The network for creativity
Join 1.25M professional creatives like you
Connect with clients, get discovered, and run your business 100% commission-free
Creatives on Contra have earned over $150M and we are just getting started
Back to feedPost
For the @Rive Halloween Challenge, I wanted to see how far we could take the new GPU Canvas: volumetric ghosts, dramatic stage lighting, and a crystal pumpkin maestro.
Every ghost has its own personality. You can control the choir like a proper instrument, with multitouch interactions
Inspired by two of my favorite artist-animators, Louie Zong and David Li.
The network for creativity
Join 1.25M professional creatives like you
Connect with clients, get discovered, and run your business 100% commission-free
Creatives on Contra have earned over $150M and we are just getting started
Challenges
View all
Related posts
I’m a long-time programmer, and I started in mobile game development in 2011, back in the iPhone 4 era. That experience gave me an appreciation for small interactions that feel good under your fingers. With Peel & Peek, I wanted to capture that feeling in something a little unsettling.
I’d known about Rive for a long time. The Rive CLI and GPU Canvas finally gave me the push to create my first piece with it.
Peel & Peek is a Halloween fidget toy, built with Rive CLI, Claude Code, and GPU Canvas. The grapes, eyes, and slime are drawn by a single fragment shader, without 3D meshes. Luau handles the interactions, a Rive state machine runs the cycle, and data binding lets me tune the details.
Here's a little teaser for my entry to the Rive Halloween challenge 🕯️ It's made 100% in Rive, and it's getting spooky 👻
A cursed pop-up book, a single candle, and the clock is ticking…
I built it with the Rive CLI and my coding agent, with candlelight, shadows and fog as WGSL shaders on GPU Canvas.
More soon. 👀
#rivehalloweenchallenge
That shadow! It's sick 🚀
Purrl: a haunted co-host for live shopping
Purrl is my new co-host when I sell live on Whatnot. For Halloween, she’s a 3D ghost-cat who answers buyers’ questions, calls out bids and celebrates every sale. For Halloween she’s wearing her favorite outfit: a sheet.
The chat drives the show. Raids bring swarms of bats, new followers rise from the pumpkin as named ghosts, and viewers vote trick or treat over a bubbling cauldron. A treat pours candy into the pumpkin; a trick gets her a little possessed.
How it’s built
Built with the Rive CLI and GPU Canvas. The scene is written in Rive Markup Language (RML), with Luau scripting, data binding and state machines: six artboards, a 131-property view model, and keyboard and pointer interaction. It was built and checked with the Rive CLI by a coding agent, then pushed to the Rive Editor.
Everything spooky is custom WGSL on GPU Canvas: six shaders of our own, for instance: 3D bats, name ghosts, cauldron liquid, candy that piles up in the pumpkin, and one composite pass for the storm, fog, glitch and possession. They run on top of a custom Rive 3d engine’s physically based renderer.
On stream, the same Rive file runs as a 9:16 overlay in OBS. It stays clear of Whatnot’s chat, buttons and pinned product, and it reacts to events from the show in real time, with her voice lip-synced live.
About the live link
Purrl is built to run inside a real Whatnot stream, where follows, bids, sales, raids and chat votes arrive as events from the show. The public page can’t connect to a live stream, so it plays a scripted demo show that fires similar events on a 2½-minute loop. You can also play with her directly: move the cursor and she follows it, click her head to pet her, drag to orbit the camera, flip the storm switch, or click the page and press X for lightning, J for a jump scare, or 1–8 for expressions.
Features used: Rive CLI · GPU Canvas (WGSL) · Scripting (Luau) · Data Binding · State Machines
The rooms in the video are painted with an image model. Purrl, her show and every screen in it are real Rive renders and recordings.