Lantern Hollow is a small haunted game you play with your cursor. The room is pitch black and your cursor is a lantern. Five ghosts hide in each room and they only exist inside the light: hold the lantern on one and it reacts, then runs. Find all five before the battery dies, and the last one comes for you.

Three rooms (a bedroom, a graveyard, an attic), twelve ghost reactions, a battery with a spare hidden in every room, and sound made from scratch.

How it's built

Rive CLI: a coding agent wrote the scene, the state machines and the data binding as RML from the terminal, and checked every change with rive --verify and headless screenshots.

GPU Canvas: two WGSL shaders. One draws the fog, the lantern beam, dust in the light and live shadows from the furniture and the ghosts. The other is the CRT glitch in the final scare.

Luau scripting: the lantern, finding ghosts, the battery and the sound.

Data binding and state machines: every ghost has an idle loop and its own reaction in each room, picked by the room index.

I made each ghost's face by hand in the Rive Editor, so every one of them has its own personality: a sleepy one, an angry one, a shy one, a cheeky one with its tongue out, and a red-eyed boss.

Play it: https://lantern-hollow-7ak6qf.rive.to #rivehalloweenchallenge