type-two 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>

2026-07-25 22:29:27 +10:00

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Police Squad Quest

A Sierra-style adventure game set in the Police Squad! / Naked Gun universe, built on the MRPGI 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 — the source material: all six Police Squad! episodes, all four films, the recurring cast, and the ZAZ comedy grammar.
DESIGN.md — the game bible: the joke engine, the two Drebins, the eleven-case campaign, and how it all maps onto MRPGI data.

Play

./play.sh

Or directly:

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-01-substantial-gift/`	Case One — playable, 100 points. Drebin Sr, 1982, monochrome. Five rooms.
`cases/case-07-from-the-files/`	Case Seven — playable, 100 points. Drebin Sr, 1988, full colour. Six rooms, the Anaheim Stadium finale.
`tools/sprites.py`	Generates every sprite on the MODELBEAST farm (free, local).
`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.

Regenerating art

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

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.

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