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maipsy · animated and empathetic avatar, React app development, and integration with OpenAI APIs (TTS, STT) and Web Audio
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Katy Sander and I joined forces to trap a demon and bind it to the Mac notch. He wasn’t happy about it. But he’s just as helpful as the other agents, and a lot funnier.
Meet Notchling. Hand-drawn, then vectorized and rigged in Rive. All animations, state machines, and timelines were built using the CLI, along with the ElevenLabs and Claude integrations that bring him to life in the final Swift package.
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....
🌕 HITODAMA — The lake is silent.
An interactive psychological horror experience inspired by Japanese folklore. You play as a lone ferryman crossing mysterious waters where drifting fog, strange shadows, and the unknown turn a quiet journey into something unsettling.
What I built:
- A cinematic, moonlit 3D lake environment.
- A custom WGSL fog shader running on Rive's GPU Canvas.
- An interactive Haunt slider that lets you intensify the atmosphere.
- Rive-powered effects built using the Rive CLI, Rive Markup Language, Luau scripting, and data binding.
The lake environment was the foundation. For the @Rive Halloween Challenge, I wanted to push it further by creating a supernatural layer that responds to the player instead of remaining a static visual effect.
This project was an exploration of how code, shaders, and interactive design can turn an atmospheric scene into an experience.
So, Ready to cross the lake?
excited to play.