BLACKWOOD: Interactive Horror Surveillance Game in RiveBLACKWOOD: Interactive Horror Surveillance Game in Rive
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Madhava's avatar
Madhava H S
• Oct 10
Title: BLACKWOOD: The House That Watches Back
What i built:
1. Haunted Surveillance Console (2D Terminal):
a) 4 Interactive Camera Feeds: Grand Foyer (CAM 01), West Hallway (CAM 02), Basement Archivum (CAM 03), and Master Bedroom (CAM 04).
b) Tactile Flashlight Mechanics: A pointer-driven flashlight beam with realistic dark-edge masking. Shining light into dark corners uncovers creeping shadows but directly illuminating an entity rapidly spikes your Panic Gauge and drains your Battery.
c) Tactical Estate Minimap Radar: A real-time 4-sector radar monitoring spectral proximity and tracking which room an anomaly is currently haunting.
2. The Classified Occult Bestiary Dossier:
An in-terminal intelligence dossier cataloging 4 animated Halloween entities: The Burlap Scarecrow, The Spectral Bride, The Pumpkin Stalker, and The Crimson Void Demon, each complete with rich lore, threat ratings, audio previews, and tactical containment directives.
3. "The Further" // Real-Time 3D Spectral Investigation:
a) Players can hit [3D]: THE FURTHER to enter a full 3D Gothic hallway terminating at the cursed Red Door (Insidious / The Conjuring tribute).
b) Floating 3D Haunted Words: Words materialize suspended in 3D perspective ("HE IS BEHIND YOU", "REDRUM", "DO NOT LOOK", "SHE WALKS AT MIDNIGHT").
c) Interactive 5-Stage EMF Detector: Measures exact Euclidean distance to the Spectral Bride, flashing green-to-red LEDs with audible Silent Hill radio static clicks.
d) Ghost Whispers & Antique Music Box: Formant-synthesized background ghost voices speaking horror quotes paired with an eerie chiming music box melody.
4. Narrative Escalation & Terminal Climax:
a) A deterministic 5-beat story arc (The Quiet Watch →\rightarrow→ Motion Anomaly →\rightarrow→ Camera Sync Failure →\rightarrow→ Terminal Seizure →\rightarrow→ Final Reveal).
b) At critical integrity loss, the terminal glitches, controls lock, and the entity breaches the fourth wall—forcing the player to trigger an Emergency Terminal Reboot to purge the corruption and survive the night.
Why we built it:
1. Creative Motivation (The "Why")
Most Halloween game projects settle for simple cartoon jump scares. We wanted to build something genuinely atmospheric, psychological, and cinematic—paying homage to classic horror cinema (The Shining, Insidious, The Conjuring) and modern surveillance games (Five Nights at Freddy's, Phasmophobia, Iron Lung). The core narrative twist that the house is monitoring you as closely as you are monitoring it creates an immersive cat-and-mouse dynamic where every click of your flashlight and every battery percentage point matters.
2. Technical Motivation (Pushing Rive to the Edge):
We built BLACKWOOD to showcase the combined potential of Rive’s newest developer tools working in harmony:
a) Terminal-First Workflow with the Rive CLI: We wanted to prove that a complete, multi-layered interactive experience can be architected, structured in RML (scene.rml), and verified strictly from the command line (rive rive/rml --verify →\rightarrow→ 0 errors, 0 warnings) without ever needing to rely solely on manual GUI assembly.
b) Low-Level GPU Canvas and WGSL Shaders: By writing custom WebGPU shaders once in WGSL, we achieved hardware-accelerated volumetric fog mist (fog.wgsl), CRT scanlines and barrel curvature (crt.wgsl), dynamic chromatic glitch aberration (distortion.wgsl), and quadratic penumbra flashlight masking (flashlight.wgsl) that run seamlessly across browsers.
c) Luau Scripting and Data Binding: Entity proximity ticks, distance decay mathematics, and narrative triggers are driven by modular Luau logic connected directly to reactive state machine properties.
d) Zero-Dependency Procedural Audio: Every sound effect—from the low 55 Hz sub-bass tension drone and accelerating heartbeat to the EMF Geiger clicks, music box chimes, and synthesized ghost whispers—is synthesized in real-time with zero external audio assets.
BLACKWOOD demonstrates that modern web technology, the Rive CLI, and GPU Canvas can deliver the graphical fidelity, sound design, and emotional intensity of a dedicated indie horror game right inside the browser.
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