policesquadquest/README.md

# Police Squad Quest

A Sierra-style adventure game set in the *Police Squad!* / *Naked Gun* universe,
built on the [MRPGI](https://github.com/) engine (`~/Documents/MRPGI`) — which is
itself a reimplementation of AGI, the engine Sierra shipped *Police Quest* on.

> The game grades you on correct police procedure with a completely straight
> face. The reward for perfect procedure is catastrophe anyway.

- **[RESEARCH.md](RESEARCH.md)** — the source material: all six *Police Squad!*
  episodes, all four films, the recurring cast, and the ZAZ comedy grammar.
- **[DESIGN.md](DESIGN.md)** — the game bible: the joke engine, the two Drebins,
  the eleven-case campaign, and how it all maps onto MRPGI data.

**Sixteen cases, all playable, all verified end-to-end at 100/100** (Case One is
95 + 5 optional). `python3 tools/lint.py` checks all thirteen clean.

## Play

```bash
./play.sh
```

That opens the engine's **title screen** — the whole campaign on one shelf,
arrow keys to choose, Enter to play, Esc backs out of a case to the shelf.
`./play.sh 07` still jumps straight to one case. The shelf's big title comes
from [cases/collection.json](cases/collection.json).

Or directly:

```bash
cargo run -p mrpgi --manifest-path ~/Documents/MRPGI/Cargo.toml -- --game cases/case-01-substantial-gift
```

`Tab` switches between play and the room editor. Type `help` in play.

## What's here

| | |
|---|---|
| `cases/case-00-1958/` | **Act Zero — playable, 100 points.** Frank Drebin **Sr**, 1958, hard noir mono. Five rooms. Played completely straight; the score is the cover-up. |
| `cases/case-00b-the-quartet/` | **Act Zero crossover — playable, 100 points.** Drebin **Sr** vs. five Ealing-comedy incompetents. Five rooms. |
| `cases/case-00c-the-liaison/` | **Act Zero crossover — playable, 100 points.** 1965: the spy-spoof era arrives hunting a pattern that is Drebin **Sr**. Five rooms. |
| `cases/case-01-substantial-gift/` | **Case One — playable, 100 points.** Drebin (Nielsen), 1982, monochrome. Five rooms. |
| `cases/case-03-big-gulch/` | **Case Three — playable, 100 points.** Four rooms, the locksmith front. |
| `cases/case-04-revenge-remorse/` | **Case Four — playable, 100 points.** Four rooms, the wrong manual. |
| `cases/case-05-butler-did-it/` | **Case Five — playable, 100 points.** Four rooms, chain of custody on a cake. |
| `cases/case-06-testimony-of-evil/` | **Case Six — playable, 100 points.** Drebin (Nielsen), 1982, monochrome. Five rooms, the whiskey exploit, four deaths. |
| `cases/case-07-from-the-files/` | **Case Seven — playable, 100 points.** Drebin (Nielsen), 1988, full colour. Six rooms, the Anaheim Stadium finale. |
| `cases/case-02-ring-of-fear/` | **Case Two — playable, 100 points.** Drebin (Nielsen), 1982, monochrome. Five rooms, undercover, three deaths. |
| `cases/case-08b-the-heron/` | **Case 8½ — playable, 100 points.** Interpol team-up: Drebin and a Sûreté legend chase a gentleman jewel thief to London. Five rooms. |
| `cases/case-09-final-insult/` | **Case Nine — playable, 100 points.** Four rooms, prison undercover and the envelope. |
| `cases/case-10-plot-device/` | **Case Ten — playable, 100 points.** Drebin Jr (Neeson), 2025, cold palette. Six rooms, the arena finale and the owl. |
| `cases/case-08-smell-of-fear/` | **Case Eight — playable, 100 points.** Drebin (Nielsen), 1991, full colour. Five rooms, the memory test. |
| `cases/case-11-what-he-wrote/` | **Case Eleven — playable, 100 points.** Drebin **Jr** reads his grandfather's files. Five rooms; the palette drifts from 2025 back to 1958. |
| `cases/case-12-the-late-movie/` | **Case Twelve — playable, 100 points.** The finale: all three Drebins pulled into a demonic cable multiverse. Seven channels. |
| `tools/sprites.py` | Generates every sprite on the MODELBEAST farm (free, local). |
| `tools/lint.py` | Checks every case for the authoring traps that have bitten us. Run it before playtesting. |
| `tools/verify.sh` | Replays every case's win path headlessly and checks it reaches max_score. Scripts in `tests/scripts/`. |
| `RESEARCH.md` / `DESIGN.md` | Source research and the campaign bible. |

## Case One — A Substantial Gift

*Police Squad!* episode 1. A credit union manager is dead, the wrong man is in a
cell, and the teller has new braces.

Sign out your badge and sidearm (the door will not let you leave without them),
get briefed, tip Johnny, dust the counter, match the print, find the bill, and
Mirandize the suspect **in the correct order**. Get the order wrong and the
statement is suppressed, which is a Sierra death card, which is the joke.

## Case Seven — From the Files

*The Naked Gun* (1988). Nordberg is shot on Ludwig's freighter, you tackle a head
of state at a state reception, and you get fired — which is the only way forward,
because a private citizen can't walk onto a baseball field but **an umpire can
walk anywhere**.

The climax: you are the home plate umpire at Anaheim Stadium with no power to
search anyone, so every frisk needs an umpire-legitimate pretext — brush the
plate, inspect the mitt, check the bat for pine tar — until you reach Number 44.
Announce yourself as police instead and sixty thousand people come over the
railings.

## Case Ten — The P.L.O.T. Device

*The Naked Gun* (2025). Liam Neeson's Frank Drebin Jr. — played **sincere** where
his father was oblivious. He means everything he says, all the time, and that is
both the joke and, eventually, the thing that saves the city.

Bank cold open (you are the distraction and don't know it) → a suicide that
isn't → Richard Cane → a New Year's ball drop, a pair of lost trousers, and a
barn owl in a 1950s hat who is lit by a different decade than everything around
him.

## Play it online

**[monsterrobot.games/games/policesquadquest/](https://monsterrobot.games/games/policesquadquest/)**

## Web build

The whole campaign bakes into a single self-contained wasm — title screen,
all sixteen cases, ~2.1 MB:

```bash
./tools/webbuild.sh
```

Output lands in `MRPGI/web/dist/` (wasm + our page shell from
[web/index.html](web/index.html) + the macroquad JS shim). The shelf's title
comes from [cases/collection.json](cases/collection.json).

Deploy — monsterrobot.games is served by **forum-nginx on the games VPS**
(`humanjing@100.71.119.27`) from a bind mount of
`/home/humanjing/monsterrobot.games`. Games are plain directories under
`games/`; the server block's `try_files $uri $uri/ /index.html` picks them up
with no nginx change. Same pattern as `/games/morpquest/`:

```bash
./tools/webbuild.sh
rsync -az --delete ~/Documents/MRPGI/web/dist/ \
  humanjing@100.71.119.27:/home/humanjing/monsterrobot.games/games/policesquadquest/
```

Then curl the live URL cache-busted to confirm. Note the deploy-map's older
note about `/opt/dealgod/images/engine/` on the dealgod VPS is stale for this
domain — that path no longer serves monsterrobot.games.

## Regenerating art

Sprites are generated locally on MODELBEAST (`flux_local` → `bg_remove_local` →
downscale). Prompts live in each case's `sprites.json`.

```bash
python3 tools/sprites.py cases/case-01-substantial-gift            # fill gaps
python3 tools/sprites.py cases/case-01-substantial-gift --force     # redo all
MB_POOL=1 python3 tools/sprites.py cases/...                        # if the farm 401s
```

Seeds derive from the sprite name, so reruns reproduce the same art.

## Engine changes

Two small, general-purpose additions were made upstream in MRPGI for this
project — both benefit any game:

- `sprites/ego.png` in a game folder replaces the default party robot as the
  player avatar (`ego1.png` optional second walk cel).
- `death_text` in `game.json` overrides the death banner, which was previously
  hardcoded to another game's flavour text.