The Trial of Fear is a short first-person horror game I made in Rive for the Halloween challenge.

I wanted to build a game that creates and builds genuine fear within the player, adding twists and turns throughout the game to make it feel exciting but horrifying.

How I built it: I came up with the ideas and used Claude Code with the Rive CLI to build it. The scene is written in RML and the game runs on Luau scripts. All the 3D stuff (the fog, candlelight, moonlight, the portal and the creatures) is custom WGSL shaders on the GPU Canvas. Data binding and state machines handle the fear and oil meters, the captions and the title. After that I went into the Rive Editor and did some parts by hand. I changed how the lantern glow flickers, made the line under the title draw itself, and added the stars under it.

I'm going to keep working on it after the challenge, with more polish, fixes and hopefully more trials, so there are updates coming.

The narrator voice is from ElevenLabs and many of the character models were made using Blender and Fusion 360 as well as from Tripo and TRELLIS.