Night Quota – a Halloween game about my hometown Monsters work one night a year. In Kharkiv, that night ends at 11 p.m. Not because of monsters. Because of the curfew.

Pick one of four monsters, walk the streets, scare people, knock on doors, and hit your quota before dawn. After eleven the streets empty and the job gets harder.

I’m from Kharkiv and I miss it, so I rebuilt it as a game. 18 districts, each started from my own photo of a real street and drawn as a constructivist poster, the style the city is known for. Every district has a local with a story about Kharkiv. The passers-by are people I love: my friends, my daughter as a little witch, and my cat Lisa, who hides in every district.

Features used: Rive CLI + GPU Canvas (both), Scripting, Data Binding, State Machines.

How it’s made • Rive CLI + Claude Code: I’m a designer, not a game developer. I described the game, the agent wrote it, I watched the live preview and corrected it. • RML for the scenes, Luau scripting for the logic: the night clock, the districts, the scares, the dialogues. • GPU Canvas: one WGSL shader over the whole game. Curfew frame, searchlights, air-raid flash, a camera shutter for cat photos, the dawn report developing out of a halftone raster. • Data Binding drives the HUD, State Machines run the buttons. • Rive Editor to play it and check every screen. • Higgsfield for character art, from my own references and photos.

Play it on desktop, with a keyboard and mouse. Give it about 20 seconds to load, the whole city is in there.

The combination of clawed hands and the friendly priest is awesome! 😂🔥

I built this project to test Pixel studio with a playable COIN DASH arcade cab. Spriteworks is a tiny studio making pixel-perfect games with heart. Play our catalogue, meet the team of two, and press start. The core engineering challenge was sustaining uncompromised 60 FPS rendering using Canvas2D while handling continuous user interaction without framework overhead.

WHAT I WAS TESTING: I focused on two core engineering benchmarks:

Precision implementation of pixel art under continuous interactive user input

Sustained 60 FPS render performance and zero-dependency browser execution

THE TECHNICAL SIDE: Engineered directly in the browser with Canvas2D, Pixel art. The application runs without third-party frameworks or build-step dependencies, using hardware-accelerated rendering and custom event loops to achieve zero-latency response. Everything executes in the browser using Canvas2D, Pixel art. No third-party frameworks, no heavy runtime bundles, and zero external tracking.

WHAT I LEARNED: Balancing the mathematical rigors of pixel art with tactile browser interaction required tuning event throttling and memory allocation to eliminate all garbage collection stutters. Finding the sweet spot between mathematical precision and frame budget took careful profiling, but the result runs at a steady 60 FPS even on modest hardware.

TRY IT YOURSELF: The live build is deployed on my JSFiddle. Open it in your browser, test the controls, and observe the render response times.

If you are building high-performance 3D, physics, or creative web systems and want to collaborate, reach out here on Contra.

Best 👌