Live: https://monsterrobot.games/games/policesquadquest/
web/index.html is our arcade page shell, matching the house style set by
morpquest (boot splash, gold README tab, controls and the shelf explained).
tools/webbuild.sh copies it over the engine's default after baking, so the
cases/ shelf directory stays nothing but games.
Hosting, established by reading the boxes rather than the docs: the deploy-map
note pointing at /opt/dealgod/images/engine/ on the dealgod VPS is stale for
this domain — that path now falls through to the arcade index. monsterrobot.games
is actually served by forum-nginx on the GAMES VPS (humanjing@100.71.119.27)
from a bind mount of /home/humanjing/monsterrobot.games, and games are plain
directories under games/ picked up by try_files with no nginx change at all.
Deployed exactly like /games/morpquest/, which is the same engine.
Verified live: all four assets 200 with correct application/wasm content-type,
our title (not the arcade fallback), the shelf renders, a case loads and plays,
and the parser round-trips over the wire. Nothing existing was touched — fresh
directory, no config edited, no cache purge needed for a new path.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
MRPGI (827797a) can now bake a folder of game folders into a single browser
build with its title screen intact, so the entire sixteen-case campaign is one
2.1 MB wasm rather than sixteen separate builds. This wraps that for the repo.
Deploy stays a separate deliberate step.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Sixteen cases. All lint clean, all win paths verified by tools/verify.sh.
John's multiverse finale, with his own Stay Tuned correction folded in as the
frame — which is what made it work. The television is not a neutral doorway,
it is a subscription: a satellite dish on the property annex roof that is on no
asset register, aimed down through the roof at a 1958 set with no plug, and a
man in a maroon blazer at ten to midnight who does the one thing that has ever
worked on a Drebin — hands over the paperwork and asks him to sign. Frank Jr
reads the terms first. Nobody has read the terms in four hundred years, and
that is what wins the case six rooms later via Clause 14.
Five channels, each a genre with a rule the family breaks with a form: an
iron-curtain spy picture where the unapproved encore becomes the only
state-approved act of resistance in history; a carrier-deck melodrama where the
unlandable jet lands because somebody finally read the manual, and the
saxophone stops mid-phrase because you cannot underscore procedure; a 90s
buddy-cop show that locks onto Sr the moment it reads DAYS TO RETIREMENT, and
is beaten by a Form 14 reassignment, because a man who has been reassigned
cannot be killed in the line of duty; a UK procedural whose silence technique
loses to a man who simply has nothing he needs to say; and a cartoon, survivable
twice, if you fill in the injury form afterwards.
The Twilight Zone kid is the actual antagonist — not the salesman, who only
sells the dish. A boy of nine on the crater set, lit from below by a television
that isn't there, who can do anything and only wants nobody to leave.
The win: they supply sixty-seven years of Drebin paperwork as the contractual
replacement programme, in good order, and the instrument must broadcast it on
all 666 channels — and none of it is entertainment. The boy watches eleven
minutes, stops smiling because it is the first thing he has ever seen that was
not made to hold him, says "Oh", and turns the television off from the inside.
The three Drebins are one man for exactly one frame.
Also: the win-path harness lived in a scratch dir and got wiped mid-session,
which made every case look like it had broken. The games were fine; the harness
was not reproducible. It now lives in the repo — tests/scripts/*.jsonl plus
tools/verify.sh — so regression testing survives the machine.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Thirteen cases, all playable, all lint clean, all verified end-to-end at
100/100 (Case One is 95 + 5 optional by design).
Case Three — Rendezvous at Big Gulch. The racket only shakes down businesses
that are doing well, so to get extorted you must run a genuinely excellent
locksmith shop. Frank reads MODERN LOCKSMITHING cover to cover and retains all
of it while understanding none of it, which for locksmithing is the correct
ratio. The street won't talk because paper doesn't stand in your doorway on a
Friday; Halloran opens up only after you offer to fix his door, and his
extortion ledger has been lying open on a public counter for two and a half
years because nobody ever asked to see his book.
Case Four — Revenge and Remorse. Section 14 paragraph 9 was written in 1949 for
a 1949 timer, and this bomber files his timing stub twice because he cannot
leave a thing not-quite-square, which shortens the contact throw and energises
the trigger first. Follow the manual and it completes. So Frank disarms it
backwards — the one time in nineteen years he departs from a written
instruction, because he can prove the instruction is wrong in four sentences.
Carries PQ1's Captain loop and an explicit refusal of PQ3's centre-pixel bug.
Case Five — The Butler Did It. Chain of custody on a birthday cake: photograph,
weigh with a witness, seal all forty forks. Eleven pounds light in the tier
nobody cuts, because she was inside it for four minutes while forty people
looked at it. And Frank will not suspect the butler because the literature says
it is always the butler, so suspecting him would be quoting rather than
investigating. It is the butler.
Case Nine — The Final Insult. The marriage is a gate, not a subplot: the finale
is locked behind actually answering the counsellor's question, and Jane's terms
are "before you go, not after". He doesn't disarm the envelope, he swaps it and
writes in a winner by hand. He picks the one he liked.
Two point budgets came in over (110, 115) and are trimmed to exactly 100.
Sprite generation needed a kill-and-restart: two overlapping runs were competing
for the farm and producing "Resource temporarily unavailable" — one clean pass
at pool 2 completed all four sets with zero failures.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Eight cases playable, all lint clean, all verified end-to-end.
John asked what 1950s bumbling criminals Drebin Sr could look good against.
Clouseau is the wrong shape twice — 1963, and a bumbling detective rather than a
criminal. The right seam is the Ealing comedies: The Ladykillers (1955) and The
Lavender Hill Mob (1951). Done as archetype parody, never character import,
which is exactly what ZAZ did to M Squad — take the form, not the people — and
which lets the gang be tuned to make Sr's twist land.
Five lodgers calling themselves a barbershop quartet, and in eleven weeks nobody
in that house has raised the arithmetic. A mastermind who is nought for eleven
and blames personnel every time. Muscle brought for the violence who offers you
an aniseed ball. A driver who cannot drive and came with the goggles. A
safecracker who is the best in the state and has been deaf since 1943, and has
been asking about that since August. An inside man who works at a different
company on a different street and has raised it four times.
The twist: they tunnel eleven feet through Victorian brick for eleven weeks to
reach a vault Frank Drebin Sr emptied five weeks earlier — legitimately, on his
own written recommendation, signing the transfer manifest at both ends. Arrested
inside an empty room. The paper calls it the finest detective work in the city
in twenty years and every word of it is true. This is why he has never been
caught: the visible criminals are loud and his own crimes are silent.
The case is actually cracked by a seventy-nine-year-old landlady who took a bus
to the police station to complain about the noise, and she never learns it.
New lint rule, from a real 10-point loss here: two DIFFERENT objects awarding
points for setting the same flag — points fire on the false->true flip, so
whichever runs second silently pays nothing and max_score goes unreachable. Same
object paying via `use` or its own dialogue is fine; those are alternatives.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Act I, monochrome. Five rooms, 100 points, verified at 100/100 with four
verified deaths.
Built out of John's Police Quest material. PQ1's famous 8-bit integer underflow
is not an easter egg here, it is the central puzzle: Frank signs for a $40
operational float clipped to a note reading DO NOT EXCEED YOUR FLOAT, the back
room costs $2,500, and exceeding the float by one dollar wraps the department
ledger's eight-bit field to 255 — the terminal appends the cents column and
authorises $2,550.00. He keeps drinking to 132 because it will not do to stop
suddenly. Accounts raise it in March; it goes to a hearing.
PQ1's Gremlin runs through the whole case and is never resolved: chickens on the
Captain's desk, on Al's shoulder, on the murdered guest star, and one in the
winning freeze-frame. Nobody has said the word "chicken" out loud in eleven
years. No file was ever opened.
Then the stage: six memorised jokes, in order, and every "improvise" option is
fatal — plus a full glass on a stool three feet from the microphone, which is
how Danny Cavanaugh died and which you must not touch.
Linter gained the rule that actually caused this session's bug: MRPGI's
obj_matches is a BIDIRECTIONAL substring test over name AND synonyms, and
match_obj takes the first hit in array order, so an earlier object can make a
later one unreachable by its own name. `talk barman` was addressing `clubbar`.
It found two more: `sideboard` swallowing `cardtable`, and `bouncer` swallowing
`bunkerdoor` — the last of which shipped broken in Case Ten. All six cases lint
clean and all six still win.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Case Eight — The Smell of Fear (1991). Act II, full colour. Five rooms, 100
points, verified at 100/100 with two verified deaths.
The puzzle is identification: Meinheimer has an eidetic memory, so the double
cannot be caught out on a fact — he can be caught out on a manner. Ask him two
questions and he answers "about four hundred", "roughly", "give or take", and a
man who remembers everything never says roughly. The catch is gated on having
heard the approximations, so the player has to earn it. Accusing him without
that is a death. Also in: the Blue Note, the SWAT tank through the wall into the
zoo (which arms the lion that kills Hapsburg two rooms later), the mariachi
infiltration, and a nuclear device disarmed by tripping over its power cable.
tools/lint.py: three of the four bugs that cost real time here were the same
class, and I walked into sets_flag-on-a-takeable twice — once in Case Ten, then
again in Case Eight after documenting it. So the rules are a linter now, not a
paragraph. It caught two live instances of that trap (case-08 blueprint,
case-10 wig) and a scoring mismatch on the first run. All five cases lint clean
and all five still win.
play.sh is now a case picker: bare invocation lists the cases and asks, or pass
a number.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Act I, monochrome. Five rooms, 100 points, verified end-to-end at 100/100 on
the first pass, plus three verified Sierra deaths.
Frank goes under as fight manager "Frank Deacon" to break a fight-fixing racket.
The procedure gag from the bible finally has teeth: Form 22-B, the four-page
application for an authorised cover identity, is filed in Act 1 by a clerk in
Sacramento who never learns anything about it — and that form is the only thing
standing between Frank and a very short career. At the promoter's licence check
the "I'm licensed" reply is gated on having filed it; skip the form and the
single visible option is the fatal one. Bureaucracy as the thing that saves you
is the exact inversion the campaign is built on.
Act I cases now share a sprite set: 18 PNGs copied from case-01, 14 new ones
generated. tools/sprites.py skips keys beginning with "_" so sprites.json can
carry a note about which sprites are shared.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Act II, full colour EGA. Six rooms, 100 points, verified end-to-end headlessly
at 100/100 with the win firing, plus two authored Sierra deaths.
The mechanic: Drebin is fired, so he has no power to search anyone — but a home
plate umpire can crouch beside a professional athlete, take his bat off him and
inspect his equipment, and nobody in a stadium of sixty thousand thinks twice.
So every frisk needs an umpire-legitimate pretext, in order: brush the plate,
inspect the mitt, check the bat for pine tar, then Number 44. Announcing
yourself as police is right there, and correct, and fatal.
Matching inversion at the reception: tackling a head of state is correct
procedure, it ends your career, and being fired is the only way to progress.
Two authoring traps found and documented for future cases:
- Object names must not be prefixes of each other — 'ludwigdesk' shadowed
'ludwig' in the loose parser match, so 'talk ludwig' addressed the furniture.
- Flag-gated edge exits need walkable floor into the trigger zone (y<=21 for
north); the upper deck sat behind a painted Wall band and was unreachable on
foot. Walk every exit to verify — goto_room hides this.
tools/sprites.py now retries farm 429/401 with backoff (that status is the
guest concurrency cap, not auth) and honours MB_POOL.
LoRA finding recorded in DESIGN.md §9: the farm's style LoRAs are FLUX.1-dev
architecture and are a silent no-op on the only ungated model, and the pixel
look comes from the nearest-neighbour downscale anyway, not the model.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
A Sierra-style adventure in the Police Squad!/Naked Gun universe, on MRPGI —
which reimplements AGI, the engine Sierra shipped Police Quest on.
The premise: Police Quest's pedantic procedure x Police Squad!'s farce. The
game grades you on correct procedure with a straight face, and the reward for
perfect procedure is catastrophe anyway. Per John, the famous Police Quest II
bugs are shipped deliberately as canon gags.
- RESEARCH.md — all six Police Squad! episodes, all four films (incl. Neeson's
Frank Drebin Jr, 2025), the recurring cast, and the ZAZ comedy grammar.
- DESIGN.md — the joke engine, the two Drebins across three eras (Drebin Sr's
1982 cases render in a monochrome EGA subset for the 1950s M Squad look),
an eleven-case campaign, and the PQ2 glitch-to-feature table.
- cases/case-01-substantial-gift — playable. Five rooms, 100 points, full win
path verified headlessly at 95/100 plus four authored Sierra deaths.
Procedure gates, dusting for latents, and Miranda rights in the correct
order are all pure JSON; no engine features were invented for it.
- tools/sprites.py — all 24 sprites generated locally on MODELBEAST
(flux_local -> bg_remove_local -> trim/downscale), reproducible by seed.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
