Polishing with Shader Graph and Trail Renderer

To really sell the game experience to the player, we can employ some easy-to-execute visual polish. Thankfully, Unity provides visual effect features through some built-in components and includes relevant features as part of its render pipeline.

Here, we’ll look at adding a few simple effects to the player, bullet projectile, and the overall visual look.

Enabling post-processing

To take advantage of any of the effects we’ll be implementing in this section, we’ll first want to enable post-processing as it applies to the Universal RP (URP) (reminder: this is the render pipeline we are working with).

Specifically, the effects we’ll be making will use high dynamic range (HDR) color values that will work with a post-processing bloom effect to make our 2D lights and parts of our sprite assets glow.

HDR color | Unity documentation

HDR color values offer a wider range of luminosity than standard colors...