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Act I, monochrome. Five rooms, 100 points, verified at 100/100 with four verified deaths. Built out of John's Police Quest material. PQ1's famous 8-bit integer underflow is not an easter egg here, it is the central puzzle: Frank signs for a $40 operational float clipped to a note reading DO NOT EXCEED YOUR FLOAT, the back room costs $2,500, and exceeding the float by one dollar wraps the department ledger's eight-bit field to 255 — the terminal appends the cents column and authorises $2,550.00. He keeps drinking to 132 because it will not do to stop suddenly. Accounts raise it in March; it goes to a hearing. PQ1's Gremlin runs through the whole case and is never resolved: chickens on the Captain's desk, on Al's shoulder, on the murdered guest star, and one in the winning freeze-frame. Nobody has said the word "chicken" out loud in eleven years. No file was ever opened. Then the stage: six memorised jokes, in order, and every "improvise" option is fatal — plus a full glass on a stool three feet from the microphone, which is how Danny Cavanaugh died and which you must not touch. Linter gained the rule that actually caused this session's bug: MRPGI's obj_matches is a BIDIRECTIONAL substring test over name AND synonyms, and match_obj takes the first hit in array order, so an earlier object can make a later one unreachable by its own name. `talk barman` was addressing `clubbar`. It found two more: `sideboard` swallowing `cardtable`, and `bouncer` swallowing `bunkerdoor` — the last of which shipped broken in Case Ten. All six cases lint clean and all six still win. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
101 lines
4.6 KiB
Markdown
101 lines
4.6 KiB
Markdown
# Police Squad Quest
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A Sierra-style adventure game set in the *Police Squad!* / *Naked Gun* universe,
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built on the [MRPGI](https://github.com/) engine (`~/Documents/MRPGI`) — which is
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itself a reimplementation of AGI, the engine Sierra shipped *Police Quest* on.
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> The game grades you on correct police procedure with a completely straight
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> face. The reward for perfect procedure is catastrophe anyway.
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- **[RESEARCH.md](RESEARCH.md)** — the source material: all six *Police Squad!*
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episodes, all four films, the recurring cast, and the ZAZ comedy grammar.
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- **[DESIGN.md](DESIGN.md)** — the game bible: the joke engine, the two Drebins,
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the eleven-case campaign, and how it all maps onto MRPGI data.
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## Play
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```bash
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./play.sh
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```
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That lists the cases and asks which one. `./play.sh 07` jumps straight to one.
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Or directly:
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```bash
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cargo run -p mrpgi --manifest-path ~/Documents/MRPGI/Cargo.toml -- --game cases/case-01-substantial-gift
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```
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`Tab` switches between play and the room editor. Type `help` in play.
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## What's here
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| `cases/case-01-substantial-gift/` | **Case One — playable, 100 points.** Drebin Sr, 1982, monochrome. Five rooms. |
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| `cases/case-06-testimony-of-evil/` | **Case Six — playable, 100 points.** Drebin Sr, 1982, monochrome. Five rooms, the whiskey exploit, four deaths. |
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| `cases/case-07-from-the-files/` | **Case Seven — playable, 100 points.** Drebin Sr, 1988, full colour. Six rooms, the Anaheim Stadium finale. |
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| `cases/case-02-ring-of-fear/` | **Case Two — playable, 100 points.** Drebin Sr, 1982, monochrome. Five rooms, undercover, three deaths. |
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| `cases/case-10-plot-device/` | **Case Ten — playable, 100 points.** Drebin Jr (Neeson), 2025, cold palette. Six rooms, the arena finale and the owl. |
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| `cases/case-08-smell-of-fear/` | **Case Eight — playable, 100 points.** Drebin Sr, 1991, full colour. Five rooms, the memory test. |
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| `tools/sprites.py` | Generates every sprite on the MODELBEAST farm (free, local). |
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| `tools/lint.py` | Checks every case for the authoring traps that have bitten us. Run it before playtesting. |
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| `RESEARCH.md` / `DESIGN.md` | Source research and the campaign bible. |
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## Case One — A Substantial Gift
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*Police Squad!* episode 1. A credit union manager is dead, the wrong man is in a
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cell, and the teller has new braces.
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Sign out your badge and sidearm (the door will not let you leave without them),
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get briefed, tip Johnny, dust the counter, match the print, find the bill, and
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Mirandize the suspect **in the correct order**. Get the order wrong and the
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statement is suppressed, which is a Sierra death card, which is the joke.
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## Case Seven — From the Files
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*The Naked Gun* (1988). Nordberg is shot on Ludwig's freighter, you tackle a head
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of state at a state reception, and you get fired — which is the only way forward,
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because a private citizen can't walk onto a baseball field but **an umpire can
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walk anywhere**.
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The climax: you are the home plate umpire at Anaheim Stadium with no power to
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search anyone, so every frisk needs an umpire-legitimate pretext — brush the
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plate, inspect the mitt, check the bat for pine tar — until you reach Number 44.
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Announce yourself as police instead and sixty thousand people come over the
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railings.
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## Case Ten — The P.L.O.T. Device
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*The Naked Gun* (2025). Liam Neeson's Frank Drebin Jr. — played **sincere** where
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his father was oblivious. He means everything he says, all the time, and that is
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both the joke and, eventually, the thing that saves the city.
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Bank cold open (you are the distraction and don't know it) → a suicide that
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isn't → Richard Cane → a New Year's ball drop, a pair of lost trousers, and a
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barn owl in a 1950s hat who is lit by a different decade than everything around
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him.
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## Regenerating art
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Sprites are generated locally on MODELBEAST (`flux_local` → `bg_remove_local` →
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downscale). Prompts live in each case's `sprites.json`.
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```bash
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python3 tools/sprites.py cases/case-01-substantial-gift # fill gaps
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python3 tools/sprites.py cases/case-01-substantial-gift --force # redo all
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MB_POOL=1 python3 tools/sprites.py cases/... # if the farm 401s
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```
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Seeds derive from the sprite name, so reruns reproduce the same art.
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## Engine changes
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Two small, general-purpose additions were made upstream in MRPGI for this
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project — both benefit any game:
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- `sprites/ego.png` in a game folder replaces the default party robot as the
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player avatar (`ego1.png` optional second walk cel).
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- `death_text` in `game.json` overrides the death banner, which was previously
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hardcoded to another game's flavour text.
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