Anyone else miss Insaniquarium 🐟 🐟 🐟 ? Well this time round for the Rive X Contra #characterchallenge, I've made a fully interactive aquarium.

The fish wander around naturally on their own, and have a dynamic hunger meter that changes their behavior depending on how hungry they are. Click the screen to drop some food, and they'll track it down.

Some of my favorite stuff under the hood:

- 2.5D Rigging: The fish rotate smoothly from side-to-side using Joysticks

- Proximity Cursor Tracking: The eyes not only follow the cursor, but only if it's close enough

- Interactive Plants: Using IK and Distance Constraints, I made plants that you can interact with the cursor

- Variable Speed: The fish doesn't just move fast across the screen like a PNG being moved, but the animation also accelerates realistically

- Editable Colors: Each fish can be customized on the fly

Go play with them yourself and check it out: https://rive.app/community/files/28158-53168-interactive-aquarium/ Or watch the video for an explanation of how it works (sound on).

Ooooh gosh! I love this!!!! These little fishes are so cuuute!!! Would love to have this one as a screensaver 😍 😍 😍

This is our team submission (Me, Megg, and Anna) to the Rive x Contra Interactive Character Animation Challenge. It’s a tamagotchi inspired experience based off of Moomin, Megg’s american bully dog. Moomin isn’t my dog but I’ve played with him, hand fed him, and took turns in potty training him. And boy does potty training a puppy sure does take a lot of patience, and I mean a LOT. Moomin’s a good boy, sometimes a naughty boy, and sometimes a bad boy. I’m not a dog person and the experience has been a little bit frustrating (especially when Moomin refuses to listen 🙄), but also rewarding, and overall sparks joy. And that’s the goal of this Rive app, to share that whole experience with Moomin to anyone who plays around with the app. We tried to capture Moomin’s mannerisms when he eats, when you pat him, and he really does flop to the ground when he refuses to listen. We wanted to make the digital Moomin feel as alive as possible. And if we’ve done our jobs well, we hope you’ll be so engaged that you forget it’s an app, and feel like he’s a real digital pet. I’m not sure if we can win the challenge because there are a lot of amazing entries (but hopefully we do, and Moomin gets a share, of course, if we win) but even if we don’t, if we’re able to make people playing with the app feel a spark of joy in a world that feels uncertain as ever, then I feel like we’ve already won. Test it here: https://rive.app/s/CvJQJr-eGk6PN7W46_8-KA/embed?runtime=rive-renderer

We’ve made this specifically for the challenge, so we didn’t have the time to optimize for a mobile experience. This is only optimized for the desktop experience.

Hope you’ll enjoy the experience, and let me know what you think in the comments.

Really nice