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 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.

Play it: https://rivegraveyard3d-qk9xpk.rive.to

Full HD video: https://www.instagram.com/reel/Dd9TPvcsD7B/

@rive_app

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?