Game Development Workshop II - Shaders

This Thursday we have the second part to the game development workshop series, which started last week! This workshop is a standalone session where we will be learning about GLSL shaders using shadertoy.

GLSL is a language, similar to C, which runs on the GPU. Typically used for the implementation of shaders in games (e.g. lighting effects, fog, etc), it can also be used as a full graphics library in its own right. Shadertoy lets us write a program, in GLSL, where we can make cool graphics simply by providing an RGB colour for each pixel. Have a look here if you’re interested to see what other people have done.

This should hopefully be a nice, relaxed workshop, and I will take you through the process of making a falling snowflake animation (maybe you could even turn it into a Christmas card!) perhaps with a tree in the middle.

There’s nothing to install on your computer in advance for this one, and while some experience with C will be useful, it’s certainly not necessary (GLSL is closely related to, but not 100% compatible with, C).