How We Created The Monitor Effect For Egress
If you have checked our Ludum Dare entry, Egress you might be wondering how we created the glow and screen-warping effect.
If you haven't played it yet, give it a go! https://lunatic-games.itch.io/egress
The Glow Effect
To create the glow, we applied a Gaussian Blur additively to the screen. By doing it additively, it created a glow effect rather than just blurring the entire screen. While attempting to optimize the shader code, I discovered that if it was applied in steps, 4 pixels in this case, it created a diode look:
The complete code (written in Godot's native shading language): ``` shadertype canvasitem;
uniform float radius = 8.0; // Radius of pixels to consider uniform float stepsize = 4.0; // Larger steps give it a more pixel-y look uniform float sd = 10.0; // See Gaussian Blur algorithm uniform float additivestrength = 24.0; // How much to include of the blur output uniform float center_strength = 1.0; // How much to include of the un-blurred pixel color
void fragment() { float pi = 3.141592653; float e = 2.71828; float multiplier = 1.0 / (2.0 * pi * pow(sd, 2)); vec4 sum = vec4(0.0); for (float x = -radius; x <= radius; x += stepsize) { for (float y = -radius; y <= radius; y += stepsize) { vec4 value = texture(SCREENTEXTURE, SCREENUV + SCREENPIXELSIZE * vec2(x, y)); float p = -(pow(x, 2) + pow(y, 2)) / (2.0 * pow(sd, 2)); sum += value * multiplier * pow(e, p); } } COLOR = sum * additivestrength + texture(SCREENTEXTURE, SCREENUV) * centerstrength; } ```
The Screen-Warping Effect
It took a bit of testing to find the best functions to use for creating a convincing screen warp. We ended up offsetting the UV coordinates of the screen using two different cosine waves: one based off the distance from the horizontal center, and another one using the distance from the vertical center. If the UV coordinates ended up being outside the boundaries, the screen was simply colored black.
The complete code: ``` shadertype canvasitem;
uniform float margin; uniform vec2 strength = vec2(10.0, 1.0); uniform vec4 backgroundcolor: hintcolor;
void fragment() { float x = SCREENUV.x - 0.5; float y = SCREENUV.y - 0.5; y *= strength.y * (1.0 - cos(x)); // How much to offset the y UV coordinate x *= strength.x * (1.0 - cos(y)); // How much to offset the x UV coordinate if (SCREENUV.y + y > 1.0 - margin * SCREENPIXELSIZE.y || SCREENUV.y + y < margin * SCREENPIXELSIZE.y || SCREENUV.x + x > 1.0 - margin * SCREENPIXELSIZE.x || SCREENUV.x + x < margin * SCREENPIXELSIZE.x) { COLOR = backgroundcolor; } else { COLOR = texture(SCREENTEXTURE, SCREEN_UV + vec2(x, y)); }
} ```
If you haven't checked out our game yet, we would love for you to give a shot and give some feedback!
It can be played in your browser here: https://lunatic-games.itch.io/egress
2. Animations: I was really proud of this one particular animaion where after the player presses the 
Bonus: The player art: I love how it looks! I wasn't sure if I wanted to do a robot drill, or even something like this at all, but looking at the sprite work for it, which I cranked out in 6 hrs, I am really happy with how crisp it looked! Especially coming from a programmer haha!
1. The music: I was a bit concerned about making music for my game since that is something I never dabbled into in all of my game projects and that fear struck in me on the last day. While I did get some nice tunes for a few seconds, most of the music can get a bit irritating at times. I guess it's either the inexperience of making my own music or I'm secretly tone deaf. Maybe both? 
2. A little lacking: Even though I am happy on the end product in the end, after hearing some friend feedback, I did wish I implemented one more gimmick into the game, since it is a little bare bones, admittingly. Nevertheless, that is always a to do item for the future!
3. The art direction: The art of the game is not exactly something home to write to (besides the player sprite imo), and part of it is because I wasn't exactly sure what to do! I ended up just thinking about that one theory where if you dig straight down into the Earth, you'd plop out on the opposite side, so that is why the themes are sky, caves and lava. There could be more imagination in them admittingly, and maybe it might even be time to look into some external help on art or just spend more time concepting.
Bonus placeholder of the mole
