For my game EAT GIRL, I made a lot of wonky animated backgrounds to give the game a disorienting tone. Some people have asked me how I made the backgrounds, and the answer is shaders! Shaders can seem like black magic, and they kind of are, but they’re a surprisingly simple kind of magic that anybody can conjure.

This is a very non-technical overview of the “Wavy” shader, which is the shader I used for most of the level backgrounds in the game.

To demonstrate the shader, I will be using this simple background. It’s just circles!