type-two 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>

2026-07-25 22:55:40 +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

That lists the cases and asks which one. ./play.sh 07 jumps straight to one.

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.
`cases/case-02-ring-of-fear/`	Case Two — playable, 100 points. Drebin Sr, 1982, monochrome. Five rooms, undercover, three deaths.
`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 Sr, 1991, full colour. Five rooms, the memory test.
`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.
`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.

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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