Metafy mirrors the video game experience with Rive

Metafy, a next-generation platform for gamers, is a digital watering hole where experts can monetize their skills by coaching beginners, beginners can uplevel their skills thanks to coaches, and all can hang out in the Metafy Community. Recently, Metafy made the strategic decision to animate all of their illustrations in Rive, so we chatted with their team to learn more about how Rive fits into their branding vision.

An experiential home for gamers

Metafy attracts gamers to their platform for many reasons: they understand their user base because they are their user base, they’re committed to bleeding edge technology, and their branding mimics the playful interactivity found in video games.

Senior Product Designer Travis Howell tells us, “All of us on the team are gamers. We want Metafy to capture what makes video games so engrossing, and we do that by implementing visual feedback and animations into our product. This creates a higher engagement rate than what you would get from a static image.”

Life before Rive

Before Rive, Metafy’s platform had little motion design. “We had an experimental phase with Lottie,” CEO Josh Fabian explains. “We haven’t looked back.” 

Travis adds, “Lottie always felt more static, whereas Rive integrates animations more organically. By the time we seriously considered Rive, we had already abandoned Lottie.”

“Rive popped up a few times in the design community as this up-and-coming tool with so much potential,” Design Lead Tobias Ecsedy tells us. 

Choosing a new tool is never easy for a company, especially when you factor in how it could disrupt multiple teams’ workflows. Metafy flirted with using Rive for over a year, first taking the time to understand how it works. They discovered Rive’s functionality aligns with Metafy’s branding philosophy. Then they hired Daniyar Baianov, an animator passionate about Rive’s capabilities. Josh quips, “And it’s been off to the races ever since.”

Rive animations in Metafy

Metafy commissions all of its illustrations from a creative agency, Thunder Rockets. Tobias says, “They’ve really built out the look and feel of Metafy. Once we have their illustrations, we add animation for a final 20% push, which ends up being 80% of the impact.” 

He adds, “One of the things that is impressive about Rive that I haven’t seen elsewhere is its code-based connection. You see fully responsive animation as if it was built in code, but it’s not.”

Onboarding flow

Josh: "It entices you to imagine, 'If this is the experience before joining Metafy, what will it be like after?'"

Emoji reactions

Josh: "We want users to feel a little dopamine hit whenever they see the 'this is fine' flames moving."

Community like/dislike in Rive State Machine

Impact

For companies like Metafy that prioritize bleeding-edge technology, Rive is a natural choice. “Rive is a tool that separates us from the pack,” Josh explains. “Finding a design-led organization that isn’t on top of Rive would be shocking. It’s one of the most exciting tools in the design ecosystem right now.”

Rive animations help their branding mimic the immersive playfulness found in video games. They also give them flashbacks to an online era thought long gone. Josh continues, “During Flash’s heyday, the Internet used to be a playground for us, and then it slowly got corporatized. In many ways, Rive is a return to the magic of the Internet — that space of expression and creativity.”

Get started with Rive

Rive is the interactive design tool that helps companies breathe life into their branding with ready-to-run animations. Learn more about how it can benefit your business at our pricing page.