2D Shader Development: Procedural Texture Manipulation

Our games need to look unique. There's nothing we can do to fight that. Good artists are great at creating amazing characters and environments but programmers can open a whole new world of possibilities and customization by leveraging the power of shaders.

NOTE: The Gumroad version of the book includes PDF, ePub and MOBI versions for you to download.

About Procedural Texture Manipulation

This book is the third on a series of 4 books and will teach you how to draw and modify textures with code.

About the series

In the past few years, while working on Nubarron, I got really frustrated about the lack of information on how to design shader effects in 2D. Most of the books and tutorials are about 3D, and one may think that transferring that knowledge to 2D is easy. Well.. not really.

I found out that there is a sub-set of basic techniques that are pretty useful in 2D, and don't require you to learn a lot of the 3D stuff, specially lighting models, the first thing that every shader tutorial/book talks about.

The series is aimed at independent game developers that want to make their own 2D games visually unique. You’ll need some understanding on programming. If you can code your own logic in C# scripts inside Unity you’re good to go.

If you haven’t coded a game in the past it’s likely that these books are not for you. I suggest you take an introductory Unity course first, work on some prototypes until you’re comfortable with programming and then read the books.

The series will help you differentiate your games from others that use nothing but built-in shaders, make use of the GPU to generate movement and effects on static sprites, generate full-screen effects and learn techniques to do illumination on 2D scenes.

Contents of the book

• Drawing with math: Lines, Functions, and Rectangles, Circles, Triangles and n-side polygons.
• Transforming shapes: scale, translate, rotate.
• Composition of basic shapes: Combining shapes, Subtracting shapes, Masking
• Image deformations: uv deformations, translate, scale, rotate, stretch, trigonometric functions.
• Chroma aberration, playing with RGBA channels
• Tampering with the resolution
• Color quantization
• Resolution change
• Using masks with textures
• Animation: animating textures, using masks in animation, easing
• Gallery of Shaping (Easing) Functions
• Intro to Signed Distance Fields
• Polar Coordinates
• Quantization