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2 Commits
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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>
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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>
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