The Defold game engine and Rive 2D vector based animation application have announced a partnership. Rive may be a new name to you as it was previously known as Nima and Flare, the two products were merged as Rive. The partnership between Defold and Rive is going to bring the Rive run-time to the Defold game engine, which can be used to create animated characters, UIs, transitions and more.
Details of the partnership from the Defold blog:
The Defold Foundation today announced a partnership with Rive Inc. to add support for Rive real-time animations in the Defold game engine. Developers will be able to design and animate in-game characters, UI elements, screen transitions and more in the Rive application and easily integrate them in their Defold games. The animations will run in real time with full runtime control and access to object hierarchies, bones and shapes.
“Rive takes real time vector animations to a completely new level with powerful animation mixing, skeletal animations, mesh deformations and inverse kinematics. There is nothing close to it on the market and we are thrilled to be able to offer this to our community of game developers,” said Defold Product Owner Björn Ritzl.
The Defold Foundation will work in parallel on the engine integration of the Rive animation runtime and on development of a new high performance vector tessellation library suitable for use in game engines. The tessellation library will be released separately and ahead of the full integration which will be released later this year.
“We are so excited to bring Rive to the gaming world through our partnership with Defold! Their product is exceptional and shares astonishingly similar principles with Rive: the best tools should be accessible to everybody, simple to use with no setup, and truly cross-platform”, said Rive co-founder Guido Rosso.
You can learn more about the partnership and see Rive in action in the video below. If you are interested in learn the Defold game engine, we have two complete tutorials series available, one here on GameFromScratch and one hosted on our sister site DevGa.me. Rive is available at Rive.app while the Defold game engine is available at Defold.com. Additionally, the Defold game engine is now available on Steam.