George Meng
Overview
Clipped was a project made for 2026 Global Game Jam. The game was about stealing paintings from a museum with the core mechanic being "clipping mask", where the player cam take an image in the world, and paste it onto a surface as a decal.
Role:
My role on the project was programmer, in charge of the guard AI as well as figuring out how to mask out the image that the player takes.
Guard AI
With our limited time, the guard AI was quite simple. It has AIperception tied to a state machine in order to tell it what to do. Each guard has a set patrol path in the form of a spline that they will move on until they sense the player.
Masking
Unlike with the guard AI, there were many challenges in creating the mask. The solution I've come up with ended up working quite well.
The mask itself is just a pure-black render target; the player then draws a white square on top of it to edit it.
That render target is then plugged into a material graph to create the decal mask.
Mask material Setup
White square material setup
When the player holds down left click, the blueprint sets the mouse position as the starting point, and sets the mouse position where the player lets go as the end point.
After the blueprint get data for both points, and draw the white square on top of the render target.
