Willo: Rive Character System for Devlands

Initial Commit LLC / Devlands / 2025

One guide, two homes.

My role: Character rigging, Rive animation, responsive web integration and sequence export

Delivered: Willo, a rigged Rive character with thirteen emotional states; a responsive Rive hero for devlands.com with a parallax cloud background and a curtain preloader; PNG sequences and WebM renders for the game; a Lottie flame loop

Tools: Rive, After Effects, Illustrator

The brief

Jacob Stopak builds Devlands, a gamified Git interface with a character-guided tutorial, under his company Initial Commit LLC. He asked me for a character rig and ten 2D character animations for the tool and its website. The character is Willo, the tutorial's guide.

The build

I rigged Willo once in Rive and built every emotion on that rig. The first sequence handover covered eight states (Angry, Embarrassed, Explaining, Idle 1s, Idle 5s, Puzzled, Sheepish, Shocked); the second added Cheering, Crying, Laughing and two speaking loops, thirteen in all, exported as PNG sequences for the game. For the website I built a separate Rive scene: Willo over a parallax cloud background, with a curtain preloader that opens onto it.

The constraint

The website scene had to keep its composition at any window shape. The layout went through nine layout versions, five responsive versions and a simplified responsive branch that reached v13 between 7 and 23 February 2025, ending with width-based conditions inside the Rive file.

The delivered experience

devlands.com loads willo.riv, clouds.riv and curtain.riv with the Rive web runtime, and the page sizes the artboard to the window. The emotion sequences went to Jacob for use in the game.

Client feedback

"Ilya was excellent to work with in every way. He is a highly talented and experienced animator and graphic designer. He took the time to understand my project requirements and put his creative spin on things in a way that still fit in with my project aesthetic. He went above and beyond to create a custom Rive animation for my website and about 10 character animations for me to use for game development. He is an excellent communicator, is very responsive, is generous with iterations, and will work with you until you're satisfied with the result. I'd HIGHLY recommend Ilya for any animation or graphic design project."

Jacob Stopak, Initial Commit LLC