I am in the process of learning HLSL, but for Sporox, it was under a time constraint that made using shader graphs a lot more effective a process. I created several shaders for the game which was helped with my experience making materials in Blender. Most of these were procedural, but I recognise this can slow the game.
Crystal shader, emissive fresnels with colour
simple ghost shader, fresnel with noise
BigSpore/GreedSpore shader, did not make it into the final demo, used lots of different noise, fresnels and multiplying in colours