Commit Graph

4 Commits

Author SHA1 Message Date
81c9c4a349 LANE8: scales that swing, bags that don't open, and fruit you can throw
The three things the greengrocer was still missing, plus the physics bug that
finding them uncovered.

HANGING SCALES. Real PinJoint3D pendulums, not animations: a static dial and
rod, and a scale-pan rigid body pinned at its own origin so it can only rotate
about the pivot. They hang at chest height down the aisles — dial at eye level,
dish below — where a real shop scale hangs and where you keep walking into it.
The dish swings 0.40 m off a light knock and the pin holds the pivot to 1.1 mm.
The pan is steel so it never breaks; what you get is a heavy brass weight loose
in a room full of stacked fruit.

THE BAG YOU CANNOT OPEN. Tearing one off the roll is the easy half — that's the
setup. Then you have to open it, and the bag has two ends, only one of which
opens, and nothing tells you which. Rubbing alternates arrow keys, because
mashing one key is not rubbing. Either the meter climbs or it doesn't, and the
only way to learn which end you're holding is to have already lost several
seconds to the other one. SPACE turns it over. That is the whole solution and
the game never says so.

CARRY AND THROW. E picks up anything under 6 kg that isn't a record; LMB throws
it at 11 m/s, six times any brittle threshold in the game. Thrown fruit bursts
on landing through the same brittle_speed path a collapse uses — no separate
thrown-object code at all.

Then the part that took the longest. Round produce got sphere colliders (a box
on an apple is why nothing ever rolled) and every display in the shop instantly
fell over. Three separate things were wrong:

  - the stack radii were TYPED, not measured. The table said a cabbage was
    84 mm; the model is 213 mm, so that pyramid was built with every row driven
    a third of the way into the row below it. Main._glb_radius() reads the asset.
  - the lattice was box geometry. For spheres the rise per row is
    sqrt(4r^2 - step^2/2) — the height at which a fruit touches all four
    beneath it. Anything else spawns every row above the first in mid-air.
  - there was no tray. A pyramid of spheres on a bare flat table cannot stand;
    nothing holds the bottom row in, so the weight above wedges it outward and
    the display walks itself apart in a second. Main._stack_tray() frames each
    pile in four low timber walls sized to its base row, which is what every
    greengrocer on earth already does.

All 310 bodies asleep within 3 s.

While chasing that, the spawn guard fired on a cardboard box in the OFFICE. The
guard is a net, not a test: it only catches a pair Jolt happens to resolve
violently on the frames it's watching, and this one had been interpenetrating
in four levels for weeks. dev/probe_overlap.gd now finds them by measurement,
comparing every pair of dynamic colliders across all six sites. It found 15,
including a row of filing cabinets 0.70 m apart that are 0.80 m wide, and a
stapler inside a monitor. The box asset is 1.35 m across, so boxes are now
stacked into piles rather than dotted about, and the Backrooms scatter uses
rejection sampling with a 1.6 m minimum. All six sites read CLEAN.

Also: the rage veins were drawing every branch from its own start point
regardless of how far the trunk had grown, so at low rage you got disconnected
fragments floating mid-screen that read as biro scribble rather than blood. A
branch now can't appear before the trunk carrying it, and trunks are thick and
dark where capillaries are fine and pale.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-01 11:22:47 +10:00
e5f4e8c5e4 LANE7: the Gauntlet, four modes, two more provocations, and ambient attrition
THE GAUNTLET (Gauntlet.gd + Cabinet.gd)
Five identical cabinets, each with its alphabetical range on a Label3D. The brief names
a CLIENT, never a cabinet, so working out that HENDERSON lives in F-J is the puzzle —
no waypoint, nothing glows. Destruction is granular on purpose: pull a drawer, it
slides out on a spring and goes live, and the folders inside become individual
smashables. Doing that by hand inside the clock isn't really possible.

The perfect tool: every site hides a SHREDDER that eats a whole open drawer at once,
and the game never says so. Noticing it and working out what it's for IS the level.
Getting it wrong isn't fatal, just slow — the right shape for a secret, since it
rewards the observant without hard-failing everyone else.

Each site nominates its own records area in its spec. Building the bank 3.4 m in front
of wherever the player happened to be standing put it through walls.

MODES (Modes.gd, M cycles)
  CUBICLE HELL       the main loop
  THE GAUNTLET       above
  TOTAL DESTRUCTION  no job, no pay, clear the site, scored on time
  AGAINST THE CLOCK  fixed timer, maximise damage VALUE — the exact inverse of Cubicle
                     Hell, where expensive things become the goal rather than the
                     mistake. Same level, opposite instinct.
Entering a mode arms only what that mode needs; Cubicle Hell and the Gauntlet are
mutually exclusive, because you cannot be doing your job and shredding the Henderson
file at the same time.

TWO MORE PROVOCATIONS (Tasks.gd)
  STAPLES     SPACE lifts a staple, then it must be pulled the way it's bent — and it's
              bent differently each time. Dither and the sheet tears, bundle reprints.
  GUILLOTINE  align to a mark and cut. The guide has a PERMANENT offset and nothing on
              screen admits it. Once you work out the error it's easy, which is the
              joke: you have to learn to distrust the equipment.
Desks now alternate spreadsheet/staples so "a desk" isn't always the same minigame.

AMBIENCE (Ambience.gd) — the attrition you can't play around. The tube above your desk
flickers, and actually flickers the real lights. Fish in the microwave. A phone ringing
four desks away. Reply-all, forty-one recipients, "thanks!". Small periodic ticks with
no interaction at all; it's what makes the room hostile rather than merely beige.

Fixes: the payslip was rendering over the Gauntlet (it belongs to Cubicle Hell, and only
once the shift has actually ended); gauntlet drawer reach was 2.0 m when the true
distance from standing-at-a-cabinet to a bottom drawer is over 2 m.

dev/probe_gauntlet.gd drives a whole run headlessly — mode switch, labels, open every
drawer, shred, win — because that catches the failure that matters: a run you can't
finish because the files never become destroyable.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-07-31 18:12:20 +10:00
4bcd7b49d9 LANE7: four workplaces, built from data
Office.gd is gone. Floorplan.gd consumes a spec Dictionary — bounds, palette, walls
with doors and glazing styles, window runs with mullions and blinds, ceiling style,
light grid and style, slabs, static props, desk clusters, chairs, level-specific
smashables and spawn — and Levels.gd holds four of them.

Making this data rather than four subclasses means a site is authorable in minutes,
levels can be diffed, and a real generator can later emit the same structure (a BSP
split of the footprint -> rooms -> doors on shared walls -> fittings by room type).
That was the actual answer to "can we use this git to generate plans": the repo John
found is OpenSCAD SVG->STL for 3D printing, with no generation, no plan parsing, no
room polygons and GPL-3.0, so it can't help — but Office.gd was already most of a
parametric plan builder, and lifting its numbers out is the real path.

The four sites are deliberately not reskins; they differ in the three things a player
actually reads — palette, light, and what the walls are made of:

  SCRANTON      magnolia, grey carpet, drop ceiling, fluorescent troffers, daylight
                down one glazed wall. The baseline.
  PAWNEE        civic beige and blue-grey, low partitions everywhere, a public
                counter, pinboards. Municipal and over-partitioned.
  THE INCUBATOR timber floor, white walls, 3 m ceiling, PENDANT lights, glass wall
                onto a pool. Nobody has an office; they work at a dining table.
  SUB-LEVEL 4   concrete, NO windows at all, exposed services, bare strip lights, a
                wall of server racks. The light is green and everything is junk.

L cycles sites in-game; _load_level tears down the shell, rebuilds, re-registers task
stations and re-arms the shift.

tools/gen_level_props.py adds ten more procedural props. The filing cabinet is the
important one: it exports as a CARCASS plus a separate DRAWER, each with its own
floor-centre origin, so the Gauntlet can pull a drawer out as its own rigid body and
spill the files. Also file folder, desk phone, guillotine, shredder, server rack,
sofa, wastebin, stapler.

dev/probe_levels.gd builds every level and reports residual motion after a full
second. All four read 0.00 m/s.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-07-31 17:58:41 +10:00
dd905d908d LANE7: CUBICLE HELL — the tilt loop, the job, and the payslip
The game stopped being a smash sandbox. You work a shift, the work provokes you, a
meter fills, you snap, and you cannot go back to your desk until you have broken
enough things. Then you sit back down and try to earn the rest of your day.

The score is your payslip: WAGES (tasks completed) - DAMAGES (everything you broke).
The load-bearing detail is that rage drains a FLAT amount per object destroyed while
each object bills at its OWN value — so during a meltdown the play is to wreck a lot
of cheap rubbish fast rather than put the sledgehammer through a filing cabinet. You
don't choose whether you lose your temper, you choose how much it costs. FURY (objects
broken while melting down) is tracked separately and deliberately isn't money, so
"I ended the shift owing them $2,400" stays a brag.

Rage.gd — WORKING -> MELTDOWN -> COOLDOWN. During a meltdown the clock STALLS if you
stop destroying; you must actually be breaking things.

RageOverlay.gd — the blood vessel. A vignette that closes in with rage and jumps
inward on every heartbeat, procedural veins that creep further into frame the angrier
you get, and a synthesized lub-dub going 62 -> 172 BPM. Zero assets: the shader is
built in code, the veins are draw_polyline from a seeded RNG, the heartbeat is a
generated WAV. Tops out as a heavy frame rather than a red screen — you have to be
able to see what you're about to destroy.

Tasks.gd — stations you walk to and are LOCKED IN PLACE at, because you're at your
desk and that's the joke. Two so far:
  SPREADSHEET  the selected cell silently drifts one cell partway through entry, with
               no sound and no animation. Commit without noticing and the figure lands
               in the wrong cell and you start again. This is the whole thesis of the
               game in about forty lines.
  PHOTOCOPIER  jams, and wants the right tray out of 1, 2, 2A, 3, 3B.
Snapping ejects you from the station at no penalty — you didn't choose to walk away.

CubicleHell.gd — 5-minute shift, wages vs damages, meltdown count, end-of-shift
payslip with a verdict line.

Also: HUD gets a monospace face (Godot's fallback is proportional, so the spreadsheet
grid and the work-order docket never lined up), and the arcade HUD's headline becomes
net pay, red when negative.

LANES/LANE7-cubicle-hell.md captures the rest of the design: more provocations, the
GAUNTLET mode (find which of many cabinets, pull drawers, destroy files individually,
and work out which tool the level wants without being told), the other three
workplaces, and why doratracyer/floor_plan can't help — it's OpenSCAD SVG->STL for
3D printing, no generation, no room polygons, GPL-3.0. Office.gd is already most of
a parametric floor-plan builder; lifting its numbers into a data spec is the real path.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-07-31 17:34:34 +10:00