a9e53ccc49
14 Commits
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type-two
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a9e53ccc49 |
Hook up the engine's new title screen as the front door
MRPGI (fa7fa10) grew a title screen / world picker: point --game at a folder of game folders and you get the shelf. cases/collection.json names it POLICE SQUAD QUEST, and a bare ./play.sh now opens it instead of the shell menu — arrow keys, Enter to play, Esc backs out of a case to the shelf. ./play.sh <number> still jumps straight in. Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> |
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type-two
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8c714d56aa |
Case 8 1/2: The Heron — the Interpol team-up
Fifteen cases, all playable, all lint clean, all verified end-to-end. This one came in at 100/100 on the first verification pass, same as The Liaison. John asked for the Clouseau crossover — Drebin dragged into an Interpol team-up chasing a jewel thief to the UK. The archetype that was the wrong shape for the 1958 era is the exact right shape for Nielsen's Drebin: two detectives on one case, one oblivious-competent, one confident-catastrophic, each convinced the other is a genius. Done as always by archetype, never import: Inspecteur Gustave Fouchard of the Surete, twenty years on one thief, introduced disguised as a chalk outline he drew around himself from inside; an accent the parser's literalism keeps faithfully transcribing and correcting for units; Hugo the driver with standing instructions to attack him at irregular intervals, who crosses the Atlantic in an overhead bin (asking to join the programme is a death); and the Heron, a gentleman thief who leaves an engraved card with nothing on it, because he is not telling you who he is, he is telling you he has a stationer. The thief is R. Fanshawe-Root — cousin of the Quartet's Professor. The family that plans versus the family that does. The scheme launders the stolen Rose through the auction house's own catalogue via a paste copy consigned before the stone ever left Antwerp; Fouchard's destruction of the plinth (a structural event, per the insurance filings) is what exposes the paste, because his catastrophes are always accidentally probative. The catch is the most Drebin thing in the campaign: no signal, no weapon, mid-bidding on the next lot — routine inspection, sir, would you mind turning out your pockets. And he does, because in twenty years and forty-one operations involving a submarine and a trained cormorant, nobody has ever simply asked. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> |
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type-two
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518fce7e84 |
Act Zero: The Liaison — the spy-spoof crossover, 1965
Fourteen cases, all playable, all lint clean, all verified end-to-end. John asked for a Get Smart-era crossover. Done the same way as the Ealing case: archetype parody, never character import — the shapes of the sixties spy spoof in entirely original lines. A federal bureau whose initials expand differently every time anybody asks. A shadow organisation never once photographed, recorded or arrested, which the Bureau takes as proof of how good they are. A secure-conversation dome inaudible only to the people inside it, while two hotel porters take accurate notes at the far end of the room. A telephone in a shoe, which rings at 2 AM in a stakeout doorway, and which Sr answers and takes a message on, in block capitals, with the time, because the log does not care what the telephone was wearing. An agent who dictates his conclusion and bargains it down under oath: there is a mastermind in this city; there is a criminal in this city; there is a city. The timeline hands the plot over for free: the tins stop at 1958, so by 1965 the pattern is seven years silent, and a federal analyst has finally assembled it — twenty-four pins on a map that should hold twenty-six, and Sr does not correct her. The Bureau concludes saboteurs and sends fourteen agents and a dome. The city assigns its best detective as liaison. The pattern is him. Margaret Vale is the point: the competent-partner archetype turned into the only person in the saga who beats the family trait. She works it out — one name, nineteen years of attendance and signatures — and writes nothing down. The Drebins write everything and are never read; she reads everything, knows, and chooses not to. The case's centre is a shared four-hour watch in the doorway her model predicted, and the question she asks at dawn, and the answer, which is yes. Also quietly answers Case Eleven's open question of why he stopped: the last tin is dated the month Prosky drew nine to fifteen for the Ardmore job. 100/100 on the first verification pass, lint clean on the first pass — the linter's trap rules have now paid for themselves in full. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> |
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type-two
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7b2222f97a |
Beirut cold open, the unused film beats, and ZAZ's back catalogue
MRPGI is verified clean and in sync; all thirteen cases still pass against it. This pass closes the content gaps a sprite audit turned up — several generated sprites were never placed, and each one was a missing film beat. - Case Seven now opens in BEIRUT, as the film does: four days at the back of a summit of the six least popular men on earth, holding a glass of water, which is where a Los Angeles shipping company with two hundred and six ships gets named out loud. Added as room6 with start_room pointed at it, so nothing renumbered. Case is now 140 points across seven rooms. The despots are generic fictional strongmen rather than caricatures of real heads of state. - Case Ten: the P.L.O.T. Device itself now appears — the title object of the case had never once been on screen — plus Cane's self-driving car, which refuses the destination and plays an advertisement before the paperclip intervenes. - Case Six: Danny Cavanaugh's publicity still, captioned in his own hand, "DANNY CAVANAUGH — AVAILABLE." - Case Eight: Hector Savage's fire hose, and Meinheimer's own wheelchair. - Case Nine: Tanya Peters and the clinic on Wilshire (Frank is DONOR OF THE QUARTER; there is a plaque; his wife has not seen it). - Case 00b: the Professor's four-foot diagram, admitted as Exhibit 1 over a defence objection that it is prejudicial, which the judge agrees it is. ZAZ's own earlier films go in as texture, not cases (DESIGN §10): Airplane!'s "don't call me Shirley" in Case Five, the escalating "wrong week to quit" across four rooms of Case Eight, the drink poured into his own face, and Otto the inflatable partner in Act III at forty per cent with no pump. Kentucky Fried Movie's news anchor who doesn't know he's on air (twice, 1988 and 2025) and Feel-A-Round at the Academy Awards, where the usher cannot move because he is the horse. Six name-shadowing blockers caught by the linter on the way in, including 'earpiece' swallowing 'plotdevice' and 'body' swallowing 'comedian'. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> |
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type-two
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9bfd6ddb44 |
Cases Three, Four, Five and Nine — the campaign is complete
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> |
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type-two
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104cedbc2f |
Case Eleven: What He Wrote — the grandfather arc closes the loop
Nine cases playable, all lint clean, all verified end-to-end. A records-modernisation project puts sixty-seven years of paper through a scanner, and Frank Drebin Jr becomes the first person ever to read one of his grandfather's reports. Page nine of the Meridian Street file sets out the survey, the recommendation, the transfer and both signatures, in the same flat careful voice as everything else. He put it all in. He put all of it in. Page ten is the property schedule, because there was never going to be an explanation — to the man who typed it there was nothing there to explain. The palette drifts backwards through the case: room 0 is Act III cold blue, the basement is nearly all grey, the last rooms are 1958 monochrome, and every 1958 prop is generated mono so it reads as lit by a different decade — the owl trick from Case Ten extended across a whole case. Ninety-one-year-old Stanley Kowalczyk, the rookie from Act Zero, is the only warm-coloured thing in it, because he is the last living link and he has had his commendation on a wall for sixty-seven years, next to a note telling a night clerk to be at his sister's. Under the third floorboard at 1114 Delaware: nineteen tins, 1939 to 1958, every one full, not one ever opened, with an inventory on top in a flat careful hand headed PROPERTY — NOT YET SUBMITTED. He never spent any of it. It was never for anything. Jr does the only thing a Drebin can do with a true fact. Eleven pages, every sentence true, submitted at 3:14 in the morning — and the portal thanks him and asks him to rate his experience with the records modernisation portal today. He rates it honestly, because he is constitutionally incapable of anything else, and leaves a four-hundred-word comment, and nobody reads it. The cycle is the punchline and the punchline is the tragedy. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> |
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type-two
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58471b6a8e |
Act Zero crossover: The Quartet — Drebin Sr vs. the Ealing incompetents
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> |
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type-two
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8d18a87cb7 |
Act Zero: 1958 — Frank Drebin Sr, and the score is the confession
John corrected the family tree and the correction is better than what I had. Leslie Nielsen's character is plain Frank Drebin; the 2025 film makes Neeson "Jr", which retroactively makes Nielsen the father without ever calling him Sr. So Frank Drebin Sr is now a THIRD Drebin one generation further back — 1958, entirely ours, no canon to violate. Terminology corrected across all three docs. The twist, per John's "maybe he is really a criminal": he is the most prolific criminal in the city's history, he is also a decorated homicide detective, and he has never once lied about any of it. Not corruption — corruption requires noticing. He is a Drebin: totally literal, totally sincere. He robs the payroll, then investigates it diligently and files an immaculate report stating what he did, because the form asks what happened and he answers the form. Nobody has ever caught him because nobody reads the reports. Best clearance rate in the division. The mechanic: the score is the cover-up. Played completely straight, no jokes in the system text — every scoring action is correct procedure that destroys the evidence against him. Lifting a latent removes it from the metal. Section 9 requires the spoiled card be incinerated, witnessed. The typed report supersedes the rookie's notes and the Captain signs it unread. You reach 100/100 in room three; the final room is worth nothing, because you have already been paid in full for the cover-up. He is also the Gremlin — the chickens on the Captain's desk come from the coop he built in 1951, and in seven years nobody has said the word out loud, so it has never occurred to him that anybody wondered. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> |
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type-two
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72815f8c55 |
Case Six: Testimony of Evil — the whiskey exploit is the puzzle
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> |
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type-two
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3b20f7accc |
Case Eight, a case picker, and a linter for the authoring traps
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> |
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type-two
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e429351ab3 |
Case Two: Ring of Fear — the paperwork is what keeps you alive
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> |
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type-two
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e95360a1b2 |
Case Ten: The P.L.O.T. Device (2025) — Drebin Jr, and the owl
Act III, cold-palette EGA. Six rooms, 100 points, verified end-to-end headlessly at 100/100 with the win firing. The homage John asked for is a register, not a costume. Nielsen played Drebin Sr oblivious — the joke was he never noticed. Neeson plays Jr sincere: he notices everything and means all of it, so his text is written straight and often genuinely moving, and the comedy is what it turns out to be about. He gives a Taken speech about his particular set of skills, chief among them paperwork. He takes four armed robbers in eleven seconds dressed as a schoolgirl with his back to the actual crime. Cane gets the same sincerity back at him from the wrong face. The three-era payoff pays off: the owl sprite is generated monochrome and placed in a full-colour room, so Frank Drebin Sr is visibly lit by a different decade than everything around him. The palette rule from DESIGN §2 doing the emotional work at the climax. Planned cases 10 and 11 merged into one folder — same film, same cast, no duplicated sprite set, and the owl payoff lands in the same case as its setup. Third authoring trap documented: sets_flag fires on use, never on take (points does both). A takeable item silently failed to set its flag and the gate it fed never opened; gate on `needs`, which checks inventory, instead. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> |
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type-two
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34c1f18335 |
Case Seven: From the Files (1988) — the umpire problem
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> |
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type-two
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0e2523a8a9 |
Police Squad Quest: research, design bible, and Case One playable
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> |