destroyulator/LANES/LANE7-cubicle-hell.md

# LANE 7 — CUBICLE HELL

*The game stopped being a smash sandbox and became a game about a man having a bad day.*

## The pitch

You are at work. The work is designed to provoke you. A meter fills. When it fills you
**snap**, and for half a minute you physically cannot go back to your desk until you've
broken enough things. Then you sit back down and try to earn the rest of your shift.

Falling Down, but the payslip is the scoreboard.

## The score IS your payslip

```
        NET  =  WAGES (tasks completed)  −  DAMAGES (everything you broke)
```

The load-bearing detail: **rage drains a flat amount per object destroyed, but each
object bills at its own value.** During a meltdown the optimal play is therefore to smash
a lot of cheap rubbish very fast — cartons, paperwork, monitors — rather than put the
sledgehammer through a filing cabinet. You don't choose whether you lose your temper. You
choose how expensive losing your temper is.

`FURY` (objects broken while actually melting down) is tracked separately and is
deliberately **not** money, so "I ended the shift owing them $2,400" stays a brag.

---

## BUILT (this lane, shipped)

| Piece | File | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Tilt meter | `game/scripts/Rage.gd` | WORKING → MELTDOWN → COOLDOWN. Provocations fill it, clean work drains it slightly, ambient office drains your patience passively. During a meltdown the clock **stalls if you stop destroying** — you MUST break things. |
| The blood vessel | `game/scripts/RageOverlay.gd` | Red vignette that closes in with rage and jumps inward on every heartbeat; procedural **veins** that creep further into frame the angrier you get; a synthesized lub-dub whose BPM goes 62 → 172. Zero assets: shader built in code, veins are `draw_polyline`, heartbeat is a generated WAV. |
| The job | `game/scripts/Tasks.gd` | Stations you walk to and are **locked in place at** (you're at your desk — that's the joke). Two tasks so far, below. |
| The shift | `game/scripts/CubicleHell.gd` | 5-minute shift, wages vs damages, meltdown count, end-of-shift payslip with a verdict line. |

### The two tasks that exist

- **SPREADSHEET** — enter a figure in a named cell. Partway through, the selection
  **silently drifts one cell** — no sound, no animation. Commit without noticing and the
  figure lands in the wrong cell, you eat a big provoke, and you start again. This one
  task is the whole thesis of the game in about forty lines.
- **PHOTOCOPIER** — run a copy job. It jams. Clearing it needs the **right tray**, and
  the trays are labelled `1, 2, 2A, 3, 3B` because that's what head office decided.

---

## BUILT — more ways to be provoked

STAPLES and GUILLOTINE shipped (see `Tasks.gd`), plus `Ambience.gd` for the passive
attrition. The table below is what's still open.

### Still to build

Each is a `Tasks.Kind` + a `panel_state()` case. The framework takes them without
changes; the design constraint is that each must have **one specific, identifiable way of
wasting your time**, not just "it's slow".

| Task | The provocation |
|---|---|
| **Staple removal** | A stack with N staples. Click each. Too slow and the page tears — redo the sheet. The remover slips and takes a chunk out of the page. |
| **Guillotine / paper slicer** | Align the sheet to a line, pull the handle. Misalign and the cut is crooked → redo. The alignment guide is 2mm off and always has been. |
| **The phone** | Rings mid-task. You must answer it. It's hold music. Not answering keeps it ringing and ringing raises rage faster than answering does. |
| **Printer driver** | The printer is "offline". Toggling it takes four clicks in a dialog that moves its buttons. |
| **Reply-all** | An email thread with 40 recipients. You must reply to the sender only. The default is Reply All. |
| **Toner** | Replace the cartridge. It's the wrong model number by one digit. |
| **Timesheet** | Enter hours. It won't accept decimals. It also won't accept fractions. |

### Passive ambient provocations (no interaction, just attrition)
Someone microwaves fish. The air-con drips. A colleague's ringtone. The fluorescent tube
above your desk flickers at a frequency chosen to be maximally irritating. Each is a
small periodic `rage.provoke()` — cheap to add, and they're what makes the room feel hostile
rather than neutral.

---

## BUILT — modes

All four ship in `Modes.gd`; M cycles. The Gauntlet is `Gauntlet.gd` + `Cabinet.gd`
(drawers slide out as their own bodies, folders inside go live, and the shredder eats a
whole open drawer). Versus is still the open one.

### The original design notes

1. **CUBICLE HELL** *(built — the core)*. Shift timer, work, snap, wreck, repeat, payslip.
2. **TOTAL DESTRUCTION** — no job, no pay. Destroy 100% of the level. Scored on time.
3. **AGAINST THE CLOCK** — fixed timer, maximise damage value. The inverse of Cubicle Hell:
   here expensive things are the *goal*.
4. **THE GAUNTLET** *(designed below — the most interesting one)*.
5. **VERSUS** — two players, one office. Explore later; the interesting version is
   asymmetric (one working, one wrecking) rather than both wrecking.

### THE GAUNTLET (design)

> *"you need to destroy every file in a specific cabinet but which one, heaps cabinets,
> real subtle hints, time limit, and you have to actually pull each drawer out, empty
> files out, destroy them individually or in small lots unless you have a specific tool"*

- A room of **many** identical filing cabinets. Exactly one holds the target files.
- **Subtle hints only**: a memo on a desk names a client; a labelled folder on the copier;
  a sticky note with half a reference number. No waypoint, no glow.
- Destruction is **granular**, not one-hit: pull a drawer → drawer slides out as its own
  body → files inside become individual smashables → destroy singly or in small lots.
- **The perfect tool.** Each level has ONE tool that makes its gauntlet tractable — an
  industrial shredder for files, a crowbar for the drawers, a lighter for a wastepaper
  bin. It is somewhere in the level, and **the game does not tell you what it is.**
  Working out "what would actually make this fast" IS the puzzle. With the wrong tool the
  gauntlet is possible but you will not beat the clock.
- Needs: `Drawer.gd` (pull-out sub-body with its own contents), a `Container` concept on
  Smashable, and a `Tool` flag on Weapon marking it as a level's key tool.

---

## BUILT — the other three workplaces

Shipped as `Levels.gd` specs consumed by `Floorplan.gd`. The notes below are the design
they were built from.

### Design notes

Reference floor plans provided: **Parks & Rec** (municipal, partitioned, outdoor patio),
**Silicon Valley hacker house** (domestic-open-plan, kitchen + pool), **The IT Crowd**
(basement, two rooms, glorious junk), plus the generic open-plan bullpen.

Each is a new script alongside `Office.gd` implementing the same interface:

```gdscript
build()                    # shell, fittings, lighting
configure_environment(env)
desk_spots() / chair_spots() / copier_spot()
spawn_point() / spawn_yaw()
```

They differ in **materials and hazards**, which is what stops them being reskins:

| Level | Signature material | Signature provocation |
|---|---|---|
| Municipal (Parks & Rec) | laminate, pinboard, civic beige | the public counter; forms in triplicate |
| Hacker house (Silicon Valley) | glass, whiteboard, drywall, a pool | standup meetings; someone's monitor wall |
| Basement IT (IT Crowd) | server steel, cardboard mountains, CRTs | "have you tried turning it off and on again" |

### On procedurally generating floor plans

The repo you found — `doratracyer/floor_plan` — **won't help**. It's OpenSCAD that turns
hand-drawn SVG wall paths into 3D-printable STLs. It doesn't generate layouts, doesn't
parse plan images, and produces no room polygons or graph you could build a level from.
It's also GPL-3.0, which we would not want to link against.

**Better path, and we're most of the way there already:** `Office.gd` is a parametric
floor-plan builder that just happens to have its numbers hard-coded. Lift those into a
data spec —

```gdscript
{ rooms:  [{name, x0, x1, z0, z1, walls, door_at}],
  fittings: [{kind, pos, yaw}],
  lights:  {grid_x, grid_z},
  spawn:   {pos, yaw} }
```

— and a generic `Floorplan.gd` builds any of them. Then each workplace is a **data file**,
new levels are authorable in minutes, and a *generator* becomes possible later (rooms as a
BSP split of the footprint, doors on shared walls, fittings by room type) because the
consumer is already data-driven. Do the spec first, generation second.

---

## Asset needs (MODELBEAST / `tools/gen_office_props.py`)

Already generated procedurally: office chair, vending machine, microwave, potted plant.
Needed next, in rough priority order:

`filing cabinet with pullable drawers` (split mesh per drawer) · `desk phone` ·
`guillotine / paper slicer` · `stapler + staple remover` · `wall clock` · `whiteboard` ·
`server rack` · `pinboard` · `water cooler bottle (separate from base)` · `wastepaper bin` ·
`hole punch` · `shredder` (the gauntlet's perfect tool)

Rule of thumb established this lane: **if it's a box, build it in code**; if its silhouette
can't be faked by a box, generate it.

---

## LEVEL 0 — THE BACKROOMS *(built)*

> *"special back rooms level can get weird with it? stuff is invisible have to release
> dust or gas or something to coat items to see them to destroy them? and you inhale
> some of it too"*

`Levels.backrooms()` + `Dust.gd`. Mono-yellow, 2.55 m ceiling, damp carpet, a dense grid
of buzzing troffers, no windows and no way out.

**The walls are generated.** This is the site that proves the Floorplan spec can be
emitted rather than authored — a seeded RNG lays partial wall runs on a 4.6 m lattice
with random gaps, plus 22 freestanding pillars. It follows the reference photographs
rather than a maze algorithm on purpose: the Backrooms aren't corridors, they're big
offset slabs in an open floor. A proper maze would be legible, and legible is wrong.

**The mechanic argues with itself.** Everything smashable is invisible but solid — you
find things by walking into them. RMB with the extinguisher throws powder; anything in
the cloud is coated, glows faintly out of all that yellow for 7 s, then settles back to
nothing. Every cloud also goes in your lungs, and that haze is on YOUR side of the glass.
Spray more to see individual objects; see the room less. Past 72% you cough: camera jolt,
screen bloom, and a rage tick.

Rhythm: spray → switch to something heavy → break it before the coating settles → spray
again, coughing. Pairs naturally with TOTAL DESTRUCTION, because the level *is* a search.

Still open here: a second gas with a different trade (something that reveals further but
costs more lungs), and the entity. There is currently nothing in here with you.

### LEVEL 0's horror layer *(built)*

`Entity.gd` · `Dread.gd` · `Backrooms.gd` · `tools/gen_horror_props.py`

Three borrowings, each doing a different job. **Slenderman**: frozen while watched,
closer every time you look back, and staring is what builds the static — so the safe
play kills you slowly and the fast play lets it catch up. **Xenomorph**: it hunts sound,
and the objective is to make sound, so playing well feeds it. **Blair Witch**: the level
wraps, and a wrap is when it repositions, so "I've been here" and "it's already here"
arrive together.

The entity is deliberately unresolved — 2.5 m, faceless, arms past the knees, cranium
swept backwards. Slenderman from the front, something else in profile. A silhouette your
brain finishes beats a monster it recognises.

Two bugs worth remembering:
- `seen_now` was a pure view-cone test with **no line of sight**, so it built static
  through walls. In a maze that's most of the time.
- Then the fix exposed the real one: the generated maze was so dense there was **no
  sightline longer than a few metres anywhere**, which kills the entity outright — a
  stalker you can never see can never be stared at. Thinned the generator (skip a third
  of the lattice lines, much bigger gaps), which also matches the reference photos far
  better; they're mostly open floor with occasional slabs.

**DREAD and the three deaths** *(built)* — one meter, not a health bar. Nothing else in
this game does damage, so hit points would be a survival-horror UI bolted onto a
demolition game. DREAD is fed by being stared at, by proximity while unseen, by each
loop, and by your own coughing; it decays when nothing is happening to you, and every
loop makes it grip harder. At 100% you die, and whichever source pushed it over decides
which death you get, so the three memes stay legible: STARE (Slender), REACH (gory, the
xenomorph sprays), LOOP (the room simply keeps you at eleven). `Gore.gd` does blood on
the lens with drips, a wet burst, and the camera going down onto the carpet — slow on
purpose, because a jumpscare is a spike but a death should take its time.

**THE OTHER ONE** *(built)* — after three loops there are two, and they share a
silhouette. Its rules are the first one's inverted: it advances ONLY while watched, is
inert when you look away, and is completely deaf. Every instinct the hunter trains into
you is how the other one kills you. Tells are close-range only and all wrong the same
way: head thrown back at the ceiling, arms up, feet that never reach the carpet.

**ONE THING PER LOOP** *(built)* — `Backrooms._disturb()`. Exactly one change per wrap,
never two, because that constraint IS the effect: nothing and a loop is just a teleport,
several and it reads as a new room. One means you're never sure whether you noticed or
imagined it. Escalates from moving a prop half a metre or killing a light bank, to
hanging a totem that wasn't there, to permanently revealing something nobody dusted, to
putting the hunter exactly where you were standing.

Still open in LEVEL 0: the two entities can't yet be told apart by anything except
getting close, which is correct but means a first-time player has no way to learn the
difference except dying. A tell at medium range — a sound only one of them makes, or one
that never appears in the same frame as the other — would give skill somewhere to live.