Glitch, scramble and decrypt text effects

The security door asks for a password and the screen answers with “ACCESS GRANTED”, decoding one character at a time. A transmission from a dying ship arrives sliced and color-shifted. A cursed scroll burns away from left to right. All of these are text effects that look expensive and usually end up as one-off scripts that fight with the typewriter.

In Text Studio they are tags. You write them around the words, preview them in the Inspector without entering Play Mode, and combine them with the typewriter, sounds and events like any other effect.

The effects at a glance

Each effect has three starting points rendered in the effect gallery appendix, and the +Tag button inserts any of them with parameter completion.

Glitch: slicing jitter with a red color shift.

Scramble: decoding on screen

Scramble is the most configurable of the group, because “decoding” means different things in different games:

• Playback: a bare <scramble> keeps scrambling, once resolves after duration, and loop repeats the cycle.
• revealDuration: the seconds a one-shot scramble spends locking characters back to the source text. Set it to 0 to resolve at once.
• charset: ascii by default, or binary, letters, lower, digits, hex, symbols, or your own literal characters.
• seed and rate: a seed for repeatable frames and the number of character swaps per second.
• Width and punctuation: characters are picked from width-similar candidates by default, so the line does not jump around, and whitespace and punctuation can stay untouched.

Two examples from the gallery: <scramble once duration=0.8 revealDuration=0.35 charset=hex>ACCESS GRANTED</scramble> for a password screen, and <scramble loop duration=0.8 charset=binary seed=7>0101</scramble> for a status readout that never settles.

Scramble only swaps what is visible. The resolved text, the markers and the layout stay exactly as authored, so typewriter events, captions and anything reading the text still get the real words.

Scramble resolving to the source text.

Decrypt, dissolve and burn as reveals

Some of these effects are built for the moment text appears or disappears. Decrypt only acts during the appearance of each glyph, which makes it a natural typewriter reveal: every letter jitters briefly, then locks into place. Dissolve and Burn work as reveal or hide treatments, either per glyph or as one continuous edge across the whole range with space=text:

<burn softness=.16 space=text>BURN AWAY</burn>
<dissolve softness=.18 space=text>DISSOLVE</dissolve>

Because reveal effects follow the typewriter, everything from the typewriter guide applies: punctuation pauses, wait tags, skip and sounds per letter.

Glitch looks for titles

For a title that should look broken even when it stands still, the ready-made looks include Glitch Signal, a chromatic displacement treatment for featured signal-loss and cyberpunk moments, RGB Split, which keeps the center face readable, and CMYK Misregister, which imitates screen-print offsets. Looks and effects stack, so a Glitch Signal title can still scramble in on reveal.

Repeatable frames and scrubbing

Random-looking effects are hard to review if they change on every play. Glitch, Chromatic Glitch, Decrypt and Scramble all take seeds, so the same seed produces the same frames in the Inspector preview, in a GIF or MP4 export and at runtime. Scramble is also seekable: scrubbing the preview backwards or jumping to a point in a Timeline reconstructs the scramble state for that moment instead of replaying it from the start.

Accessibility first

Glitch effects are exactly the kind of motion some players need to turn off. Under the project’s Reduced Motion setting, Glitch, Chromatic Glitch, Pixel Grid, Shake, Blink and Squiggle switch off entirely, and the text stays readable without them. Effects that move glyphs are reduced rather than removed. While you author, Text Studio warns when flashing can exceed three flashes per second, a common photosensitivity threshold. The accessible text animation article explains how to plan a calm alternative for every effect.

Performance notes

Dissolve, Burn and Pixel Grid are material effects drawn by the TextMeshPro shader rather than by moving glyphs. Since Text Studio 1.3 they no longer slow down unrelated layers of a styled text, although heavier effect groups may add a draw call. Glitch, Scramble and Decrypt work by changing glyph positions, colors or characters instead. For a terminal full of scrolling, decoding lines, keep the scramble on the lines that are actually changing.