Manchester City, a Web3D game built by Hiber and powered by Rive

Hiber is bringing browser-based gaming to the next level with Manchester City, a Web3D game made in partnership with the Premier League football club and Ready Player Me. Embedded on the Premier League’s website, the game shows how Hiber and tools like Rive can work together to deliver high-performant Web3D gameplay. 

Read our interview with them for the whole story. 

Scoring goals with browser-based gaming

After years of innovation, Web3D finally looks more like a future reality than a trendy digital dream. But there are still many obstacles to overcome, especially in web-based gaming. Hiber, the team behind the most powerful game engine on the web, is tackling these hurdles head-on. 

Hiber’s game engine, Hiber3D, harnesses WebGPU so game developers can deliver high-quality, scalable games across billions of devices worldwide — all on web browsers. 

Hiber3D has already powered the creation of more than 6.5 million browser-based games, and Hiber is continuously refining the engine and creating demo projects to showcase its full capabilities. The Manchester City game is a prime example of how Hiber3D delivers a hat trick of performance, scalability, and accessibility. 

“We want Hiber’s designers and developers to easily create unique interfaces within web-based game engines,” explains Jonas Tageman, Hiber’s Chief Technology Officer. “Rive lets us do exactly that for in-engine and web-based interactions without needing to write code.”

Rive’s UI lands exactly where designers kick

To build Manchester City, Hiber built UI incorporating the football club’s branded assets. Hiber used Rive to create a custom mini map that tracks player positions and rotations at different levels. In addition to the mini map, Rive was used for other critical UI elements like the health meter, health bar, start text, and win screen — all with minimal developer effort. 

“Rive made it possible to bring our vision to life, and it worked right out of the box,” says Hiber Artist Nils Frleta. “Now, we can drag Rive elements into a project and see how they look and feel. Iterating is much easier.”

Nils says transitioning to Rive wasn’t so tough because it shares similarities with Adobe Illustrator. Still, many of Rive’s features were new to him. Rive’s YouTube tutorials helped greatly. 

No red cards from developers

With Rive, developers no longer need to build an artist’s ideas from scratch with hard-coded UI. 

“Rive has equally impacted our developers,” Hiber’s Senior Developer Filip Engberg tells us. Far from seeing less coding as a threat to job security, Filip and the other developers are thrilled they have more time doing other things they love, like building out features, improving game logic, and making better games. 

“It’s fun to build UI, so some of our developers have tried Rive and are excited because it lets us be creative too,” he says. “This isn’t about separating roles. Rive is a versatile toolbox that empowers everyone to experiment and innovate.”

Aiming for the Web3D goalposts

Moving forward, Hiber plans to use Rive more as the Hiber3D engine evolves, making it possible for game publishers to go beyond the app stores and reach new markets for browser-based games.

“Twenty years ago, Flash dominated browser games, and everyone played games on Facebook,” Jonas recalls. “Now, with Hiber3D, you can click into a game and start playing instantly. Rive is opening up entirely new ways of working and creating Web3D.”

Meleah Maynard is a writer and editor in Minneapolis, Minnesota.