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Halloween Hotel: a crooked Gothic hotel under a giant moon. Click the windows to catch 15 famous monsters mid-routine (Dracula shaving at a mirror with no reflection, the Mummy wrapping himself in toilet paper, the Grim Reaper working the front desk) and find them all before sunrise. Every set of three you finish plays a reward, and finding everyone finally lights up the NO VACANCY sign.
How it was built: I modeled and baked the hotel in Blender, and it runs as real-time 3D (140k triangles) inside Rive's GPU Canvas, with custom WGSL shaders for the sway, the shutters, the neon and the magic. Claude Code and the Rive CLI wrote the scene in RML and the logic in Luau, and checked their own work with --verify and headless screenshots. Data binding drives the guest cards, the tracker and the mobile layout, and state machines run the card, the welcome and the finale. After rive push, I refined it by hand in the Rive Editor.
Features used: Rive CLI + GPU Canvas, plus Scripting, Data Binding and State Machines.
Play it (best on desktop with sound on): https://halloween-hotel.vercel.app
Don't forget to include your Rive link!
Loved this! I found 14 out of 15. Maybe the flying witch was the 15th and I missed clicking on it. Don't ever remove this! Bookmarked forever!
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Don't Look Away: a candle-lit horror game where the GPU shader is the game.
Something is in the house. It only moves in the dark. Your cursor is a candle. While your light is on the Visitor, it stands still; look at the window, the portrait or the door, and it takes a step closer, in a new pose, somewhere new. In the dark you only see two pale points. When it reaches you, the candle goes out.
Features used: Rive CLI and GPU Canvas, plus Scripting, Data Binding and State Machines.
- GPU Canvas (WGSL): the darkness is a fragment shader: a breathing pool of candlelight around the pointer, smoke in the light, a vignette that closes in with dread, and a tear across the picture every time it steps.
- Rive CLI + RML: the room, the words, the view model and the state machine are plain markup, built and checked with rive --verify, inspect and headless screenshots; the demo video was rendered by replaying a scripted pointer frame by frame.
- Luau scripting: one rule, it only moves while the light misses its head and body; it also draws the Visitor and the candle in your hand.
- Data Binding: its distance drives the step counter and the portrait on the wall, which slowly becomes her. State machine: title, ending, and the flash of the scare.
- Rive Editor: the file was opened in the editor, and the claw marks beside the door were drawn there with the pen tool and pulled back with rive pull.
Play it (lights off): https://dont-look-away-nkdh1b.rive.to
Video with the agent workflow and code: https://youtu.be/Pt_J1wdtQxI
The cursor as a candle and a Visitor that moves only when you look away is a strong mechanic. How did you do the lighting in the shader?
The Haunted Room is an interactive, cozy-spooky desktop fidget toy, a little haunted parlor you can leave open on your screen and poke at whenever you need a break.
No instructions. No hints. Nothing will tell you what to press. Just a cozy haunted room full of secrets, waiting to be poked at your own pace.
▶️ Play it on desktop: https://haunted-room-wcc682.rive.to/
🎬 Watch video on YouTube: https://youtu.be/xDFD62jbs_I
FEATURES USED: Rive CLI + GPU Canvas (both) 🖥️ Rive CLI The entire scene was built from the terminal with the Rive CLI and Claude Code as my coding agent, writing the scene in RML with a live preview.
I worked in stages: layout first, then one interaction at a time, iterating by feel on every timing and effect.
✨ GPU Canvas (WGSL shaders) Custom shaders power the animated fireplace, the rippling portrait transformation and the twinkling stars in the landscape painting. ⚙️ Also used: State Machines (every hover and click interaction), Data Binding (a view model links the systems together, so lighting the fire warms the room, deepens the shadows and scares away the wall eyes), Scripting (looping background music with a mute toggle) and Audio.
🎨 Human Touch I art-directed the whole room: generated a concept, then cut, cleaned and composited every piece of art by hand. I made the calls on what stayed and what went. A bandage whip, a "Happy Halloween" garland and a spider web were all built and cut because they crowded the scene. I finished it in the Rive Editor, adding shadows by hand so every object sits in the room. The music was picked to feel playful-haunted, not scary, so it's something you'd actually want to leave running.
App and video created by Ashley Phillips
Music: Mikhail Smusev via Pixabay
Sound effects: freesound_community via Pixabay
Voice: ElevenLabs generated
Wow! Exactly the horror vibes I love.
The Last Lantern - a full 3D Halloween game, built and running entirely inside one Rive file.
The candle is dying, and the graveyard is not empty. You wander a haunted graveyard in first person with a lantern, catch ghosts in your light, bring their souls to five jack-o'-lanterns to relight them, and survive the red-eyed wraith until you reach the church, before your candle burns out.
How it's built😍 - Rive CLI + coding agent: I directed my coding agent through the Rive CLI. It wrote the RML scene, the Luau game scripts and the WGSL shaders, verified every build with rive --verify, captured test frames headless and pushed straight to my Rive file. I played every build and steered each iteration (controls, difficulty, fog, the scare).
- GPU Canvas: the whole 3D world is drawn in real time with custom WGSL shaders: moonlight shadow map, triplanar textures, wind bending the dead trees, volumetric ground fog lit by the lantern and the moon, 4x MSAA and a filmic post pass.
- Scripting: Luau runs the game: first-person movement and collisions, ghost and wraith AI, soul capture, candle wax, havens, tutorial, sound, dawn ending.
- Data Binding: a view model drives the HUD (souls, lanterns, candle), the title, game-over and dawn screens, tutorial hints and keyboard input.
- State Machines: screen transitions and UI animations.
- Human touch in the Rive Editor: I reworked the title screen by hand (colors, title, How to Play layout).
- Blender: I modeled the graveyard (about 185,000 triangles), exported as a binary mesh the shaders draw directly.
Controls: hold the mouse to walk, move it left or right to turn, click a ghost to catch it, press FLARE to drive the wraith away. Arrow keys work too.
Full HD video: https://www.instagram.com/reel/Dd9TPvcsD7B/
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A full 3D graveyard with first-person movement inside one Rive file is ambitious. How did you keep performance steady with the lantern light and the ghosts on screen together?