Introduction

Try to think for a moment about any game or app you've played in the past – that could be your favorite childhood video game or a recent one that you can't stop thinking about. I'm sure that the first thing you'll remember will be tied to a specific experience you had while playing the game, something that impressed you at the time. It could be the way the world was crafted within the game, or a specific sequence of events that happened in it. In any case, we can probably agree that apps and games aren't just made out of static components, such as models and materials, but the interactions and the magic that happens when everything works together.

In this recipe, we'll take a look at some of those elements within the realm of materials that add interactivity and functionality to our real-time experiences. As we said before, shaders have the ability to be interactive as well, and thanks to that and the logic that we write, we can create powerful assets that make our levels that...