Making the menu shine

Hiya,

This month, I got a week off from my day-job. I decided to use 40% of that holiday to work on OverGem full-time!

I really missed this feeling of being able to work on games all day. I've learnt so much more in that week alone, compared to the last year of working on it part-time! Just having a good amount of time set out is really helpful, some things can't be done in an evening 😜.

I wanted to share what I learnt in this devlog, and its about shaders! Yeah yeah, I know, I never thought I'd touch it either, but its what I needed. Guess I had to learn it eventually, shaders' all the talk these days.

I marked this log as a 'tutorial' because it fits that description the most. But I want to emphasise that its more of a 'log', a record of how I did a thing. A tutorial implies I am 'knowledgeable', and that I know what I'm doing ... which I don't 🙃 I googled just as much as any newbie to shaders.

Shader for a 'glint' effect

So, what I learnt on my dev-week was turning this:

Into this:

I did change the 'O' of the title to just use the same sprites as the in-game OverGem. I also adjusted the sprite of the rest of the title, colouring the 'ver' to be more like the gem and adding white 'shine lines'.

The shader is what gives the sprite that shiny 'glint'.

My approach to this is essentially masking a 'glint' texture on top of the title sprite, and just move the glint horizontally. Excuse me if my terminology is off, I'm not a graphics person 😜

And thats basically it!

Now, I can change the Tiling and Offset node's offset x value, and _GlintTex will move across the _MainTex title texture. Note that negative value is moving right.