destroyulator/game

Destroyulator — the game

Mac-first (Apple Silicon / Metal), Godot 4.7, Jolt physics.

Run it

Editor: open /Applications/Godot.app, import this folder (game/), press F5 / ▶.

CLI:

/Applications/Godot.app/Contents/MacOS/Godot --path /Users/m3ultra/Documents/Destroyulater/game

Controls

Input	Does
WASD / Space	move / jump
mouse	look (Esc releases the cursor, click recaptures)
LMB	swing the equipped weapon
1–6 · wheel · Q	pick a weapon · cycle · swap to previous
H	cycle HUD style (Arcade / Minimal / Work Order / Dev)
M	cycle game mode (Cubicle Hell / Gauntlet / Total Destruction / Against the Clock)
L	cycle site (Scranton / Pawnee / The Incubator / Sub-level 4)
G	restart a Gauntlet run
F	report the disc in hand (Find-the-Misfiled-Disc)
E	work at the station you're standing at (locks you in place); otherwise grab a record
drag ←→ · LMB · G	with a record held: slide the disc out · throw it · drop
digits · arrows · ENTER	while working: type · move cell · commit
B · R	rain 500 bodies (stress gate) · reset the office

The four sites

scripts/Floorplan.gd builds a workplace from a data spec; scripts/Levels.gd holds four of them. A site is a Dictionary — bounds, palette, walls with doors and glazing, window runs, ceiling style, light grid and style, slabs, props, desk clusters, chairs, smashables, gauntlet records-area and spawn — so a new one is authorable in minutes and a generator can later emit the same structure.

	palette / light	what makes it different
SCRANTON BRANCH	magnolia, grey carpet, troffers	the baseline office
PAWNEE CITY HALL	civic beige, blue-grey	a public counter, pinboards, over-partitioned
THE INCUBATOR	timber, white, 3 m, pendants	nobody has a desk; they work at a dining table
SUB-LEVEL 4	concrete, green strip lights	no windows, exposed services, a wall of servers
LEVEL 0	one colour, everywhere	the Backrooms. Walls are generated, and everything you're here to destroy is invisible

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

LEVEL 0 — the Backrooms, and the dust

The only site whose walls are generated rather than authored, which is both the honest test of the spec and the right call for the fiction: the place is meant to feel endless and samey, and a seeded RNG does that better than a human placing slabs. It emits partial wall runs on a coarse lattice plus freestanding pillars — the Backrooms aren't corridors, they're big offset slabs in an open floor, and a proper maze would be legible.

scripts/Dust.gd is its mechanic. Everything smashable here is invisible but solid — you find things by walking into them. Right-click with the fire extinguisher throws a cloud of powder; anything it touches is coated, glows faintly out of all that yellow for seven seconds, and then settles back into nothing.

And you breathe it. Every cloud puts a little in your lungs, and the haze it builds is on your side of the glass. So the mechanic argues with itself: spray more to see individual objects, and see the room less. Past 72% you start coughing — the camera jolts, the screen blooms, and it feeds the rage meter, because of course it does.

The intended rhythm is spray → switch to something heavy → break it before the coating settles → spray again, coughing.

…and there is something in there with you

scripts/Entity.gd borrows from three places, and each borrowing does a different job:

• Slenderman — it does not move while you are looking at it, and it has closed the distance every time you look back. Looking at it is also what builds the static, so the safe option (keep it in view) is the one that kills you slowly and the fast option (run) is the one that lets it catch up. That's the trap, and it's why Slender worked.
• Xenomorph — it hunts by sound, and the thing you came here to do is smash furniture. Every break and every puff of powder drops a marker it walks toward. Playing well is what feeds it; playing quietly means not playing. A loud enough noise overrides the freeze entirely.
• Blair Witch — walk far enough in any direction and you come out of the opposite wall into the same room, because every room here is the same room. And a wrap is when the entity gets to reposition, so "I've been here before" and "it's already here" land in the same second.

It can't be fought — weapons pass through. The outs are distance, silence, and not looking, three things the rest of the game actively discourages.

And after three loops there are two of them. THE OTHER ONE shares the silhouette — same height, same suit, same dark — so at range you cannot tell which you're looking at. Its rules are the first one's rules inverted:

	the hunter	the other one
while you look at it	frozen	it comes
while you don't	it closes	inert
noise	hunts it	deaf
correct play	keep it in view, stay quiet	look away; noise is irrelevant

Every instinct the first one trains into you is the way the second one kills you. The tells are close-range only, and all wrong in the same direction: its head is thrown back so it's staring at the ceiling rather than at you, its arms are raised, and its feet never reach the carpet.

The room changes one thing

Every loop, exactly one thing is different. Never two — that constraint is the whole effect. Change nothing and a loop is just a teleport; change several and it reads as a new room, which is the opposite of what this place is for. One change means you're never sure whether you noticed something or imagined it, and since the room is otherwise identical, when you are sure it's worse.

It escalates: early loops move or turn a prop, or kill a bank of lights. Later ones hang a totem that wasn't there, permanently reveal an object nobody dusted, or put the entity where you were standing a moment ago.

DREAD, and dying

No health bar. Nothing else in this game does damage, so hit points would be a survival-horror UI bolted onto a demolition game. Instead there is one meter — DREAD — fed by every way this place gets at you: being stared at, something close behind you, each loop, and your own coughing. It falls when nothing is happening to you, and every loop makes it harder to shake.

At 100% you die, and which death you get is decided by whichever source pushed it over — so the three memes stay legible in the moment it matters:

	how	the card
Slenderman	you looked too long	YOU LOOKED TOO LONG — it was still. it was always still. that was never the safe part.
the xenomorph	it reached you, and it sprays	IT WAS ALREADY IN THE ROOM — you were making so much noise.
Blair Witch	eleven loops of the same room	YOU ARE STILL IN THE ROOM — you walked it eleven times. you will walk it again.

scripts/Gore.gd does the rest, procedurally: seeded blobs that swell on the lens and then bleed downward in streaks, a wet burst at the camera (physical deaths only — being taken by the static shouldn't spray), and the camera going down to land on its side on the carpet. The sequence is deliberately slow — a jumpscare is a spike, but a death should take its time, because the seconds you spend watching the lens settle are where it actually lands. R to wake up.

scripts/Dread.gd is the tape: grain, scanlines, chroma split, a wandering tracking tear, and Slender's interference driven straight off the entity's stare — the HUD element that isn't a HUD element.

The four modes

scripts/Modes.gd, cycled with M.

• CUBICLE HELL — the main one, below.
• THE GAUNTLET — scripts/Gauntlet.gd + scripts/Cabinet.gd. Five identical cabinets, each labelled with an alphabetical range. The brief names a client, never a cabinet, so working out that HENDERSON lives in F–J is the puzzle — nothing glows. Destruction is granular: pull a drawer, it slides out and goes live, and the folders inside become individual smashables. Doing that by hand inside the clock isn't really possible — every site hides a shredder that eats a whole open drawer at once, and the game never says so. Noticing it is the level.
• TOTAL DESTRUCTION — no job, no pay. Clear the whole site, scored on time.
• AGAINST THE CLOCK — fixed timer, maximise damage value. The exact inverse of Cubicle Hell: here the expensive things are the goal rather than the mistake.

CUBICLE HELL

The mode the game is about. See ../LANES/LANE7-cubicle-hell.md for the full design.

Rage.gd is the tilt meter: work provokes it, clean work drains it slightly, and at 100% you SNAP into a forced destruction window that stalls if you stop destroying. RageOverlay.gd is the blood vessel — a vignette that closes in, procedural veins that creep further into frame, and a heartbeat that goes 62 → 172 BPM. All of it generated in code; no textures, no shader files, no audio assets.

Tasks.gd is the job — four stations, each with one designed way of wasting your time:

• SPREADSHEET — the selected cell silently drifts one cell partway through entry. No sound, no animation. Commit without noticing and the figure is in the wrong cell.
• PHOTOCOPIER — jams, and wants the right tray out of 1, 2, 2A, 3, 3B.
• STAPLES — SPACE lifts a staple, then it must be pulled the way it's bent. Dither and the sheet tears and the bundle reprints.
• GUILLOTINE — align to a mark and cut. The guide has a permanent offset and nothing on screen admits it; you have to learn to distrust the equipment.

Ambience.gd is the attrition you can't play around: the tube above your desk flickers (and actually flickers, on the real lights), someone puts fish in the microwave, a phone rings four desks away, reply-all to forty-one recipients. No interaction, just a periodic tick on the meter — it's what makes the room hostile rather than merely beige.

CubicleHell.gd scores it as a payslip: wages − damages. Rage drains a flat amount per object but each object bills at its own value, so the meltdown decision is smash a lot of cheap things fast versus one expensive swing.

The weapon-vs-material matrix

This is the decision the game is built on. A swing deals Weapon.power × Weapon.vs[material] against that material's hp, and there are three outcomes: it breaks, it dents (knockback + a chip of damage), or it's futile — a dead clank, no score, no combo, and a HUD nudge to switch tools.

	cardboard	paper	vinyl	glass	wood	steel
Bare Hands	ok	good	ok	ok	poor	useless
Box Cutter	shreds	shreds	good	poor	useless	useless
Cricket Bat	good	poor	great	great	ok	poor
Crowbar	ok	poor	ok	good	good	great
Sledgehammer	ok	poor	ok	great	great	great
Fire Extinguisher	ok	poor	ok	great	good	good

Tuned in one place: scripts/Weapon.gd (vs tables) and scripts/Smashable.gd (PROFILES[kind].hp). The office printer is the level boss — steel at toughness_scale = 5.0, so it's a real fight with anything but the sledge.

Weapons also differ in when they connect, not just how hard: the hit lands at Weapon.contact through the swing animation, so the sledgehammer commits late and heavy while the box cutter is near-instant.

The viewmodel

scripts/ViewModel.gd. Real rigged hands (mixamorig, all 20 finger bones per hand) holding real weapon meshes.

The arms rig is instanced once per hand and each instance is placed so its own hand bone lands on the grip — no IK solver. That works because in first person you only ever see forearm and hand. Placement solves two aims at once: the fist's bore lines up with the weapon shaft, and the forearm runs back toward where that shoulder would be. Both directions are measured off the rig at load (pinky-knuckle → index-knuckle for the bore, elbow → hand for the forearm), so the grip survives re-tuning grip_rest_rot instead of needing a fresh set of hand-authored euler angles.

Motion is layered on one node: look-sway with spring-back, walk bob scaled by speed and weapon heft, idle breathing, landing dip, and a keyframed swing arc per archetype (overhead / horizontal / jab / thrust).

Assets

Path	Source
assets/viewmodel/fps_arms.glb	tools/gen_fps_arms.py — cut from the GODVERSE modular character kit
assets/viewmodel/{bat,sledge,crowbar,cutter,extinguisher}.glb	tools/gen_viewmodel.py — procedural, grip at origin, shaft +Y
assets/store/*.glb + *.fractured.glb	Lane 2 prop batch; the fractured sibling drives real chunk destruction
assets/art/sleeves_*.jpg	3×3 sheets of generated cover art, windowed per record via uv1 offset

Regenerate either set with:

/Applications/Blender.app/Contents/MacOS/Blender --background --python tools/gen_viewmodel.py -- --render

Dev harness

dev/ is not shipped. Because macOS screen-recording permission isn't available to the CLI, the game records itself:

Godot --path game --resolution 1280x720 --write-movie /tmp/cap.avi --quit-after 2250 dev/demo.tscn

dev/DemoDriver.gd drives the player through a scripted tour (every weapon, the material matrix, the boss, all four HUDs) so a change can be eyeballed frame by frame without a human at the keyboard. dev/probe_*.gd print rig/scale/placement numbers — renders are too coarse to tell a 5 cm error from a 50 cm one.

Smoke test before committing

/Applications/Godot.app/Contents/MacOS/Godot --headless --path game --quit-after 300

Zero script errors required. After adding any class_name script, run Godot --path game --editor --quit first — headless Godot won't rescan a stale class cache.

The level

scripts/Office.gd builds LEVEL 01: an open-plan office after the Dunder Mifflin floor plan — bullpen of facing desk pairs behind cubicle partitions, reception, a glass-walled manager's office, conference room, break room with vending machines, a copier alcove for the printer boss, and a warehouse roller door. Drop ceiling, fluorescent troffers (which are the actual light sources), magnolia walls, grey carpet, a window wall with blinds.

Office owns the shell and static fittings; Main._populate() owns everything smashable, and asks Office where things go (desk_spots(), chair_spots(), copier_spot()). Walls, desks and counters are boxes built in code because they are boxes; chairs, vending machines, the microwave and the plant come from tools/gen_office_props.py, because a box reads as obviously wrong for those.

The spawn guard

Placing ~40 props by formula means something will eventually spawn a few centimetres inside something else, and Jolt's depenetration is not gentle — a chair overlapping a desk left the building at 500 m/s on frame one, knocking over the furniture on its way.

Main._physics_process() speed-limits dynamic bodies for the first 0.75 s: enough for a real overlap to push apart calmly, far too little to launch anything. Every offender is named once in a warning with the position it was placed at, so the underlying overlap stays visible and fixable rather than silently papered over.

Verify a level is genuinely at rest with:

/Applications/Godot.app/Contents/MacOS/Godot --headless --path game --quit-after 300 dev/demo.tscn

The demo's first act touches nothing and prints total body speed each second. It must read 0.00 m/s, and no [spawn] warnings should appear.