policesquadquest/DESIGN.md

Police Squad Quest — design bible

A Sierra-style adventure game in the Police Squad! / Naked Gun universe, built on MRPGI. Source research: RESEARCH.md.

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1. The joke engine

The premise isn't "a funny adventure game". It's a specific collision:

Sierra's Police Quest (1987) × ZAZ's Police Squad! (1982).

Police Quest was designed by Jim Walls, a real ex-cop, and was famously pedantic: you had to walk around your car and check the tyres, radio in correctly, draw your weapon before firing (or you shot yourself in the leg), and read the Miranda rights in the right order. Get the procedure wrong → you die. It is the single most self-serious game Sierra ever shipped.

Police Squad! is the same subject matter played as total farce.

So the game grades you on procedure with a completely straight face, and the reward for perfect procedure is catastrophe anyway. That's the machine. It's mechanical, not just written — the player performs the joke rather than watching it.

Three rules fall out of that:

1. The game never winks. All system text is flat police-procedural prose. Score readouts, death cards, refusals — deadpan. The comedy is what the flat text is describing. (See RESEARCH.md §4.)
2. Correct procedure is mandatory and useless. You must do it. It never helps.
3. The parser is Frank's brain. A text parser is a literal-minded machine, and literalism is ZAZ's core joke. look answers take things at face value.

Worked example — the opening of Case One

> take badge
Taken. (+2)
> east
You have not signed for a sidearm. Regulations are regulations.
> take revolver
Taken. (+2)
> east

Two points for procedure. Then you get to the crime scene and the body is gone because Nordberg filed it.

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2. The three Drebins, and the four eras

Who's who (this is confusing on purpose)

Canon gives us two: Leslie Nielsen's character is plain Frank Drebin, and the 2025 film introduces Frank Drebin Jr. (Liam Neeson) as his son — which retroactively makes Nielsen the father without ever calling him "Sr."

We add a third, one generation further back: Frank Drebin Sr., Nielsen's father, a homicide detective in 1958. He is ours — no canon to violate — and he is where the whole thing turns over.

	Who	When	Register	Palette
Act 0	Frank Drebin Sr. (ours)	1958	Played entirely straight. No jokes. M Squad.	Hard noir mono: 0 / 8 / 15, minimal grey
Act I	Frank Drebin (Nielsen)	1982 TV	Oblivious	Soft mono: 0 / 7 / 8 / 15
Act II	Frank Drebin (Nielsen)	1988–94 films	Oblivious, blockbuster scale	Full 16-colour EGA
Act III	Frank Drebin Jr. (Neeson)	2025	Sincere	Full EGA, cold blues/cyans

Three men called Frank Drebin, inconsistent suffixes, and if Sr. is the grandfather then the middle one has no suffix at all, which makes no sense. Nobody in the family has ever addressed this. It is never explained.

The palette does the era switch for free. MRPGI is EGA anyway; each act simply declines to use colours the next one gets.

Frank Drebin Sr. — the twist

He is the most prolific criminal in the city's history. He is also a decorated police detective. He has never once lied about any of it.

He is not a hypocrite and he is not corrupt in the ordinary way — corruption requires you to notice. He is a Drebin: totally literal, totally sincere, and entirely without a theory of mind. He robs the payroll. He then investigates the robbery, diligently, by the book, and files an immaculate report which states what he did, because the form asks what happened and he answers the form.

Nobody has ever caught him because nobody reads the reports. His clearance rate is the best in the department.

He is the origin of everything downstream:

• The Gremlin (from Police Quest 1, already running through Case Six) is him. The chickens on the Captain's desk come from his back yard. Forty years of low-grade pranks in a police station, never identified, no file ever opened — the only crime of his that anyone ever noticed, and the one thing he genuinely did not do on purpose.

• The paperwork — Case Two's Form 22-B, the thing that saves his grandson's life — is a family trait that started as a cover.

• Nielsen's Drebin never found out. That's the tragedy under the joke: the honest one in the middle.

• Jr. finds out. Case Eleven, cases/case-11-what-he-wrote/ — BUILT. A records-digitisation project puts sixty-seven years of paper through a scanner, and Frank Drebin Jr. becomes the first person ever to read one of his grandfather's reports. They say everything. Sr. never lied; nobody had looked.

  The palette drifts backwards through the case. Room 0 is Act III's cold blue; the basement is nearly all grey; the last rooms are Sr's 1958 monochrome, and 1958 props are generated mono so they read as lit by a different decade. Ninety-one-year-old Stanley Kowalczyk — the rookie from Act Zero, who has had his commendation on a wall for sixty-seven years — is the only warm thing in the case, because he is the last living link.

  Under the third floorboard at 1114 Delaware there are nineteen tins, 1939–1958, every one full, not one ever opened, with an inventory on top headed PROPERTY — NOT YET SUBMITTED. He never spent any of it. It was never for anything.

  And Jr. does the only thing a Drebin can do with a true fact: he writes it all up, eleven pages, every sentence true, and submits it — and the portal thanks him and asks him to rate his experience. He rates it honestly, at length. Nobody reads it.

The mechanic: the score is the cover-up

Act 0 is played completely straight — real hardboiled prose, no gags in the system text at all. You investigate a payroll robbery and a killing.

Every correct-procedure action quietly destroys the evidence against you, and the game awards you points for each one, because each one is genuinely correct procedure. Log the prints and the log replaces the prints. Incinerate the contaminated samples per regulation. Type the report that supersedes the first responder's notes.

You finish 100/100 for flawless police work. The score is the confession. Police Quest's own scoring system, turned over.

The crossover — why the idiots matter

Frank Drebin Sr. looks like a genius because the visible criminals are idiots. That's his whole career, and he does not arrange it — it just keeps happening, because incompetent crime is loud and his own is silent.

For the era, Clouseau is the wrong shape twice over: The Pink Panther is 1963, and Clouseau is a bumbling detective, not a criminal. The right seam is the Ealing comedies — The Ladykillers (1955), five criminals of escalating incompetence posing as a string quintet in a boarding house, picked off by their own stupidity while the landlady never notices anything is happening; and The Lavender Hill Mob (1951), a meek clerk masterminding a bullion job.

Archetype parody, never character import — which is exactly what ZAZ did to M Squad: they took the form, not the people. It's also the better joke, since the gang can be tuned precisely to make Sr's twist land.

cases/case-00b-the-quartet/ — five rooms, 100 points. A "barbershop quartet" of five lodgers, none of whom has raised the arithmetic:

The Professor	Plans are magnificent, forty pages, and have never once worked. Eleven operations, nought for eleven. Blames personnel every time.
The Muscle	Eighteen stone, gentle, brought for the violence. Nobody has established whether he understands this. Offers you an aniseed ball.
The Wheelman	Cannot drive. Has never held a licence. Came with the goggles and the goggles were very convincing.
The Safecracker	The finest hand with a combination lock in the state. Profoundly deaf since 1943. Has been asking about this since August.
The Inside Man	Genuinely a clerk, genuinely has keys — to the Meridian Street bonded Warehouse, a different company on a different street. Has raised it four times.

And the twist, which is the whole point: they tunnel eleven feet through Victorian brick for eleven weeks to reach a vault Drebin emptied five weeks earlier — legitimately, on his own written recommendation, signing the transfer manifest at both ends. They are 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.

The case is cracked by Mrs. Enid Pargiter, seventy-nine, who came into a police station on a bus to complain about the noise. She never learns what she did.

Drebin Jr's homage (John's original ask)

Neeson's register is sincerity where Nielsen's was obliviousness. Jr. isn't stupid — he's earnest, gravel-voiced, and completely committed to a plan that makes no sense. Write Jr's look text as genuinely moving. Then have it be about a vending machine. (Built: §8.)

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3. Structure — one folder per case

MRPGI loads any directory with --game DIR, so each mission is a standalone game folder under cases/. No global room numbering, no hub-state plumbing, cases can be built in any order and in parallel.

cases/case-01-substantial-gift/
  game.json          manifest: name, start_room, intro, extra verbs, flags, max_score
  sprites.json       MODELBEAST prompts (input to tools/sprites.py — not read by the engine)
  sprites/*.png      generated art; ego.png is the player
  rooms/room*.json   the case

./play.sh lists cases and runs one. Skipped: a hub world and cross-case save — add when there are enough cases to want them.

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4. Mechanics — all of it is pure JSON

MRPGI already has every field this design needs. No engine work.

Want	Field	Use
Procedure gate on a doorway	exit_flags + exit_blocked	"You have not signed for a sidearm."
Sierra death	kills on object or dialogue choice	The use_text is the death card
Police Quest scoring	points + manifest max_score	Points for procedure, not progress
Evidence that appears once found	visible_flag	Dusting reveals the print
Things that vanish	hidden_by_flag	The body Nordberg files
Item locks	needs, consumes	Warrant, evidence bag
Interrogation	dialogue + requires_flag / sets_flag	Miranda rights in order

Two small engine changes were made upstream in MRPGI, both general-purpose and useful to any game: a folder can supply sprites/ego.png to replace the default party robot (plus optional ego1.png for the walk bob), and death_text in game.json overrides the death banner, which was previously hardcoded to another game's flavour text. Nothing else was added — every mechanic below already existed.

Custom verbs

game.json merges extra synonyms into the verb table, and the AI-parser whitelist is generated from the same table so they can't drift:

"verbs": [
  { "name": "use",  "words": ["dust", "cuff", "book", "frisk", "radio", "mirandize", "arrest"] },
  { "name": "look", "words": ["investigate", "detect"] },
  { "name": "talk", "words": ["interrogate", "question"] }
]

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5. The campaign

Act I — Frank Drebin (Nielsen), Police Squad! (monochrome)

Six cases, one per episode. Act I cases share a sprite set — copy the common PNGs (ego, hocken, nordberg, al, johnny, olson, badge, revolver, casefile, desk, phone, coffeepot, filecabinet, squadcar, evidence, shoeshine, body, counter) from an existing case, then run tools/sprites.py, which skips anything already present and generates only the new props. Each opens with a special guest star being murdered in the title card — a real object in the room whose only purpose is to die.

#	Case	From	Hook	Procedure gag
01	A Substantial Gift	Ep 1	Credit union manager shot; teller Sally Decker did it for orthodontist money and framed a customer	Sign out badge + sidearm; dust for prints; Mirandize in order — built, see §6
02	Ring of Fear	Ep 2	BUILT. Undercover as fight manager Frank Deacon; Buddy Kessler's wife taken to force a dive in the fourth	The paperwork is what keeps you alive. File Form 22-B in Act 1 and a clerk in Sacramento makes Frank Deacon real. Skip it and the promoter's licence check leaves you exactly one dialogue option, which is fatal. Three ways to blow the cover, all deaths.
03	Rendezvous at Big Gulch	Ep 3	BUILT. Protection racket on Gulch Street; Police Squad buys a locksmith's as a front	The racket only shakes down businesses that are doing well — so to get extorted you must run a genuinely excellent locksmith shop. Frank reads MODERN LOCKSMITHING cover to cover, retains all of it and understands none of it, which turns out to be the correct ratio.
04	Revenge and Remorse	Ep 4	BUILT. Courthouse bombing; Eddie Casales in a cell for standing on the steps	The manual is wrong and you can prove it in four sentences. Section 14 ¶9 was written in 1949 for a 1949 timer; this maker files his timing stub twice, which shortens the contact throw and energises the trigger first. Disarm it backwards. Also carries PQ1's Captain-loop (go and see the coroner) and an explicit refusal of PQ3's centre-pixel map bug.
05	The Butler Did It	Ep 5	BUILT. A twelve-year-old vanishes from her own party between the cake and the candles	Chain of custody on a birthday cake — weigh it, seal all forty forks, and it comes up eleven pounds light in the tier nobody cuts. And Frank refuses to suspect the butler because the literature says it is always the butler, so suspecting him would be quoting rather than investigating. It is the butler.
06	Testimony of Evil	Ep 6	BUILT. Danny Cavanaugh dies mid-act at the Blue Grotto; poison on the rim of his own glass	The PQ1 whiskey exploit is the intended solution (see below). Then undercover as a stand-up: six memorised jokes, in order, and improvising is fatal.

Act II — Frank Drebin (Nielsen), the films (full colour)

#	Case	From	Hook
07	From the Files	Naked Gun (1988)	BUILT — see §7. 140 points, seven rooms. Opens on the Beirut cold open: four days standing at the back of a summit of the six least popular men on earth with a glass of water, which is where he hears a Los Angeles shipping company named out loud. Nordberg shot on Ludwig's freighter; the Queen's reception; then Anaheim Stadium, where you umpire a baseball game in order to legally frisk the players.
08	The Smell of Fear	Naked Gun 2½ (1991)	BUILT. The double gives himself away by being approximately right — a man with an eidetic memory never says "roughly". Blue Note, SWAT tank into the zoo, mariachi infiltration, and a nuclear device disarmed by tripping over its power cable.
09	The Final Insult	33⅓ (1994)	BUILT. Retired, bored, in couples counselling. Undercover in Statesville as Nick McGurk; a device in the Best Picture envelope. The marriage is a gate, not a subplot — the finale is locked behind actually answering the counsellor's question, and the winning move is to swap the envelope and write in a winner by hand. He picks the one he liked, which Jane calls the most honest thing he has ever done.

Act III — Frank Drebin Jr, 2025 (full colour, cold palette)

#	Case	From	Hook
10	The P.L.O.T. Device	Naked Gun (2025)	BUILT — see §8. The whole film in one case: the bank cold open, Simon Davenport's "suicide", Richard Cane, and the New Year's ball drop where Frank Drebin arrives as an owl.

(Originally planned as two cases; merged into one folder — same film, same cast, no duplicated sprite set, and the owl payoff lands in the same case as its setup.)

Act 0 — 1958 (BUILT)

cases/case-00-1958/ — five rooms, 100 points, hard noir mono.

Written completely straight: real hardboiled prose, no gags in the system text at all. A payroll robbery, a dead night watchman, a widow on a bench.

The score is the confession. Every scoring action is correct procedure that happens to destroy the evidence against you:

Action	Points	What it actually does
Dust and lift the latent off the strongbox	+20	Lifting removes the print from the metal. What survives is a card and a log entry, both in your handwriting.
Run it against the elimination set	+10	No match — sworn officers weren't printed until 1961. You write down why there's no match, in full.
Incinerate the spoiled samples under section 9	+20	Witnessed by the rookie, who thanks you for showing him how it's done properly.
Type the report	+15	Four pages, every sentence true, superseding the rookie's handwritten notes. The Captain signs it unread, as he has for eleven years.
Arrest the man with the key	+20	He says he lent it out fifty times. You write that down too.

You hit 100/100 in room three. The final room — the house, the boy, the chickens, the tin box under the third floorboard — is worth nothing, because you have already been paid in full for the cover-up.

The boy asks whose print it was. You tell him. He says "Oh," and goes back to his spellings, because his father has never once lied to him and so there is nothing here that needs looking at twice.

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6. Case One — as built

cases/case-01-substantial-gift/ — the vertical slice, playable now.

Five rooms, 100 points.

Room	Place	Contains
0	Police Squad HQ, squad room	Hocken (briefing), Nordberg (injured), Al (74px — his head leaves the top of the screen and no one comments), your desk, badge, sidearm, case file
1	The street	Johnny the Snitch's shoeshine stand, the squad car
2	The credit union	The body, the vault, the teller counter, Sally Decker
3	The crime lab	Ted Olson and the microscope
4	The orthodontist's	The dental chair, the braces cast, the arrest

The chain: sign out badge + revolver (procedure gate on the HQ exit) → read the case file → crime scene → dust the counter for prints → take the evidence bag → lab: Olson matches the print → the orthodontist's bill names Sally → return and Mirandize her in the correct order (wrong order = she walks and you get a Sierra death card from Hocken, which is not a real death, which is the joke) → arrest.

Running gags wired in as mechanics:

• Al — a 74px sprite in a 168px room. Placed so his head is above the frame. His look text describes only his shoes.
• Johnny — talk johnny costs a dollar and will answer anything. His dialogue tree has more nodes about orthodontics and macroeconomics than the case.
• Nordberg — appears in every room in worse condition. Never mentioned.
• The guest star — dies in the title card. look guest in room 0 before he dies, and he's already dead.
• The freeze-frame ending — the win text describes the cast holding still while things audibly keep going wrong.

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7. Case Seven — the umpire problem

cases/case-07-from-the-files/ — Act II, full-colour EGA. Six rooms, 100 points.

Hospital → Ludwig Shipping → the Queen's reception → the officials' room → home plate → the upper deck.

The central mechanic: the strike zone is the puzzle. Drebin has been fired, so he has no power to search anyone. But a home plate umpire can crouch six inches from a professional athlete, take his bat off him, and inspect his equipment — and nobody in a stadium of sixty thousand thinks twice, because that is simply what umpires do. So every frisk needs an umpire-legitimate pretext, in order:

1. use homeplate — brush the plate. The only reason a masked man on his knees beside an athlete is acceptable. Sets at_plate.
2. use catcher — inspect the mitt for a foreign substance. Clean.
3. use batter — check the bat for pine tar above the legal limit. Clean.
4. use slugger — Number 44, who has been staring at the owner's box since the second inning. A pager taped inside the batting glove.

Skip the pretext and the object simply refuses (requires_flag). Announce yourself as police — a dialogue choice that is right there, and correct, and what a police officer would do — and sixty thousand people come over the railings. Sierra death.

The other inversion: at the Queen's reception, Ludwig hands a two-hundred- year-old firearm to the person you are there to protect, and you tackle a head of state. That is correct procedure, it ends your career, and being fired is the only way to progress — a private citizen can't walk onto that field, but an umpire can walk anywhere.

Also in: Nordberg conducting an entire briefing through a wired jaw; Ludwig owning two hundred and six ships and one of them being called I LUV LUDWIG; the anthem lyric sheet; the steamroller, established in Room 5 as scenery an hour before it is needed.

Two authoring traps this case caught, worth knowing before writing Case 08:

• Object names must not be prefixes of each other. ludwigdesk shadowed ludwig, so talk ludwig addressed the furniture. The parser matches loosely; renaming it to desk fixed it.
• Flag-gated edge exits need walkable floor into the trigger zone. The north exit fires at y ≤ 21, which was inside the painted stands (a Wall band) — the upper deck was unreachable on foot until a tunnel was carved through it. Verify every exit by walking it, not with goto_room.

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8. Case Ten — Drebin Jr, and the owl

cases/case-10-plot-device/ — Act III, cold-palette EGA. Six rooms, 100 points.

Bank → Police Squad → the morgue → Mulholland → Cane's club → the arena.

The Neeson homage is a register, not a costume. Nielsen played Drebin oblivious — the joke was that he never noticed. Neeson plays Drebin Jr sincere — he notices everything and means all of it, completely, at all times. So Jr's text is written straight and often genuinely moving, and the comedy is the collision with what it's about:

• He gives a Taken speech about his particular set of skills. Chief among them is paperwork.
• He takes four armed robbers in eleven seconds without drawing his weapon, which is the finest work of his career, and he does it dressed as a schoolgirl, with his back to the actual crime.
• He tells Beth he's sorry for her loss and means it, and that turns out to be the only useful thing in the room.
• The villain gets the same sincerity back at him from the wrong face: "I'm not going to hurt anybody. I'm going to make it quiet."

The three-era payoff. Act I is monochrome, Act III is cold blue. The owl sprite is generated monochrome and placed in a full-colour room, so Frank Drebin is visibly lit by a different decade than everything around him — the palette rule from §2 doing the emotional work at the climax. look owl before the finale is the quietest text in the game. use owl is two words.

Also in: the hot dog cart that has always been in the bank and which he has never once asked about; the animated paperclip assistant; the trousers, which he retrieves with enormous dignity because standards are not a thing you keep only when they are being counted.

Third authoring trap: sets_flag fires on use, never on take — points does both. A takeable item that was supposed to set a flag silently didn't, and the gate it fed never opened. Gate on needs (which checks inventory) instead of inventing a flag for "is carrying it".

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9. tools/lint.py — the traps, encoded

Three of the four bugs that cost real debugging time in this project were the same class of mistake, and I walked into the sets_flag-on-a-takeable one twice — once in Case Ten, then again in Case Eight after writing it down. So the rules are now a linter rather than a paragraph:

python3 tools/lint.py            # every case
python3 tools/lint.py cases/...  # one

It checks, per case:

Rule	Why it exists
Two different objects awarding points for setting the same flag	Points fire on a flag's false→true flip, so whichever runs second silently pays nothing and max_score becomes unreachable. Cost 10 points in the crossover before it was caught. (Same object paying via use or its own dialogue is fine — those are deliberate alternatives.)
An object name unreachable because an earlier object shadows it	MRPGI's obj_matches is a bidirectional substring test over name and synonyms, and match_obj takes the first hit in array order. clubbar's synonym "bar" swallowed barman; bouncer's "door" swallowed bunkerdoor (shipped broken in Case Ten until the linter found it). --warn also lists benign shared synonyms like "man"/"player".
takeable + sets_flag	sets_flag fires on use, never on take (points does both). The flag silently never sets and the gate it feeds never opens.
One object name a prefix of another	The parser matches loosely — ludwigdesk shadowed ludwig, so talk ludwig addressed the furniture.
Flag required but never set	Catches a typo'd requires_flag / exit_flags before it becomes an unwinnable case.
Exit points at a room that doesn't exist
exit_flags set on an edge with no exit
Dialogue goto out of range
Sprite referenced but missing from sprites/	Otherwise it's a silent magenta box.
Authored points below max_score	The target would be unreachable. (Above is fine — alternative dialogue branches awarding the same latched flag inflate the naive sum.)

It does not check that every exit is walkable — that one still needs a real playthrough, because it depends on painted Wall bands (§7). Walk your exits.

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10. ZAZ's own back catalogue

Police Squad! was ZAZ's third thing. The first two are fair game and are already the same comedy engine, so they go in as texture rather than as cases — the way a film quotes itself.

From Airplane! (1980) — Leslie Nielsen's breakout as Dr. Rumack, and the direct ancestor of Drebin's whole register:

• "Surely you can't be serious." Case Five: Mrs. Vane-Ashcombe of the Pasadena Vane-Ashcombes asks whether Frank really intends to interview all forty guests. "Surely I can, madam." — "...I don't think you can, and don't call me Shirley." He had not called her Shirley. He did not know her name was Shirley. He writes it down, because it is now the only thing he knows about her, and it goes in the file.
• "I picked the wrong week to quit ___" — Case Eight, escalating one room at a time across the whole case: drinking (the Blue Note), smoking (the bombed institute), amphetamines (the warehouse), sniffing glue (the Press Club, in a mariachi costume, nine minutes from a nuclear device).
• The drink in the face. Also Case Eight. Four times over one evening. The bartender holds out a towel at the exact moment, without looking, because he has been doing it for nine hours.

From Kentucky Fried Movie (1977) — ZAZ's first:

• The news anchor who doesn't know he's on air. In Case Seven (1988) he is telling the floor manager what he thinks of his shirt, live to eleven million homes. In Case Ten (2025) it is the same joke on a bank lobby screen, and nobody in the gallery tells him, because everybody in the gallery has decided somebody else will.
• Feel-A-Round. Case Nine: the Academy Awards is trialling an immersive presentation system in which ushers positioned around the auditorium physically reproduce for the live crowd what is happening on screen. Frank asks one to move. He cannot — in ninety seconds there is a scene in the Best Documentary montage involving a horse, and he is the horse.

And Airplane!'s Otto turns up in Act III, which is where he belongs: after the cuts, Police Squad partners are supplied by a vendor, and Drebin Jr's is inflatable, at forty per cent, with nobody able to find the pump. Frank tops him up by mouth, because you do not leave a partner at forty per cent, and Hocken Jr. watches all eleven minutes of it without a word because he can see Frank means it.

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11. The glitches are canon

Police Quest II shipped with bugs that are, without alteration, Naked Gun jokes. A player who has never heard of Sierra reads them as Drebin being Drebin; a player who has reads them as a love letter. So we ship them deliberately.

Case Six is built entirely out of these. The 8-bit underflow is its central puzzle, and the Gremlin runs through it and is never resolved.

Real Police Quest bug	In Police Squad Quest
PQ1's 8-bit underflow — buy 132 whiskeys until the wallet goes negative, the unsigned counter wraps to 255, and the UI appends a cents 0 to read $2,550	Case Six's 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. Exceeding the float by one dollar wraps the department ledger's eight-bit field, and Police Squad's accounting system authorises $2,550.00. Played entirely straight; Accounts raise it in March and it goes to a hearing.
PQ1's Gremlin — a precinct prankster leaving live chickens and mace-soaked paperwork on the Captain's desk, never explained, never resolved	Chickens in the squad room, on Al's shoulder, on the murdered guest star. Nobody in eleven years has said the word "chicken" out loud. The winning freeze-frame includes one. THE GREMLIN was never identified. No file was ever opened.
PQ1 — instant death for forgetting your nightstick or running one red light	Every case's optional traps: the sidearm indoors, touching the monarch, the lion.
PQ2's doorframe sight trap — a silent misalignment that kills you an hour later	Case Six's glass: put on the stool before you go on, and fatal six minutes later if you are thirsty.
Keys locked in the car, station doors lock behind you → softlocked in the parking lot on screen one	The squad car in Case One: "The keys are locked inside, on the seat, in plain view, behind your own reflection." Non-fatal. Nobody mentions it.
Keith, your partner, slacks off and smokes; driving back to the station makes him go do "paperwork"	Nordberg. Casts, traction, cigarette, assigned as your partner, has not stood up. His paperwork is a magazine.
Firing without raising the weapon → you shoot yourself in the foot	Hocken dialogue: "Permission to test-fire my sidearm indoors, Captain." → "Granted." → Sierra death. An optional trap, exactly as Sierra used it.
Holding a direction while drawing → hands and gun detach and float above your head	Act II gag: a raise verb that reports the weapon is now above the ceiling, and stays there for the rest of the case.
"Headless chicken" pathfinding — NPCs spiral endlessly around obstacles	Al, in Case One, "continues walking in a tight, rapid circle around the water cooler, as he has all morning."
Metal detector only checks if you're facing up — walk diagonally past it	Act III airport screen. The detector is correct and the regulation is correct and you go through diagonally.
Waving a drawn gun at airport security with no reaction until you cross a specific vector	Same screen. The guard reacts to geometry, not to guns.
Air-walking — keep the swimming animation on dry land	Act II, after the zoo. Frank swims across the car park.
Levitating into the sky off a transition	Act III finale — but it's the owl.
Typing halt resets the enemy's shot counter → infinite standoff	halt is already a verb in Case One's manifest. In the Act II standoff it works, forever, and the game never acknowledges why.
Infinite score by re-dusting the ashtray / re-questioning the amnesiac witness	Case One, dusting the counter: "The department pays out on a lifted print once. You may dust this counter as many times as you like. It has been looked into."

The rule: play the bug straight. Never nudge the player. The comedy is that the game is behaving exactly as documented.

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12. Art pipeline

tools/sprites.py <case> reads that case's sprites.json and generates every missing sprite on the MODELBEAST farm (free, local, m3ultra):

flux_local (text→image, 512²) → bg_remove_local (RMBG-2.0 cutout) → Pillow
nearest-neighbour trim+downscale to the sprite's target height

Trimming to the alpha bounding box before scaling is what puts the subject's feet on the bottom edge, which is how MRPGI positions and depth-sorts sprites. The engine quantizes to EGA itself on load, so the script only owes it a small transparent PNG.

A shared STYLE constant in the script enforces the Sierra look; per-sprite prompts stay short. Act I prompts end in "black and white monochrome grayscale only" — that one phrase is the whole 1950s era treatment.

python3 tools/sprites.py cases/case-01-substantial-gift            # fill gaps
python3 tools/sprites.py cases/case-01-substantial-gift --force    # redo all
python3 tools/sprites.py cases/case-01-substantial-gift --only ego,al

Seeds are derived from the sprite name, so a rerun reproduces the same art.

On LoRAs (tested, negative result)

The farm has ~40 LoRAs, but none of them currently apply to this pipeline, and it's worth writing down why so nobody burns an afternoon on it twice:

• The style LoRAs worth wanting (style_retro-flux, old_timey_v4) live in vendor/comfyui/models/loras/, which is not in MB_LORA_DIRS — a bare name 404s. A full path loads them.
• Loaded that way they are still a no-op. They're FLUX.1-dev LoRAs and the only ungated model is flux2-klein-4b, a different architecture. An A/B at a fixed seed gives three visually identical images (checksums differ by a hair; nothing you can see). Iso-Pixel-05 is SD-architecture — same result.
• Using them for real needs either the HF-gated dev model, or routing SD/SDXL LoRAs through the comfyui_sd operator instead.

And it wouldn't help much anyway. The pixel-art look comes from the nearest-neighbour crush to ~24px, not from the model — a style LoRA at 512px is thrown away by the downscale. Plain flux2-klein-4b is the right tool here. Where the farm's bulk capacity does pay off is quantity: 48 sprites across two cases, free, in a few minutes.

Farm gotcha: the guest token caps concurrent jobs, and going over returns 429/401 — which reads like an auth failure and isn't. tools/sprites.py retries with backoff; if a whole batch fails, something else of yours is using the farm. Don't run two clients at once.