Cursor Camp, A Real-Time Multiplayer World, Built with Rive
Cursor Camp (https://neal.fun/cursor-camp/) is a live multiplayer playground where up to 1000 real cursors from around the globe share the same space simultaneously. A beach, lazy river, clubhouse, campfire, soccer pitch, cave, treehouse and more, brought to life through over 40 Rive-powered interactions and animations spanning environments, characters, objects, and interactions.
My role was building the entire Rive layer. Starting from the illustrator’s artwork, I translated everything into interactive systems, rigging and animating scenes, characters, and objects while developing the state machines and behaviours that make the world feel dynamic and alive.
The real challenge was making it data-aware. Using ViewModel data binding and Luau scripting throughout, every animation responds to live runtime input, with cursors picking up objects, triggering states, and reacting to a constantly changing world.
That includes moments like players duetting on a piano in real time, progressively eating an entire cake with each click, adding sticks to a fire to increase its intensity, or dropping ingredients into a cauldron to dynamically change the colour of the broth.
The result is a Rive system ready to be wired into Neal Agarwal’s multiplayer backend, where WebSockets keep thousands of players in sync in real time.
It hit the front page of Hacker News on day one, with people asking one question over and over:
How is this running in a browser?
That’s the impossible UI.
38
124
6.1K
