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Spent the last few days diving deeper into Rive, focusing heavily on character animation and state machines to bring this fictional German learning app to life.
Learning a new language shouldn't feel like staring at a spreadsheet. Here is how I used smooth, reactive animations to make interactive feedback feel natural and engaging:
Rive CLI + Claude is truly a game changer🔥
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It's alive! It's alive! And it's... addicted to mobile games?
DOOMSWIPE -- Doomscrolling for monsters -- is my entry for the Rive Halloween Challenge!
This is what comes out when you pour an ounce of CLI, a drop of GPU Canvas, a spoon of craft, a cup of scripting, a web of state machine transitions, and a ton of intention into building something w/ Rive 🎃
🪞 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 .
DEAD STILL is a Victorian spirit-photography game in three sittings. Ghosts can’t be seen. Only photographed.
You are J. Ashworth, “Photographer of the Departed”. Frame your clients, turn the brass focus ring, and hold a long exposure while the plate drinks the light. Then rock the plate in a red-lit darkroom and watch who was really standing beside them:
- The widow: her husband, in his empty armchair. The first sitting teaches you, step by step.
- The twins: a dead girl who will not keep still. Frost on the glass betrays her, and only a magnesium flash can freeze her.
- Mr. Hale: an investigator who asks for a portrait “with whoever is here”. Then the print looks back at you.
Rive features used:
1) Rive CLI: the whole project is RML, Luau and WGSL, checked with --verify, inspect, --screenshot and --test (20 unit tests that guard the rules), and shipped with --publish=web.
2) GPU Canvas: the shaders are the mechanics:
- 2D Rive artboards lit inside a 3D studio, with shadows and depth of field
- long exposure as real accumulation into a float plate: anything that moves smears
- a development shader you agitate by hand, with the dead coming up last
- frost on the ground glass where a spirit stands, and candle flames that bend toward the cold
- a magnesium flash, then smoke
- for the twist, a "living print": the plate re-exposed every frame, so a face in the photograph can open its eyes
3) Scripting (Luau): the sittings, the scoring and the story; it scrubs Ashworth's Wake timeline to open his eyes.
4) Data Binding: one view model drives the whole HUD.
5) State machines on every artboard; the HUD's hints run on one.
6) Skinned image meshes with bones for every character, each with an idle timeline.
7) Layout, vector feathering, trim paths, dash paths and Rive audio (gapless loops for the clock, the candles and the darkroom).
The video shows the game itself (every gameplay frame rendered by the game), the CLI run that shipped it, its RML, Luau and WGSL, the GPU Canvas passes, the file opened in the Rive Editor, and the same signed .riv running in a local build of my own portfolio site.
Amazing....