Creating a Custom Flat Shader
Two years ago I worked on a game jam game tasked with creating a game where gameplay was centered around a glitch, something that didn’t quite work right. Inspired by things like World of Goo I decided to make a game I called Reach, a puzzle game with a slime based protagonist.
The game featured a simple, flat art style which you can see in the gameplay video below.
The problem with this approach was that each of the blocks that make up the level, the goo and everything else requires two sprites. The first displays the foreground color and the second a background color. That is both a lot of work to setup and a lot of extra shapes.
I think I can do better now. I know I am can do it better now.
To solve it, lets write a shader. We can render the foreground color and use a gradient image with a cutoff so we can clip the image to a perfect copy of whatever shape we want.
This approach should allow us to make complex even animated shapes from a single object. But this is just an idea, lets put it into practice. Tomorrow, I’ll be filming a video walking through from start to finish the implementation of this concept. A launch of what I hope is a divergence from the classic programming tutorial as I will only have this concept to work from at the start. I guess there is only one way to find out if the concept works. Stay tuned.
