Shaderland

Shaderland is a puzzle-programming game about computer graphics, transfem hackers, and weird little creatures.

60+ times every second, your computer must figure out the colour of all the millions of pixels on your screen. The programs that do this are called shaders. They require a unique way of thinking, one that is foundational to 3D art.

Your friend L1l1th, hacker and occultist, used shader programming to create a whole world inside her machines. A virtual ecosystem with beasts multifarious. But now she's gone, leaving just those machines behind.

Somewhere inside the tangled wires are her secrets. But to reach them, you will need to learn her art.

This is Swizzle. Or perhaps you'll give her another name? She's a digital lifeform, and you made her to ferret out L1l1th.

Swizzle's a creature that walks on pixels. Her world is made by your shaders: by writing the rules, you make some of the world solid and some of it air.

To do this, you use a node editor, just like the ones in many game engines. Each node does some mathematical operation, with different results at every pixel.

Connect up the pieces, and this creates a shader program which generates a pattern. With these patterns, perhaps you can guide Swizzle deeper into Shaderland. It starts simple enough, but there are many paths to explore!

Swizzle is not the only inhabitant of Shaderland. There are others, also made by L1l1th, waiting to be discovered. Some of them care about different different colours, some of them move in entirely new ways, and they all have their history.

And somewhere, there might just be a creature that has the answers.

Shaderland is a puzzle-programming game with a rich story. It offers open-ended puzzles where you can look for not just a solution, but the best one, or at least a better one than your friends. But it's also a guide to 'thinking in graphics' by carving up space with mathematical functions. Starting with the UV plane and black-and-white fragment shaders, it builds up through colour channels, vertex shaders, signed distance fields, and ultimately to the third dimension. You do not need to know anything about graphics or programming to explore this world. But by the end, you will have a better intuition for it...

It also sports a level editor, allowing you to create your own challenges. Maybe pretty ones, maybe torturously hard ones. Put them out into the Wired to challenge other creatures, or use it to make art in the best tradition of the demoscene, and either way understand your computer a little better.

A strange and beautiful world is waiting to be born.