I’ve been playing with openGL for about 4 years now. I am no specialist at it but I can make a fairly optimized Minecraft clone or a model renderer.
I am right now working in a 2d game with libgdx, and wanted to add some fancy light effects, like the ones seen here:
https://youtu.be/GPbLJ_QDOgo?t=214 (Revenge of the titans)
(the particles, the laser aim, etc)
or the effects that come out of their weapons here:
https://youtu.be/x66GUr-Lg8Y?t=215 (Soul Calibur)
For the first video I could think of some ways of doing it without shaders, using only textures and stuff, although it probably wouldn’t look that good. For the second one I actually don’t have an idea. So I thought probably shaders, although with my very limited knowledge of shaders I still have no idea how to implement it.
So, is it possible to do those kind of effects without shaders? Is it worth learning shaders to achieve such effects ? Or everything can be worked around with smart use of textures?