I am not sure how to accomplish this effect for my simple arena shooter game.
I am thinking that shaders might be a good way to do this, but i never used shaders, and never used 3d, only regular 2d effects such as scaling, rotation, alpha blend, etc.
What i am trying to achieve, is a kind of "scaled shredding". I take a texture, and splitting in into "rows and columns" to represent a kind of "digital-explosion". So this effect is a kind of "scaling" but i "distribute" the pixel rows by introducing "gaps".
One alternative by not using shaders, is that I guess i could (operate on a "texturelevel" intead of a "row level") by drawing the whole sprite multiple times, but scaling (shrinking) them into 1 pixel rows/cols, but then i use the whole sprite for each "row". I really want to avoid using the "whole texture" for every row even though this possible is much simpler than rendering on a row by row basis.
Here is a visual representation of the effect: