Making-Of: Failing to Finish a Game with Rive CLI and Claude

Making-Of: Failing to Finish a Game with Rive CLI and ClaudeMaking-Of: Failing to Finish a Game with Rive CLI and Claude

The network for creativity

Join 1.25M professional creatives like you

Connect with clients, get discovered, and run your business 100% commission-free

Creatives on Contra have earned over $150M and we are just getting started

Back to feedPost

Cyril Drouin

• 4h

How I failed to finish the game in time

Four days. Five Claudes with CLI Rive. Four stories. 51 mistakes. 0 finished games. I've been animating for 20 years. In game dev, I'm still in the tutorial.

With the Rive CLI, the game becomes text: I describe, Claude writes, I watch, I send it back. Repeat until one of us gives up. (Spoiler: never Claude.)

My four days of free time weren't enough, but what a ride. I'm posting the making-of instead of the game, hoping it saves someone a few of my 51 mistakes: references at every step, a hand-drawn storyboard, stills before motion, and finish before you reorganize. (I didn't.)

Hope this will help 🧠

@rive_app #rivehalloweenchallenge

rivehalloweenchallenge Rive Animation Rive

Jonathan Haines

• Oct 6

Halloween Hotel: a crooked Gothic hotel under a giant moon. Click the windows to catch 15 famous monsters mid-routine (Dracula shaving at a mirror with no reflection, the Mummy wrapping himself in toilet paper, the Grim Reaper working the front desk) and find them all before sunrise. Every set of three you finish plays a reward, and finding everyone finally lights up the NO VACANCY sign.

How it was built: I modeled and baked the hotel in Blender, and it runs as real-time 3D (140k triangles) inside Rive's GPU Canvas, with custom WGSL shaders for the sway, the shutters, the neon and the magic. Claude Code and the Rive CLI wrote the scene in RML and the logic in Luau, and checked their own work with --verify and headless screenshots. Data binding drives the guest cards, the tracker and the mobile layout, and state machines run the card, the welcome and the finale. After rive push, I refined it by hand in the Rive Editor.

Features used: Rive CLI + GPU Canvas, plus Scripting, Data Binding and State Machines.

Play it (best on desktop with sound on): https://halloween-hotel.vercel.app

rivehalloweenchallenge

Aditi Agrawal

• Oct 6

Loved this! I found 14 out of 15. Maybe the flying witch was the 15th and I missed clicking on it. Don't ever remove this! Bookmarked forever!

Dat dsgnr

• Oct 6

Having a lot of fun building a tool inside Rive runtime ! here's a sneak peek of a way to draw in Blender to AI so that it does proper VFX for the upcoming (hopefully if I meet deadlines lol) haloween submission

rivehalloweenchallenge