Godot Card FX Lab: a weekend shader experiment with AI

Every now and then I like to make very small projects with no roadmap, no product goals, and no expectation that they will become something larger. Godot Card FX Lab was exactly that: a weekend generative-AI experiment to test Godot shaders and see what kinds of effects I could create for a card game.

The question was simple. How could a card feel when it appears, when you hover it, drag it, boost it, dissolve it, or open a pack? I did not want to build a full card game. I only wanted a small place where I could try visual ideas quickly and see which ones had something interesting.

Open source · MITsergi-io/card-fx-labGodot Card FX Lab is a small visual-effects lab for cards and booster packs made with Godot. Browse or download the code on GitHub.View source

Try the lab

You can open the experiment directly here, or visit its itch.io page if you would rather view it in a separate tab.

A place to try ideas

The project is built with Godot 4.7 and organised as a set of independent effect modules. There is a main scene with a catalogue, a live preview, and a panel for changing properties. The point was to avoid touching a card scene every time I wanted to try something new: select an effect, adjust its values, and immediately see what happens.

The current catalogue includes these 9 effects:

• Hard Hover: tilts the card in perspective, with lift, floating motion, and glare driven by cursor position.
• Card Dissolve: burns the card away through procedural noise and hot edges, then lets it be restored.
• Drag & Drop: adds spring-weighted motion, velocity tilt, inertial release, and boundary collisions.
• Cinematic Burning: ignites the card from a chosen point with a turbulent char front, layered flames, and wind-driven ash.
• Samurai Slash: plays an iai-style slash combo that cuts the card into moving fragments with bright blade trails.
• Vortex Absorption: places a black hole that makes the card vibrate, bend, spiral, and collapse.
• Card Boost: overcharges the card with a golden flash, blue energy, rising sparks, and a sustained aura.
• Booster Pack Opener: builds magical pressure inside a pack, bursts it in purple, and reveals 4 cards in a fan.
• Booster Pack Opener 2: tears the pack’s top seam with foil fragments and a flash, then lifts 4 cards into a vertical fan.

Not every effect is equally useful or polished. That is also part of the experiment. Some exist simply because an idea sounded fun and I wanted to see whether I could get it on screen in an afternoon.

AI had a lot to do with that pace. I used GPT 5.5 and GPT 5.6 SOL (High) as tools to generate and explore effects, test shaders, suggest variations, unblock an approach that was not working, or produce a first version I could iterate on. The result has been quite interesting. Not because AI replaces design judgement, but because it makes the distance between thinking of an effect and seeing it move much shorter.

This is as far as it goes

I do not want to take Godot Card FX Lab much further than this. It is not the beginning of a card game, a product promise, or a framework I plan to maintain for years. It is a fun weekend generative-AI experiment, finished at the point where it had answered the questions I cared about.

I like being able to leave some projects like this: small, open, MIT licensed, and with no pressure to justify their existence beyond learning something and having a good time building them.

Thanks for reading, Hack the Planet!