund enabled Ryzo Studios to bring in real-world advisors, including youth advisors, and supported the studio to take a creative risk: developing a combat game where the win condition is regulating your own emotions.
“The wider ambition is the harder one: shifting the cultural conversation about an emotion nobody wants to look at directly,” says Erica. “We’re trying to make anger actionable as a signal, rather than a problem, something with a feeling underneath it that a boy can learn to find.”
So far, Rage Fighters has been played by 16,000 male players. Through the gameplay, these players have discovered and used emotional regulation skills more than 76,000 times.
This is a digital game that impacts real lives offline. In post-play surveys, boys have connected the emotional regulation skills they practice during gameplay to real-world scenarios in their own lives.
“That’s the transfer we designed for,” says Erica.
To learn more about Ryzo Studios, visit their website below:
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