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>
10 KiB
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 |
dev/probe_levels.gd builds every one and reports residual motion after a full second.
All four must read 0.00 m/s.
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.