Shaders (getting trippy here)

So for this next area of Robo-Ninja, I've been trying to figure out how to do some crazy wavy-screen effect as Robo-Ninja teleports into the new dimension. Suddenly, my lack of knowledge about modern computer graphics really shows up. The Gameboy Advance and DS used their own proprietary 2d graphics systems, and so far I've just been using some high-level 2d libraries in libGdx, that protect me from having to learn much about the actual openGL stuff that's actually going on.

But to do this crazy effect, it looks like I'm going to have to use shaders. So I'm going to have to learn a little bit. Thanks to some nice folks on the libGdx IRC channel, I found a page with some nice example code of something vaguely like what I'm trying to do. Playing around with that example code, I've turned Robo-Ninja into a serious trip-fest:

So...that's weird. Not exactly what I'm going for, but I think I can use that to get pointed in the right direction of what I want for the transition. The real question at this point is, how much time do I spend really learning this stuff properly (the syntax of the shader language isn't complicated, but to really understand it, I need to have a much better understanding of 3d graphics than I do, which could take quite a bit of time and work to really get there), vs just barely understanding it enough to achieve the effects I'm looking for (which is pretty likely in this case, since it's just for this one visual transition, and not crucial to the game itself). We'll see what happens....