This is one of the coolest shader tutorials I have seen.

https://youtube.com/watch/...

It simply walks you through start to finish enhancing a weapon. I also found it can also be applied to 2D games as well. What I don't like is it is not setup to be generic. I will have to figure out how to make it be a weapon effect you can apply. I think having weapons provide a mask for where the shaders should be applied would make that possible. Then the generic effects can be applied to the weapons or removed. No need to have unique weapons of every type and for every effect.

This is the kind of tutorials that really get me going. When thinking of 2D I had not really thought about using shaders like this.