Trying to understand how to replicate this effect | GameMaker | Page 1

white smelt Mar 18, 2026, 8:21 PM

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Heya, i wanted to ask something. It's not anything i would require immediately, and it became more of a curiosity at this point after the many attempts to try and do this myself and searching online.

The situation is this, i have this image i display in the background, can be in the background layer, can be drawn by an object, whatever. This image needs to have this effect like it's expanding outwards, like pieces of it are moving in sequence and they repeat. It should be a still sprite cause i didn't find any animation, video, etc., while searching the code of this game, so i'm curious to know how it's done.

Oh, and obviously i should be saying the game in question is Deltarune, and this is the visual example.

crystal scroll Mar 18, 2026, 8:31 PM

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I'm pretty sure that uses a shader

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You can simply have a uniform variable for time and modify alpha on that

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I don't know how the shader works in this example specifically but there's probably some code snippets that can do this

white smelt Mar 18, 2026, 8:37 PM

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Yeah, that's what i imagined while doing research. Also aligns with having it in a different cutscene where a roar makes the screen have trails going outwards as well.

crystal scroll Mar 18, 2026, 8:38 PM

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It's possible that it's also getting the sprite texture and taking the pixel from some distance up using time and modifying it's colour using that

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Since it does seem the pixels move

crimson willow Mar 18, 2026, 9:20 PM

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white smelt Heya, i wanted to ask something. It's not anything i would require immediately, ...

if you're using utmt, look for DEVICE_OBACK and IMAGE_DEPTH

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it's not a shader at all, surprisingly

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2018 toby fox probably didn't know what those were

white smelt Mar 18, 2026, 9:28 PM

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crimson willow if you're using utmt, look for DEVICE_OBACK and IMAGE_DEPTH

Holy, i did NOT see that. Knew i should have checked all the "DEVICE" objects.

Idk how tho, probs i was tired. Anyway this was exactly what i was looking for! I was still curious if there other "modern" ways to do it for anything (like a shader, since it seems to be doing that when the Roaring Knight roars), but i guess that it won't matter until someone has an answer for that.

And probably i will keep this post to see what other people will suggest. I'm just genuinely curious, lmao. Y'all are always so surprising and i just like learning.