Shader Journey #0: Introduction
Here’s the beginning of my new adventure in the world of shaders! :)
A subfield of game dev that has fascinated (and resisted) me for years is the amazing world of shaders. I’ve always enjoyed watching a few lines of code transform my 3D objects into mirror-like chrome balls, or strange glowy spheres, or even spiky bubbles that pulse in the air… but I never really understood the logic behind it!
Then, I discovered Freya Holmér’s incredible Youtube channel, and in particular her 3-part series on shaders for game dev. She explains what shaders are, how they work and how you can write them for your Unity games. These videos were a real revelation for me: I finally understood the basics of shaders, I got past Unity’s ShaderLab syntax and I started to actually correlate the weird lines of HLSL code and the nice visual effects on screen. So — kudos to her, and if you’re new to this topic and you want to learn more about shaders, make sure to watch those videos ;)
Shaders can completely transform the look and feel of the game (like the screenshot from Minecraft above), and they’re also a very optimised way of showing some pretty complex graphics because they take advantage of GPU parallel computation.
