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What if your dashboard didn't just show a system failure… but made you feel like something was watching you? 👁️
That question became the foundation of CursedOS.
I didn't want to build another Halloween interface filled with red lights, scary icons, and random glitch effects.
I wanted to create something that feels wrong before you can explain why.
So I approached it like a real interface with an unsettling personality.
The interface: A dark infrastructure dashboard with system metrics, activity logs, and warning states.
The motion: Rive state machines and animations that help the experience feel alive rather than static.
The visual distortion: WGSL shader experiments for the CRT/glitch aesthetic.
The implementation: Rive CLI, RML, GPU Canvas, and a VS Code development workflow.
But here's the interesting part:
The goal isn't to make everything glitch. It's to make every glitch feel intentional.
A warning appearing at the wrong moment can be more unsettling than a screen full of visual chaos. A subtle distortion can make a familiar interface feel unfamiliar.
The core Rive project now builds and verifies locally with 0 errors and 0 warnings. I'm continuing to work through the publishing workflow and refine the experience.
🎃 Built for the Rive Halloween Challenge.
Now I'm curious:
What makes an interface more unsettling to you — unpredictable behavior, subtle visual glitches, or the feeling that something is watching?
I'd love to hear your take.
@Rive
#CreativeCoding #InteractionDesign #FrontendDevelopment #MotionDesign #WGSL #UIUX
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Having a lot of fun building a tool inside Rive runtime ! here's a sneak peek of a way to draw in Blender to AI so that it does proper VFX for the upcoming (hopefully if I meet deadlines lol) haloween submission
That´s what I'm talking about, looking great!!! @Dat dsgnr
A fake terminal. A coding agent starts building a little Rive scene, and partway through, something else starts typing.
I used both the Rive CLI and GPU Canvas. The agent wrote the scene in RML through the CLI. The terminal renders to an offscreen GPU Canvas and runs through a CRT shader I wrote in WGSL. A state machine and some Luau scripts handle the typing.
The whole thing runs off one data-bound number I called "possession." As it climbs, the text, the cursor, the shader and the preview window all go wrong together.
I did the preview animations by hand in the Rive Editor.
I'd never opened @Rive until a few days ago.
Play it here: https://haunted-cli-njr8nr.rive.to
Inspiring creative work.
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
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!