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UNDERHOUSE: a first-person horror game built entirely in Rive 🕯️
Don't shine your light at the floor.
UNDERHOUSE drops you into a dark house with a flashlight, 3 lives, and one job: find the key and get down the hatch. The key wakes something. Six floors down, and every floor the things in the dark get a little more horrible.
▶ Play one floor (headphones on): https://underhouse-5mquqm.rive.to
Four creatures, four rules. Learn them or die on floor 1:
🕯️ The Weeper only moves when your light is off her.
🖐️ The Reaching, starved arms rising from a black pool, follows your light. Switch it off and it sinks back.
👂 The Listener is blind and hunts every sound you make.
🕷️ The Crawler drops off the ceiling the moment you take the key.
Your flashlight is both your weapon and your bait. Footsteps leave visible echo rings, and so do theirs. Hide in wardrobes, and wind the crank when the battery dies (it's loud).
How I built it
• Rive CLI: the scene is RML generated from a script, checked with rive --verify, published from the terminal, and pushed to the editor.
• GPU Canvas (WGSL): a raycast house with fog and a plaster ceiling, raymarched 3D creatures, sound-echo rings, film grain, and depth of field.
• Scripting, Data Binding, and State Machines: Luau game logic, an AI scare director that stages blackouts, knocks, and the turn-around face, and a live HUD with hearts, battery, and a waypoint.
• Human touch: I art-directed every creature through rebuild after rebuild (the Listener took five versions), tuned the scares and pacing by hand, and adjusted the title in the Rive Editor myself (shown in the video).
Controls
Desktop: WASD move, mouse or arrows to look, Shift to run, Click or F for the light (hold to wind), E to hide, Tab for the map, H for help.
Android: play in landscape. Left thumb moves, drag right to look, bulb for the light, hide button for wardrobes.
Built with an AI coding agent under my direction. The concept, art direction, and tuning are mine.
How deep did you get? Tell me your floor 👇
@rive_app #rivehalloweenchallenge
@Adam Plouff @Mayte CG @Mike Sunday Heads up: the original play link has expired on Rive's side. You can play UNDERHOUSE here, same project:
https://underhouse-euksw7.rive.to
Headphones on. Don't shine your light at the floor. 🕯️
@rive_app #rivehalloweenchallenge
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BUCKSHOT MANOR 🎃
A haunted house. Two barrels. One long night.
Buckshot Manor is a first-person haunted-house shooter built entirely in Rive. You fight through six rooms of ghosts, zombies, wraiths and exploding pumpkins, then face The Watcher, a giant eye waiting in the foyer, and survive until dawn breaks.
How it's made
Rive CLI + Claude Code: the whole game was built by prompting an agent that writes RML markup, Luau scripts and shaders, with rive . live-reloading every change. In the video, one prompt ("make the candlelight ghostly green”). retints the whole house in seconds.
GPU Canvas: the 3D world is a custom WGSL renderer with real-time lights, shadows, fog, bloom and volumetric light, all running inside a Rive file.
Rive Editor, by hand: the HUD, title, death and win cards are real artboards with state machines and data binding. I refined them by hand in the Editor, including recoloring and reframing the haunted portrait that hangs on the walls.
Play it: https://haunted-fps-nms8do.rive.to
Controls: WASD to move, mouse to look, click to fire, F to fire both barrels, R to reload, Q to swap to the axe.
Haunted Hall
Is a found-tape, first-person Halloween shooter built in Rive. You enter a haunted house through a camcorder viewfinder and fight your way through four stages (The Entry, The Deep Hall, The Dark. Hall and the Exit) with a double-barrel shotgun. Ghosts drift out of the dark, bats swarm from the rafters, and a zombie shuffles toward the camera, getting angrier every time you hit it.
Features used: Rive CLI and GPU Canvas.
Rive CLI: the whole game was built by describing it to my coding agent (Claude Code), which wrote the RML (scenes, state machines, view models and data binding) and the Luau scripts (stages, enemy waves, zombie, bat swarm, shotgun and reload logic), checked live in the rive . preview.
GPU Canvas: a WGSL atmosphere pass gives the cursed camcorder look: chromatic split, room-dependent light flicker, vignette, animated film grain, and glitch bands with a red wash when you get hit.
Rive Editor: final polish done by hand in the editor.
Built something that isn’t client work for a change.
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