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ArjinFerman  Tinfoil Gigachad  2d ago (text post)   201 thread views

Tinker Tuesday for August 25th, 2026

This thread is for anyone working on personal projects to share their progress, and hold themselves somewhat accountable to a group of peers.

Post your project, your progress from last week, and what you hope to accomplish this week.

If you want to be pinged with a reminder asking about your project, let me know, and I'll harass you each week until you cancel the service.

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Sorry, I thought the video was looping after the cut, and closed it too early.

No, the shader-based ones do in fact look a lot better!

In fact, they look a little too smooth; it doesn't quite fit the style of the sprites. Not sure what to do about it though (short of using high-res textures); I'm a complete zero when it comes to visual design.

Thanks for the hint, I saw some people doing cartoony shaders, maybe I'll give a few of those a shot.

I'm a complete zero when it comes to visual design.

Same... to the point where I'm often oblivious to issues until someone shows me a better version.

Can shaders handle flipbook animation? That second explosion effect is a huge improvement, but flipbooks allow much higher fidelity. Here's a bunch Unity published for free.

If you are sticking specifically with procedural shaders and image-based flipbooks are out, there should be a bunch of ways to add fidelity to the effect. it looks kinda like a gradient scrolling outward from a polar coordinate + Perlin clouds to add detail, + alpha on a gradient or curve for the dissipation effect?

  • clustering smaller particles on top of your big one should be a cheap, easy way to add detail. color-shift them to simulate smoke or debris?
  • the big explosion looks a bit weird, because it dissipates from the center a bit early and very strongly, and the overall duration of the blast seems a bit short for its size, and the explosion expansion seems linear rather than a sharp spike and then longer tail falloff as it dissipates.

Here's a random example, note how the explosion happens in two frames, and then the dissipation happens in three? Initial blast should be violent, and then the fadeout should be slower.

For the dissipation, look up how dissolve shaders work, and I think that's the sort of effect you want: your image turns transparent, starting with the darker pixels, and moving up to the lighter pixels; it works really well with Perlin noise to give more organic fadeout.

Can shaders handle flipbook animation?

They can, you just move the UV coordinates by particle lifetime. It's how I handled everything originally, including the monster animations. I was a bit hesitant to just throw a higher fidelity images at it to mind the resource use, but it looks like an entire flipbook from your link is like 4MB, so it should be fine. I'll play around with these.

That second explosion effect is a huge improvement, but flipbooks allow much higher fidelity.

You mean the second out of the 3, or the second shader effect (so third out 3)?

Technically shaders give you "infinite" fidelity, the limiting factor is the screen resolution (and much later, if you keep zooming in, floating point precision). That said I'm surprised how far a few extra pixels will get you. My textures were 64x64, these ones seem to be around 400x400, and look decent even at high zoom.

it looks kinda like a gradient scrolling outward from a polar coordinate + Perlin clouds to add detail, + alpha on a gradient or curve for the dissipation effect?

Sounds about right. The main effect I lifted from here, it does use perlin noise from what I can tell, and I used the smoothstep function to add the dissipation.

clustering smaller particles on top of your big one should be a cheap, easy way to add detail. color-shift them to simulate smoke or debris?

Huh, wasn't sure this was even possible, as I'm not doing this the standard way - since the main simulation (including projectiles, collisions, etc) also happens on a shader, it would be too costly to pass the results to standard scene nodes. I basically have to hack the particle system, and if I can't program it there, it would be too much trouble. Good news Godot seems to have an emit_subparticle function for it's particle shaders, so this should be doable. I'll give it a go.

Here's a random example,

Did you forget to paste a link by any chance?

Anyway, thanks for all the hints man!

yup, sorry, here ya go

for bright particles generally, check out additive, screen and multiply shader effects. not sure how your engine handles or names those, but it ought to have some analog for them, and they're essential for doing bright effects like explosions, fire and sparks.

Also, I meant the second explosion. third one would look cool if you can get a lightning effect stacked on it.

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