:Here's my entry for the #CharacterChallenge — the Rive x Contra challenge. Kaguya — The Moon Princess🌕 Kaguya is Japan's oldest folktale — a princess discovered inside a stalk of bamboo, destined to one day return to the moon. Using Rive, I brought this story to life as an interactive character living inside an app. She responds to three kinds of input: Touch — As the story unfolds, tapping the bamboo three times brings her into the world, born from the stalk. Tap her, and joy or surprise appears at random. Offer her the treasures, and the fakes are exposed — bursting into flames or cracking apart. Data — Each treasure the suitors offer shifts her emotional state. As her mood value drops, her expression gradually falls, and the world draws her closer to the moon. Motion — Tilt your device, and the moon's pull literally reaches for her. Her body and her adoptive parents' hands respond in real time. The device's accelerometer (via Expo) reads the tilt and feeds that value straight into Rive. Everything was built in Rive — State Machine, Data Binding, nested ViewModels, and a 1D Blend for the tilt animation. By embedding it into a React Native (Expo) app, I aimed for a character that isn't a sticker placed on top of the product, but one that truly lives inside it. I'm a solo indie developer and illustrator from Japan. The art, rigging, animation, and code — I made every part of it myself. 👉 https://rive.app/community/files/28128-53118-kaguya-the-moon-princess

This is my #RiveChallenge presentation on Contra, built from a character system I created for VDV Labs, Robert Vandervoort. All these little characters are part of an interactive system designed to create a band inside an app. The idea was simple: what if one rig structure could support many different performers? Instead of building every character and animation from scratch, I designed one reusable Rive system that can adapt to different animals, outfits, instruments, and performance loops. One component turns into a kawaii band: the characters change, the instruments change, and the performance evolves, but everything is still driven by the same reusable Rive structure. This was the biggest challenge of the project: building a system strong enough to handle multiple characters and outfits while keeping the animation readable and reliable. The amount of layers, states, controls, and visual variations made the work both technical and creative. I handled the full process: vector cleanup, character adaptation, animation, outfit design, state machine logic, and data binding. At the end, the project is more than one character animation. It is one flexible character system working across multiple performers in the same scene. Built in Rive.

Great work!