For my latest prototype, I wanted to evoke a sense of analog nostalgia, gritty, unstable, and imperfect. Think lost tapes, old surveillance footage, or the glitchy intros of 80s sci-fi. A clean render wouldn’t cut it. I needed something with personality, something VHS.

To get there, I built a custom VHS effect shader that layers several imperfections: flickering scanlines, wobbly distortion, chromatic bleed, desaturation, and noise. Each is subtle on its own, but together they create a powerful mood cue. The effect isn’t just visual, it tells the player, this world is worn, haunted, and strange.

Here’s how it works, step by step.