WIP of my submission for the Rive X Contra Halloween Challenge, a Halloween Typing Game. I was really hesitant going into this one, but I’m using this challenge as an opportunity to study and learn more about Rive’s CLI; what I can do with it, what I can’t do with it, how to even use it. There’s so much to say and talk about when it comes to using AI to generate things, but this isn’t a post for that. To keep it short, I basically don’t want to use AI to generate everything from scratch, especially the designs. Because of the scope of the challenge and the time limit, I decided to use assets from Adobe Stock, specifically these beautiful designs from Ivan Dubovik.

I’m a motion designer, not a coder or game developer, so I’ve set up the things I know how to do (the designs and some animations) and created a plan/overview of the game written out for the AI to follow. My intention isn’t to one shot prompt all of this, I’m being deliberate with my choices, from what I’m creating before I even touch the AI to the plan I’m writing out for it to execute. I will basically feed it this .rev and the plan so that It can stitch everything together to create the game.

What I’m really curious to discover is how flexible and editable everything will be after the AI is done, I really want to be able to go into the file and add and improve the animations I had already created, and even the animations the AI will potentially generate. I also want to see if I will be able to adapt artboards, databinds, states, and viewmodels the AI generates. I’m worried the AI will make a crazy mess that I can’t even decipher and straight up destroy everything I did before, but we’ll see… So curious to see if it will be capable to create the game i’ve envisioned.

Spent the last few days building Gourdgeous, a fun 3D jack-o’-lantern designer. I put GPU Canvas, custom WGSL shaders, Luau scripting, data binding, and state machines to work with Rive’s CLI and OpenAI Astra.

Create your own pumpkin, export it, and use it as your avatar or whatever. Fun for kids of all ages!

Try it 👉 https://gourdgeous.art