Maturity | Shader Breakdown
Maturity was a solo game dev project made for a Seattle Indies Slow Jam 2021.
I wanted the game to have a consistent visual style while also being able to express multiple moods thru the shading.
Play it here: https://camden-cecrle.itch.io/maturity
Spoiler rich video of the full game so you can see the shader in context
Default (Non-stressed) Shading
I wanted the default shading of the game to "feel" like claymation.
The main things I wanted to hit were the wobbly or "boiling" edges, soft-ish shading and the ability to update at a lower framerate to make it feel calm
This portion of the graph generates the map used for vertex displacement. This is then modified to fit with the characters "mood"
Visual representation of the displacement map
Attributes that feed into the rest of the shader that controls the color
Example of only color with no vertex offset
Generates some additional noise for the stress state
Stress effect
I wanted the stress effect to be the polar opposite of the default (Cozy) shading.
So I scale and amplify the vertex offset to be smaller, sharper points, swap the color palette to more "stressful" colors and increase the "frame rate"
Depression effect
For the depression effect I wanted it to feel cold and still.
To accomplish this, as depression increases the amount of vertex offset decresses as well as the saturation decreases and everything tints to a darker blue
Depression's effect on Stress
Depression overrides most of the effects of the stress modifier
Generates a global "fingerprint" noise for the calm state
Lerps between calm and stressed colors based on stress