Skillshare – Code a Lava Lamp: Introduction to Shaders for Game Development in Godot

In this class, we’ll learn how to make shaders in the Godot Game Engine via a super customizable lava lamp project! The Godot Game Engine is a lightweight, free and open source game engine.

This class serves as an introduction to 2D fragment shaders, which are often used in game development to achieve neat visual effects that run rapidly on the GPU via parallel processing, meaning many points are processed by the code individually and simultaneously. Being able to write shaders is a valuable skill that can add a lot of flair to your game projects, and after creating the lava lamp, you’ll have a good understanding of how they work!

We’ll be writing our lava lamp code in Godot’s shading language, which is very similar to GLSL, the widely used OpenGL shading language. At the end of the class, we’ll create a seamless GIF loop of your custom lava lamp in action to share to the project gallery

As a bonus, I’ll even show you how you can run your lava lamp on your desktop while you do other things (similar to Shimeji!)

While you should be able to follow along without experience, and I’ll be careful to explain every step in detail, some experience with coding or game engines will be very helpful for your understanding. If you run into any issues, please let me know via the discussions tab and I’ll be sure to help you figure them out.