shaders-and-vfx

shaders-and-vfx is a skill for Claude Code from rondorkerin/gamestack. It costs 257 tokens per session (1,228 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A guide to creating shaders, materials, procedural textures, and visual effects such as particles, trails, decals, and screen distortion for games.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to build or review rendering effects, stylized materials, procedural surfaces, particle effects, and performance-aware visual systems across game engines.
Why use it?
It helps make game visuals readable and varied while considering technical costs such as slow shader compilation, excessive particles, and overdraw.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin.

Part of the gamestack plugin — 26 skills shipped together

Good fit Use it to build or review rendering effects, stylized materials, procedural surfaces, particle effects, and performance-aware visual systems across game engines.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/rondorkerin/gamestack/shaders-and-vfx
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add rondorkerin/gamestack --skill shaders-and-vfx
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/rondorkerin/gamestack

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install gamestack, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 26 skills.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for shaders-and-vfx

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/rondorkerin/gamestack/shaders-and-vfx/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/rondorkerin/gamestack/shaders-and-vfx)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/rondorkerin/gamestack/shaders-and-vfx"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/rondorkerin/gamestack/shaders-and-vfx/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for shaders-and-vfx

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/rondorkerin/gamestack/shaders-and-vfx"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/rondorkerin/gamestack/shaders-and-vfx.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 257 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,228 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00257 $0.01228
Opus 5 $0.00129 $0.00614
Sonnet 5 $0.00051 $0.00246
Haiku 4.5 $0.00026 $0.00123

Measured 11d ago against content hash 3e884c7cdabf, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-11, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

shaders-and-vfx scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 11d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

plugins/gamestack/skills/shaders-and-vfx/SKILL.md · 42 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 42 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Shaders & VFX

How to author shader-driven materials and visual effects that are parametric, readable, and cheap — across any engine. A shader is a data-flow contract (each stage reads and writes specific things); a material is a bounded parameter surface a generator can vary safely; VFX is the rendering substrate for game-feel's feedback channels, and the single biggest fill-rate risk if left unbudgeted.

Tier: technical craft (→ gamestack-core). Engine-agnostic shading/VFX principles, the technical substrate for game-feel-and-juice's feedback channels.

When to use this

  • Authoring shaders/materials as a parametric, generator-safe system (node-graph thinking, procedural texturing, baked vs. procedural)
  • Building VFX — particles, trails, decals, distortion, dissolve/hit-flash/rim — and choosing the technique by its cost model
  • Implementing a stylized look: toon/cel shading, outline rendering, flat shading for cheaper + more readable rendering
  • Diagnosing shader compilation stutter, overdraw collapse, a particle storm, or procedurally-generated materials that read as samey

Scope

This skill owns shader, material, and particle technical implementation — what each shader stage reads/writes, how a material parameterizes, how each VFX primitive is built and what it costs. Adjacent concerns live in sibling skills:

  • When/why/how-much feedback to fire, and the inverted-U budget ceiling → game-feel-and-juice (this skill is its rendering substrate; cite up to it for "should it fire and how big")
  • Rendering pipeline (forward/deferred), lighting, GI, shadows, post-processing order, overall performance-budget framing → 3d-graphics-and-rendering (sibling, same tier — this skill lives inside its pipeline)
  • Visual readability, silhouette, signal-color language, art direction → art-direction-and-readability (owns the language; this skill realizes it as technique)
  • The meshes/terrain these materials texture and outline → procedural-geometry (sibling — its UV-less runtime geometry is why triplanar/vertex-color paths exist here)

Read the full file on GitHub · 42 lines

Files

What ships with it

2 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 11d ago First seen · 42 lines · 257 tokens per session scan A 3e884c7cdabf

Subscribe to this mod's changes

shaders-and-vfx is a skill published in the GitHub repository rondorkerin/gamestack (28 stars, last pushed 2mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 257 tokens to every session and 1,228 once invoked, about $0.0013 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

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