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Dead Orbit | A 3D Space Shooter Built Entirely in Rive
10 haunted worlds. 10 guardians. 12 customizable warships. And a whole lot of things trying to kill you. 🎃
Dead Orbit started as a Halloween experiment and turned into a full 3D space shooter, built entirely in Rive.
Explore the Halloween Veil, choose your destination, and fight through enemy waves before facing each world's guardian. From giant haunted carriers to ghostly creatures, skull-covered planets, and cursed candy. Yes, even the candy shoots back.
Back in the hangar, you can customize 12 ships across four tiers, with 27 possible builds per ship, different weapons, and special abilities.
technical side:
Rive CLI: AI-assisted development using RML scenes
GPU Canvas: 3D ships, worlds, holograms, lighting, and custom WGSL shaders
Luau scripting: Combat, enemy behavior, weapons, and gameplay systems
State machines and data binding: Animations, interactions, HUDs, and game state
Responsive layouts: Built for different screens and orientations
The menu, star map, hangar, hyperspace jumps, and combat all run inside a single .riv file, without a separate game engine.
Tested at up to 120 FPS on a 120 Hz display.
It's been a wild ride getting all of this together for the Rive × Contra Halloween Challenge!
🔊 Sound on
wow, love to play with this one 🔥
Wow, it’s amazing
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Related posts
🪞 Everybody tells. Eventually.
Halloween, 2003.
A little girl falls into the quarry above Stonewell.
Her father finds her too late.
At least, that's the story he tells.
Twenty-three years later, he's coming home.
Tonight the town burns its secrets.
And something in a long grey coat is walking the street, reciting his own words back to him.
Its face is a mirror.
🎃 THE HALFWAY
A first-person horror game built in Rive.
Fog, film grain and a flashlight, like the survival horror we grew up on.
A forest where someone keeps calling her name.
A diner that kept its light on.
An old police scanner tape with a two-minute gap.
2:41. She's still talking.
2:43. He's going back down.
Nobody knows what happened in between.
Except him.
In Stonewell, you write down the one thing you can't say out loud, and you burn it at midnight.
So what would you write on yours?
He only came halfway. ✨
🛠️ Built in Rive with the CLI, GPU Canvas, Scripting, Data Binding and State Machines.
Enter Stonewell 👇
https://halfway-ethl6h.rive.to
What would you have done with two minutes?
Bro ...I don't have words .
A look at the main menu I've been building for Dead Orbit, for the @Rive × Contra Halloween challenge
🔊 Sound on
Brought 2D artboards into 3D space using GPU Canvas, with custom shaders, interactive elements, and a few Halloween surprises
Built with Rive CLI, Luau scripting, WGSL shaders, state machines, and data binding. Everything runs inside a single Rive file
Wow, thats amazing🔥
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! 😂🔥
