Game Design: Shaders

• Visual tools and assets add polish and flair to a game's content, animations, actions, and interactions, enhancing its visual appeal.

Shaders

• Shaders run on the GPU and control how the game appears through the graphics pipeline.

Types of Shaders

• Vertex Shaders: add special effects to objects using their vertex data (location, colors, coordinates) by changing the values of the data.
• Fragment Shaders: work with "fragments" of an object to determine their color.
• Pixel Shaders: adjust the traits of individual pixels, allowing for fine-tuning effects.
• Geometry Shaders: transform primitives to output zero or more primitives; commonly used in OpenGL applications.
• Tessellation Shaders: add extra vertices to a primitive, used to smooth objects, add textures, or upscale models.

Compute Shaders

• Compute Shaders operate on the GPU outside the normal rendering pipeline.
• They are used to offload compute-intensive tasks and are efficient for floating-point calculations.

Particle Effects/System

• Particle Systems simulate and render numerous small images or meshes to create dynamic visual effects like fire, smoke, or liquids.

Lighting

• Simulates real-world light behavior to create realistic lighting results using global illumination, simulating both direct and indirect light.

Real-time Lighting

• Real-time Lighting calculates lighting at runtime, updated every frame.

Baked Lighting

• Baked Lighting pre-calculates lighting data before runtime.

Types of Light

• Directional Light: emits straight, parallel rays of light.
• Spot Light: emits light in a cone shape, simulating light sources like flashlights.
• Point Light: sends out light equally in all directions from a single point, simulating lamps.

VFX (Visual Effects)

• VFX enhances a game's visual fidelity using a combination of shaders, particle effects, and lighting, tailored to the game's theme and art style.

Two main types of VFX

• Environment Effects: represent physical occurrences like fire, rain, mist, or explosions.
• Gameplay Effects: enhance or draw attention to specific user interactions.

Cameras

• Cameras are essential for rendering the scene from a certain vantage point.

Importance of Audio and Sound Effects

• Audio and sound effects are crucial for setting the theme and atmosphere across various scenes in a game.

Soundtracks

• Soundtracks include music and ambient sounds, such as theme songs, background music, menu music, and combat music.

Sound effects

• Sound effects refer to non-musical audio elements, including sounds for running, interactions, weapon swings, gear, vehicles, voiceovers, and UI/UX.

Elements in Sound Design

• Source: the inspiration of your sound effects
• Envelope: describes the volume of sound effects over time, including attack (how fast the sound volume peaks) and release (how the sound ends).
• Pitch: refers to the highness or lowness of the tone, correlating to the frequency of the sound.

Frequency

• Frequency: the rate of vibration determines pitch, with higher frequencies producing treble and lower frequencies producing bass.
• Equalizers visualize and adjust frequencies. Layering: involves playing multiple sounds together to create unique sequences, combine tracks to create music, and create new sounds.

Audio Mixer

• Audio Mixers perform audio mastering and are set apart via the asset folder.

Audio Plug-ins

• Audio Plug-ins are custom audio effects that can be imported for unique audio effects and mixing setups.

Audio Random Container

• Audio Random Containers set up and play a randomized list of audio clips and can adjust the volume and effects, typically used for repeating sounds.