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
DEAD STILL is a Victorian spirit-photography game in three sittings. Ghosts can’t be seen. Only photographed.
You are J. Ashworth, “Photographer of the Departed”. Frame your clients, turn the brass focus ring, and hold a long exposure while the plate drinks the light. Then rock the plate in a red-lit darkroom and watch who was really standing beside them:
- The widow: her husband, in his empty armchair. The first sitting teaches you, step by step.
- The twins: a dead girl who will not keep still. Frost on the glass betrays her, and only a magnesium flash can freeze her.
- Mr. Hale: an investigator who asks for a portrait “with whoever is here”. Then the print looks back at you.
Rive features used:
1) Rive CLI: the whole project is RML, Luau and WGSL, checked with --verify, inspect, --screenshot and --test (20 unit tests that guard the rules), and shipped with --publish=web.
2) GPU Canvas: the shaders are the mechanics:
- 2D Rive artboards lit inside a 3D studio, with shadows and depth of field
- long exposure as real accumulation into a float plate: anything that moves smears
- a development shader you agitate by hand, with the dead coming up last
- frost on the ground glass where a spirit stands, and candle flames that bend toward the cold
- a magnesium flash, then smoke
- for the twist, a "living print": the plate re-exposed every frame, so a face in the photograph can open its eyes
3) Scripting (Luau): the sittings, the scoring and the story; it scrubs Ashworth's Wake timeline to open his eyes.
4) Data Binding: one view model drives the whole HUD.
5) State machines on every artboard; the HUD's hints run on one.
6) Skinned image meshes with bones for every character, each with an idle timeline.
7) Layout, vector feathering, trim paths, dash paths and Rive audio (gapless loops for the clock, the candles and the darkroom).
The video shows the game itself (every gameplay frame rendered by the game), the CLI run that shipped it, its RML, Luau and WGSL, the GPU Canvas passes, the file opened in the Rive Editor, and the same signed .riv running in a local build of my own portfolio site.
Amazing....
This is really amazing. This is something new concept direction.
Absolutely stunning! 🔥 Pure creativity and perfection in every detail. ❤️✨
Brilliantly unique..
Not just a creation, it’s a whole new perspective
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
Related posts
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!
CHANNEL 13 📺👁️ A found-footage horror scene you play through smart glasses.
You open a moldy fridge full of roaches, grab a warm beer, sink into a ruined couch and turn on an old CRT. Every zap, something hooded and faceless gets a little closer in the static. On channel 13 it rushes the glass… and then it comes out. 🎧 Sound on.
How I built it:
• Rive CLI: the whole scene is written in RML with a coding agent (Claude Code), built and checked with rive --verify / inspect / screenshot, then pushed to the Rive editor
• GPU Canvas (WGSL): two shaders. A smart-glasses lens pass over the whole frame (fisheye, chromatic split, low-light grain, light-buzz flicker, digital glitch) and a cursed CRT shader (B/W analog snow, scanlines, rolling bar, vertical-hold slips, the figure bulging the glass, procedural spider-web cracks, power-off collapse)
• Luau scripting: story timing and "dread" level, channels and subliminal flashes, flying glass shards
• Data binding: one Story view model shared across artboards, a Broadcast view model driving the TV
• State machines: beat timelines, roach and bulb loops, 13 channels, all sound cues
• Audio: 22 sound effects, zero music. Fridge hum, buzzing bulb, roaches, footsteps, CRT whine, whispers, heartbeat, screamer, shattering glass
Uses both the CLI and GPU Canvas.
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.