Texture/Material Effects

[gamecreator]

I'm getting to a point where I would like to implement special effects into my platformer.

I'm talking about hit effects, spells, etc. ... stuff like this:

My main concern is that I want to avoid having 50 gigs of textures and be somewhat smart about how I do things.  So I'm hoping people can chime in here about what additional tricks I can use to save frames/be efficient.  Things like SetColor to change the color of effects instead of making pre-rendering separate colors.

This video I posted before had some neat tricks:

but I don't know how to do things like change the texture UV by code.  I've been looking at the material and texture docs and the only other thing that seems helpful is SetPixel but I think that's too expensive to do every frame for multiple textures.  My next step is to look at the headers for any possible undocumented functions but I could use some feedback on other tricks / functions I may have missed.

Finally, I know the smartest thing is probably to code shaders (for example, I'm pretty sure it could scroll or scale the texture UV no problem) but that's been a bit intimidating for me to get into.  If things get a little out of hand with these sprite sheets then it may come to me having to dive in.

I just tested animating and scaling the UVs in Max in various ways but it looks like Leadwerks doesn't import them.

tldr: what are some ways to animate/alter materials or textures with code besides SetColor and SetPixel?

[gamecreator]

Implemented a hit effect (free spritesheet here: https://opengameart.org/content/hit-animation-frame-by-frame).  Nice to get help from past threads too.

Edit: and most of a spell effect (I'm going to add at least one more layer to make it a bit more lively).  Note how the glow scales up in size quickly as he raises his staff.  That's done by code (using SetScale).

[gamecreator]

Sometimes you have to let off a little steam with some silliness.  I was testing if i can move a bone individually and suddenly I had a box "chasing" me.  Added some overly dramatic music and I was set.