type-two 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>

2026-07-25 23:30:26 +10:00

4.9 KiB

Raw Blame History

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-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-01-substantial-gift/`	Case One — playable, 100 points. Drebin (Nielsen), 1982, monochrome. Five rooms.
`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-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.
`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.

4.9 KiB Raw Blame History