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YOU HAVE 4 MINUTES. THE DEAD HAVE ALL NIGHT.
HOLLOW ISLAND: THE LAST BEACON
A three-chapter survival-horror game built for the Rive Halloween Challenge on Contra.
A missing crew. A broken pier. A radio warning that arrives too late.
You enter Hollow Island as Ayaan, a rescue worker searching for answers. Beyond the shoreline, spirits patrol the abandoned village, hunt you on sight and attack without waiting for your next move.
Each mission gives you four active minutes. Recover equipment, complete the objective and return to a working protective ward before the rescue window closes.
Your light is part of the fight.
Reveal spirits with the lantern. Strike with salt crossbow bolts. Evade claw attacks, take cover from ghost projectiles and place binding seals to hold an attacker still. Recover essence and bank it for useful upgrades.
Three chapters. A threat that grows.
The Light on the Pier: recover the lantern, restore the shore ward and survive the first encounter.
What the Sea Returned: enter the flooded storehouse, recover the crossbow and secure a missing rescuer's ledger.
The Houses That Breathe: search the haunted village for the true radio signal, restore the chapel anchor and defend it.
Built with Rive, from scene to survival.
Rive CLI and RML author the scene. GPU Canvas and WGSL bring the moving sea, fog, lighting and stylized 3D world to life. Scripting drives combat and enemy behaviour, Data Binding connects the game state, and a State Machine routes keyboard focus. Original synthesized music and sound effects give the island its voice.
Created with Codex assistance and shaped by my story, gameplay direction and refinement decisions.
Enter the island:
https://hollow-island-the-last-beacon-37aqwo.rive.to/
Headphones recommended. Desktop controls. Tab opens the field guide.
@rive_app #rivehalloweenchallenge
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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
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!
The Haunted Client Feedback 👻
Every designer's real Halloween horror. A cute ghost client haunts a design approval screen. Each "Approve design" click summons new feedback ("make the logo bigger", "17 more colours", "use the first version"), and the design obeys each one while the screen gets possessed and the fog thickens. Lock the brief to finally get "Approved. Finally."… until the P.S.
Built with both the Rive CLI and GPU Canvas.
Rive CLI + RML: the whole scene was written by a coding agent in Rive Markup Language, with a live preview.
GPU Canvas: two WGSL shaders (drifting fog and an RGB-split possessed-screen glitch), driven by the state machine.
Scripting: Luau scripts run the shaders and make the ghost's eyes follow your cursor.
Data binding: a view model drives the feedback flow, the live "Round N of ∞" counter and cursor tracking.
State machines: 5 layers covering float, feedback, the design's reactions, button modes and the twist ending.
this is too funny lol
A fake terminal. A coding agent starts building a little Rive scene, and partway through, something else starts typing.
I used both the Rive CLI and GPU Canvas. The agent wrote the scene in RML through the CLI. The terminal renders to an offscreen GPU Canvas and runs through a CRT shader I wrote in WGSL. A state machine and some Luau scripts handle the typing.
The whole thing runs off one data-bound number I called "possession." As it climbs, the text, the cursor, the shader and the preview window all go wrong together.
I did the preview animations by hand in the Rive Editor.
I'd never opened @Rive until a few days ago.
Play it here: https://haunted-cli-njr8nr.rive.to
Inspiring creative work.