Introduction

If you are reading this book, you are most likely a person who has played a game or two in your time. One of the aspects of real-time games is the effect of immersing a player into a world to make it feel as if they were actually playing in the real world. The more modern games make heavy use of screen effects to achieve this immersion.

With screen effects, we can turn the mood of a certain environment from calm to scary, just by changing the look of the screen. Imagine walking into a room that is contained within a level, then the game takes over and goes into a cinematic moment. Many modern games will turn on different screen effects to change the mood of the current moment. Understanding how to create effects triggered by gameplay is next in our journey of shader writing.

In this chapter, we are going to take a look at some of the more common gameplay screen effects. You are going to learn how to change the look of the game from normal to an old movie effect, and we are going...