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John corrected the family tree and the correction is better than what I had. Leslie Nielsen's character is plain Frank Drebin; the 2025 film makes Neeson "Jr", which retroactively makes Nielsen the father without ever calling him Sr. So Frank Drebin Sr is now a THIRD Drebin one generation further back — 1958, entirely ours, no canon to violate. Terminology corrected across all three docs. The twist, per John's "maybe he is really a criminal": he is the most prolific criminal in the city's history, he is also a decorated homicide detective, and he has never once lied about any of it. Not corruption — corruption requires noticing. He is a Drebin: totally literal, totally sincere. He robs the payroll, then investigates it diligently and files an immaculate report stating what he did, because the form asks what happened and he answers the form. Nobody has ever caught him because nobody reads the reports. Best clearance rate in the division. The mechanic: the score is the cover-up. Played completely straight, no jokes in the system text — every scoring action is correct procedure that destroys the evidence against him. Lifting a latent removes it from the metal. Section 9 requires the spoiled card be incinerated, witnessed. The typed report supersedes the rookie's notes and the Captain signs it unread. You reach 100/100 in room three; the final room is worth nothing, because you have already been paid in full for the cover-up. He is also the Gremlin — the chickens on the Captain's desk come from the coop he built in 1951, and in seven years nobody has said the word out loud, so it has never occurred to him that anybody wondered. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
4.8 KiB
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-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.pngin a game folder replaces the default party robot as the player avatar (ego1.pngoptional second walk cel).death_textingame.jsonoverrides the death banner, which was previously hardcoded to another game's flavour text.