Growing up in Russia in the 90s Halloween was familiar to me only via movies on bootle VHS. This was the inspiration for my entry for this challenge.

Candykids 2 is a tower defence game that lives on a worn-out tape. Kids and teens are trick-or-treating their way to your door, and your scarecrows are two-sided signs. One side scares the little ones; flip it, and the other side roasts the teenagers. You have to keep flipping as the crowd changes, because teens will happily wreck a scarecrow that’s showing the wrong side. Every visitor you scare off drops candy, which you spend on more scarecrows. But that candy is also all that stands between you and the kids. Run out, and they eat you.

I built it with the Rive CLI, working with Claude: the game logic, rules and scene are all RML and Luau scripts. GPU Canvas does the fun parts: the 3D tape sliding into an old TV/VCR, and a CRT/VHS shader over the whole game. Then I went over all generated placeholders to give it personal touch in the Rive Editor. It was my first time trying Rive CLI + Claude and in the end had less time than I expected and much more hurdles to go through but it was a great learning experience and I will definitely use this workflow in the future.

Music by Nicholas Panek from Pixabay.