type-two 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>

2026-07-26 19:36:30 +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.

Fourteen 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

./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-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-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.
`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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