The Shader Challenge

This project is being quite an interesting programming challenge (at least in my greenhorn game programmer perspective). Today, I'll talk about a big, recent difficulty: shaders.

For those unfamiliar with the term, shaders are small programs that run in the GPU. They're responsible for adding special effects to sprites and models: colors on texture, production of lighting or shadow on a model, etc.
 

Shaders can activate our Moon's normals!

Sounds cool and all, right? Well, implementing them with no previous experience was a nightmare. Seriously. Since libGDX uses OpenGL for 2D and 3D rendering, shaders had to be written in GLSL, a language with a similar structure to C. Getting the hang of it was quite hard, as most tutorials I found around the Internet were too simple or too complex.

With some help, everything seemed to work out. Keep calm and carry on, right?