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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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:

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 —

{ 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.

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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.

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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.

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THE GREENGROCER (built)

"stack and fall physics, can squash to make juice, throw it, smash glass bottles of juice etc"

Levels.grocer() + Splat.gd + tools/gen_produce.py.

The only site whose stock is mostly soft, and that single material change rewrites everything. produce throws no shards; it bursts — coloured pulp, a puddle that stays, a squelch, and LITRES, which is a much better score for a greengrocer than a body count.

Two knock-ons make the level play itself:

• Low brittle_speed means anything heavy landing on produce squashes it, so a pyramid crushes its own bottom layer as it collapses with no special code. Shove test: 257 items became 45, and 42 litres.
• Puddles are slippery, cutting acceleration rather than top speed so it reads as sliding. The more fun you have, the worse the footing.

Stacks are built bottom-up and nothing is glued or frozen — they stand because they're stacked. 258 produce items spawn and settle to 0.00 m/s with no spawn crush. The glass bottles behind the juice bar are the deliberate exception: one shelf that still wants a proper swing, and the contrast between litres and shards is the whole joke.

Round produce is authored CENTRED rather than floor-centred like every other prop in the repo, because a rolling body whose origin sits on the floor plane wobbles like a loaded die.

Still open here: you can't yet PICK UP a piece of fruit and throw it. The record grab/throw ritual is right there and produce is the obvious second user of it.