How I Created 2D Pixel Art Water - Unity Shader Graph

Welcome to my very first YouTube Video!! My name is Jess and I’m a software developer from Australia. In this video I showcase the water I made for my game and all the juicy technical details behind it.

My game (name tbd) is a top-down 2D pixel-art style sandbox that uses procedural generation, inspired by games like Stardew Valley and Minecraft. I’ve been working on it for a few years now so I thought it was about time to start sharing some progress! Would love to hear what you think so far :)

Timestamps
0:00 Intro
1:43 Creating the tiles
2:08 Height map gradient
6:07 Caustic texture
10:16 Specular highlights
11:59 Sea foam
13:28 ✨ Final result ✨

Want to download and try the shader yourself? I've made the files available on GitHub here:

Gaussian blur subgraph:

Music from:

[anhi]

Your FIRST YouTube video??? And here I was ready to binge your whole channel. Your game reminds of me One Our One Life in all the best ways and I can't wait to see what you develop it into. Goodluck!

[ДанилаКарпенко-ьд]

If there is a day cycle in the game, adjusting the color of the water can be an incredibly powerful technique for creating an atmosphere. It is awesome.

[aarthificial]

The final result looks absolutely stunning!
Also huge congrats on the first video, it's extremely well done!

[upta]

How on earth is this your first video? This is legitimately top-tier quality with interesting content and engaging presentation. Exceptionally well done, definitely earned a subscribe from me!

[Draidzeven]

Great work! The reason there's no built in blur though, is that generally blurring in shaders is really expensive: it's just a lot of texture reads, especially for a good quality blur. I'd suggest given that you're already doing this as a tile set, that you also prepare pre-blurred tiles to represent the foam gradient. One fun thing to try: you can pack both the sharp outline and the blurred gradient into the same texture by using different color channels, say red for sharp and green for blur. You get them both at the same time in the same texture read "for free, " then unpack them using a split node!

[heh_boaner]

It's amazing how techniques invented 4 decades ago are still in use today. Specifically, the scrolling Perlin noise. I hope someday I could bring innovation like that to this industry.

[城南十七]

It's the best water shader I've ever seen. It's amazing that you are both good at coding and art. This video is really helpful to me and I'm looking forward to your next video.

[toyfreaks]

Good editing and organic voice-over sync up to hijack both hemispheres simultaneously and deliver A LOT of information. So well conveyed as to make an old hack want to go back and make a game.

[Chief-wxfj]

The specular highlights was a really nice touch, it sold it a lot

[smellymarshmally]

Please produce more content like this; it's truly impressive. The audio quality and graphics are top-notch! Also, consider creating tutorials for both beginners and advanced developers.

[Adkit]

I love the attention to detail for the aesthetics here, showing that both technical skill in coding as well as artistic vision need to work together for a videogame to be made well.

[_stephenhubbard]

One of the best 2D pixel water shaders I've ever seen!

[PrismaticaDev]

Great work - a nice blend between detail and that nostalgic pixel-art vibe!

[studio_buehler]

Very nice! I feel heavy Sebastian Lague influences and I like it. Up there in terms of production quality as well as explaining complicated subject matter.

[TimpersOliver]

as a pixel artist i love watching people make pixel art games and the dev work. its crazy this is your first video. please make more! the art on this game looks so so nice.

[lastotter]

You’re Will definitely be buying your game once you’re finished, thank you for being SO helpful to the

[darenn-keller]

Really cool video. I'm so impressed it's your first video, well done!

[joepveenman]

This is really impressive. Making shaders like this is away a lot of work and you did an amazing job.
The rest of the game looks also very impressive. 8 directional characters, some beautiful looking trees, the use of noise on things like grass and the fantastic sprite work.
This is very impressive both from a technical standpoint as form a creative one.

I wish you the best of luck and look forward to the next update.

[Pallerim]

This was awesome. Not enough Devlogs go into this level of detail with explanations and reasoning. Thanks for creating this, it must have been a lot of work. And the end result looks so good!

[LabGecko]

I have no idea how much research you've done for this, but the result looks like genius level coding, and your video presentation is top notch too. Well done.