Shader Tricks in Game Production
summary
Game uses Unity shaders to add concrete, cheap effects to a one‑month student game (12 students, 3 programmers): a script‑driven progress bar uses two lines of fragment code comparing a 0–1 uniform to UV.x compare; a “fertile ground” ring computes object‑space distance and angle, distorts its outline with a tiled noise texture for wavy edges, fades foliage in the vertex shader, and spawns a scalable ring particle system. Glow uses replacement shaders + blur and a color ramp fix; light‑links pack many buttons into one mesh and store order in UV to drive a single shader; hair uses ragdoll joints copied to bones; sky uses a background sphere with Z off.
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chapters (11)
- 0:00Shader tricks intro
- 2:32Unity script-controlled shaders
- 8:26Progress bar masking
- 14:15Animated terrain transitions
- 22:11Glow effects for avatars
- 28:06Physics-driven attachments
- 30:12Trail renderer flight paths
- 31:21Edge detection glow fixes
- 32:47Skybox sphere rendering
- 34:16Depth-aware occlusion fading
- 36:49Q&A
