NBA All-Star: Interactive Rive Court and Wall

Wunder Beast / State Farm / 2026

One file. Two live surfaces.

My role: Rive animation, interaction design and runtime controls

Delivered: One interactive Rive file that drove the LED court floor and the LED wall behind the hoop, a standalone leaderboard file, HTML test demos and developer documentation for the production team

Tools: Rive, Adobe Illustrator

The brief

Wunder Beast needed interactive graphics for the State Farm Celebrity Three Point Contest at NBA All-Star Weekend 2026. Two physical LED surfaces, the court floor and the wall behind the hoop, had to run from a single Rive file that their production team operated live from its backend.

The build

The court floor carries animated court markings and seven shooting-position indicators that light up and go dark on demand. Three difficulty tiers (Rookie, Starter, All-Star) change the court layout with animated transitions. The wall handles introductions for all nine contestants, a game timer, the running score, a 10-row leaderboard, game-over sequences with staggered score, time and rank reveals, and a game intro with synced sound. Celebrity mode adds player-versus-player matchups and contestant photos loaded at runtime.

Production controls the file through its ViewModel: triggers start sequences, strings set names, numbers set scores. I grouped the controls to mirror the visual structure, so leaderboard controls live with the leaderboard and court indicators have their own group. Events fired inside nested components are not visible to the main Rive instance, so I built a chain of listeners that rebroadcasts them to the top level. Their backend follows one event stream and knows when each transition starts, ends or goes idle.

The constraint

Two problems arrived in the last days. The event backend could not use the WebGL2 runtime, so I moved the file to the Canvas renderer and replaced the vector glow effects with pre-rendered PNG textures. The celebrity name layouts used scripts that sized each name to fit, and those scripts crashed without a clear pattern. Once the final contestant list was confirmed, I removed the scripting and set every name, font size and layout by hand.

The delivered experience

The file ran on the court and the wall during the contest. Phone footage from the event shows the graphics on the physical LED surfaces, and the renders below step through each state of the file. The full production account is in my original case on Contra.

Client feedback

“Ilya brought our live basketball experience to life with a flexible Rive setup that looked stunning on a full-sized LED court. Great technical skill, adaptability, and attention to detail. We'd work with him again without hesitation.”

Brandon DeLauney, Wunder Beast