destroyulator/README.md
Monster Robot Party 7c282c298e LANE7: LEVEL 0 — the Backrooms, generated walls, and the dust mechanic
"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"

THE SITE (Levels.backrooms)
Mono-yellow, 2.55 m ceiling, damp carpet, a dense grid of buzzing troffers, no windows
and no exit. 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 photos
rather than a maze algorithm on purpose — the Backrooms aren't corridors, they're big
offset slabs in an open floor, and a proper maze would be legible. Legible is wrong.

THE MECHANIC (Dust.gd) — it argues with itself, which is the whole point.
Everything smashable here is invisible but SOLID; you find things by walking into them.
RMB with the extinguisher throws a cloud of powder. Anything it touches is coated,
glows faintly out of all that yellow for 7 seconds, then settles back into nothing.

And you breathe it. Every cloud puts a little in your lungs, and the haze that builds is
on YOUR side of the glass. So: spray more to see individual objects, and see the room
less. Past 72% you cough — camera jolt, screen bloom, and a rage tick, because of course
it does. Intended rhythm is spray -> switch to something heavy -> break it before the
coating settles -> spray again, coughing. Pairs with TOTAL DESTRUCTION, since the level
IS a search.

Tuning that mattered: the first cloud was a wall of big blocky quads that hid the very
thing it was revealing (150 finer, shorter-lived particles now), and a coated object has
to POP out of a room that is entirely one colour, so the coat is near-white and faintly
self-lit rather than a subtle tint. 78 objects, not 34 — a search with nothing in it is
just a walk.

Bug found while testing: `x as Smashable` on a freed object is itself an error in Godot
4, so the validity check has to come BEFORE the cast — destroying anything mid-level was
spewing "trying to cast a freed object" every frame.

dev/probe_backrooms.gd verifies the whole loop headlessly, including that the mechanic
does NOT leak into the other four sites when you leave.

All five sites still settle to 0.00 m/s.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-07-31 19:05:56 +10:00

2.4 KiB

DESTROYULATOR

Clock out. Smash everything.

A comedic, non-violent, first-person workplace-destruction game from Monster Robot Party. Nobody gets hurt but the furniture.

The game is CUBICLE HELL. You work a shift doing deliberately infuriating office tasks. A rage meter fills. When it fills you snap, and 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 day. Your score is your payslip: wages earned minus damages caused — so during a meltdown you want to wreck a lot of cheap rubbish rather than one expensive filing cabinet. Falling Down, scored by payroll.

Five sites (Scranton branch, Pawnee city hall, a hacker house, a windowless IT basement, and the Backrooms — where the walls are procedurally generated and everything you're there to destroy is invisible until you coat it in extinguisher powder, some of which you breathe) and four modes (Cubicle Hell, the Gauntlet, Total Destruction, Against the Clock). Sites are data, not code — see game/scripts/Levels.gd.

Design, built and planned, lives in LANES/LANE7-cubicle-hell.md.

Monorepo layout — one lane per directory

Dir Lane What
game/ Lane 1 — the game Godot 4.7 (Jolt physics, Mac-native). The shippable build.
web/ Lane 3 — web toy Three.js dig-and-destroy demo (planned; thriftgod-adjacent).
tools/ asset build Blender generators for the viewmodel + office props. Re-runnable.
LANES/ coordination Execution specs for parallel Claude/Opus work sessions.
3D-STORE/ not in git 700MB Blender/Unreal source-asset vault (see .gitignore).
destroyulater.txt lore The founding chat where the idea happened.

Asset generation lives in its own repo: ~/Documents/meshgod (text→GLB factory). The first-person arms are cut from ~/Documents/character_kit_modular (the GODVERSE modular character kit) by tools/gen_fps_arms.py.

Rules for parallel work sessions

  • A lane session writes ONLY inside its own directory. Cross-lane contracts (asset formats, file drops) are specified in LANES/*.md.
  • Every change to game/ must pass the headless smoke test before commit: Godot --headless --path game --quit-after 180 with zero script errors.
  • GLB convention everywhere: glTF Y-up, 1 unit = 1 m, origin at floor-center.