Emberwick: A Browser Ghost Story with Three Changing LightsEmberwick: A Browser Ghost Story with Three Changing Lights
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🎃 EMBERWICK: The Night That Wouldn't End
👻 A third-person ghost story for Halloween night, playable in the browser. You are the Lamplighter, carrying the Glim: a lantern with three lights. 💡 LIGHT shows what is 🌊 ECHO shows what was 🔮 HAUNT shows what the town remembers Each light physically changes the world, so you solve the town by comparing the three, across four acts and three endings.
Features used: both the Rive CLI and GPU Canvas.
How Rive is used • The whole HUD is a Rive file written as RML with a coding agent and built with the Rive CLI (verify, publish, push). • One state machine with seven layers runs it: Mode, Prompt, Subtitles, Token, Memory, Act Complete and Ambient. • A Game State view model with 15 data-bound properties is fed live by the three.js game: the current light, objective, counter, prompts, subtitles and a mode-switch trigger. • "Echo Veil" is a full-screen WGSL shader drawn on GPU Canvas through a Luau node script. It reacts to the active light and ripples on every switch. • Click listeners inside the file let you switch the three lights on the Rive page itself, no game needed. • The HUD was then refined by hand in the Rive Editor: the mode pips, lettering and the timing of the switch animation.
🎮 Play it: https://emberwick1.netlify.app/street.html ⌨️ Controls: WASD to move, E to interact, 1 / 2 / 3 to switch lights.
🔗 Rive file (click the lights): https://emberwick-hud-w4z1hj.rive.to
Om's avatar
Love the idea of the three lights revealing different sides of the same world. Such a clever mechanic!
Mayank's avatar
Thank you! That was the starting point for the whole game: one street, three versions of it, and you only understand the town when you compare them. Glad it landed 🏮
Om's avatar
How did you decide what each of the three lights reveals, and do their effects change how you approach the puzzles?
Mayank's avatar
Great question. I tied each light to a kind of truth: LIGHT is what is there now, ECHO is what used to be there, and HAUNT is what the town remembers, which is not always what really happened.
And yes, it changes how you play. You stop looking for an object and start looking for...
Benjamin's avatar
TRUEFRAME logo
lamplighter with three lights is such a halloween hook. beat me to the browser horror niche
Mayank's avatar
Ha, there's plenty of room in the niche! A lamplighter felt right for Halloween: the one person whose job is to walk into the dark. Would love to see what you make of it 👻
Mayank's avatar
the full video showing the working of the game too T-T @Rive
Mayank's avatar
thanks a lot <3
Rudransh's avatar
Amazing work🔥🔥
Mayank's avatar
thanks`
Ayush's avatar
Audio design matches perfectly with the environment!
Mayank's avatar
def what i thought!
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