TreeTop presents: ZOMBIE DROP – My entry for the Rive Halloween Challenge

Why? Zombie Drop is a love letter to the first games I ever played, back in those glorious C64 / Nintendo / early PC days. Part pinball, part Breakout, part Space Invaders, in a 16-bit look and, of course, with zombies and a healthy dose of 80s suburbia tropes.

How? It started with pen and paper: sketching the basic idea, the rules and the characters. Then I used Claude Opus 5.5 to work out instructions and a development plan for Claude Code. The initial build was split into 7 phases, each with its own feedback loops to refine details like dimensions, physics and difficulty progression. After that came many rounds of pushing and pulling between the Rive Editor and the Rive CLI to refine animations, adjust designs and fine-tune everything.

GPU Canvas was used to create various effects to get those retro member berries extra juicy. The list: pixelation, 16-bit color depth, dithering, color palette rounding and... mosaic transitions.

Most of the development time went into mechanics and difficulty. I wanted a proper highscore chaser, complete with a global leaderboard and those classic three-letter initials to aim for. Zombie Drop mashes up some well-known games, but I wanted to add a bit of gamer horror to the mix. Your points are never safe. Some characters will happily take them from you, and the risk grows with every wave. You can lose a huge chunk of your score in a single round, and if you lose your pumpkin at the wrong moment, the horde will rush you and end your run fast.

The cast 🎃 The Kids: Two teenagers defending their house with baseball bats and one pumpkin. They smash the pumpkin into the horde, and it bounces as often as physics allows. Lose it, and they have to carve a new one. That takes time, unless you mash and click like your life depends on it. (It does.) 🧟 The Zombies: They want the house. Stop them with a pumpkin hit or a friendly swing of the bat. Three zombies inside, game over. 🧙 The Witches: Zombie bodyguards. Hit one and she smashes the pumpkin right back at you. Fail to block it and you lose points. 👻 The Ghosts: Hit one and the house gets a health point back. Spooky AND supportive. 💀 The Skeletons: Bonus points, and they look funny. Classically creepy, structurally weak. Piles of bones also make excellent distractions for certain four-legged locals. 👴 Mr. Sloman: The semi-sprightly neighbour is deeply unimpressed by the zombie invasion. He wanders across the screen, getting slower as the night goes on. He survives several zombie bites, but a pumpkin knocks him flat and costs you points. The later the night, the more it costs. And he can be hit more than once. This can get expensive. 😤 Brad: Brad is annoying. The local bully can't drop the act, not even during the apocalypse (unless a zombie gets him first). If he makes it through the horde to the kids, he costs you points and time. A well-aimed pumpkin or bat solves that. 🐕 Scrabs: A very good boy. The neighbourhood stray has a soft spot for tasty bones, so a nighttime graveyard outing suits him fine. But if no skeleton is keeping him busy, he might just grab your pumpkin. That would be bad.

Play it Version 1 is live and the leaderboard is open. Grab your bat and kick me out of the top 10. Below is my best run so far. Do better, I dare you!

👉 https://www.treetop.at/zombie-drop PS: For reasons unknown the gpu effects are not working on the rive embedded URL, please visit the link above for the real experience!