Real World

Point & click adventure — game two of the Norman Arc. Engine: inkwell.

The player is Paul, a junk dealer investigating what happened to Norman from the outside. His companion is Dex, a Personal Tape riding in slot one of Paul's Armilla. The world, the terminology and the entity catalogue live in the wiki (services/wiki-pages/pages/projects/realworld and .../neumatronic-universe); this file records the game-specific UI decisions.

Running

go run .                 # the alley scene (beat 3)
go run . -finale         # the finale — try the Nokia-punk theme switch
go run . -scene alley    # pick a starting scene
go test ./...            # content and layout checks, no window needed

go.mod carries a replace pointing at the neighbouring inkwell checkout so the engine and the game move together. Drop that line for a release build.

Control
left click	run the selected verb
right click	verb coin (Look / Use / Talk / Take)
`F1`	toggle hotspot outlines
`SPACE`	during a cutscene: let the tape speak, if it offered

Screenshots: EBITEN_SCREENSHOT_KEY=q go run ., then press q in the window.

Layout

Internal resolution is 640×400 — the same 16:10 as the wiki's "320×200 VGA look" brief and exactly 2× it, so art drawn at 320×200 upscales cleanly. Integer scaling only; the window opens at 2×.

The doubling is forced by type, not taste. inkwell renders text through a fixed 6×16 debug font that the domain cannot replace. At 320×200 a 16px glyph is 8% of the screen height: rows overlap, and a top bar sized from the wireframe deck's proportions cannot hold a single line. At 640×400 the same glyph lands at 4%, which is the proportion the design was drawn for.

     0                                     394│396                    639
   ┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
 0 │ ALLEY — paused                              SRP: 1 tape            │ TopBar (20)
20 ├────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
   │            scene — hotspots, characters, SpeechBubble              │ Scene (244)
264├─────────────────────────────────────────┬──────────────────────────┤
   │ Use hook on: floor grate                │ DEX                      │
   │ ┌───┬───┬───┬───┐   ┌───────┐┌────────┐ │ "The hook is a hand      │ HUD (136)
   │ └───┴───┴───┴───┘   │ 1 DEX ││ 2  —   │ │  shorter than the gap."  │
399└─────────────────────────────────────────┴──────────────────────────┘
     InventoryBar          TapeSlots           TapeChannel

Every vertical measurement derives from ui.LineH (glyph cell + leading), not from the deck's ratios, so the layout cannot drift out of step with the font again — TestLayoutFitsTheFont guards it. The tape channel comes out at 5 rows of 38 columns, which is about two of Dex's remarks on screen at once.

The vertical divider at x=394 is the one proportion carried over from the wireframe deck: 61.6% world, 38.4% tape channel. The deck's vertical proportions are not carried over.

The dialogue box deliberately spans only the left region, so a tape can comment alongside a conversation.

The rule everything follows

Canon's central idea is the dual architecture: every machine has a digital side and an ACP side, and the "agent-mediated focus" turns that into a UI paradigm — one main text focus plus a side status panel, with the hand typing at the digital side and the voice speaking to the ACP.

The hand holds the world. The voice speaks to the tape.

WORLD — mouse, the four verbs, inventory → Paul acts. TAPE — the talk verb and tape commentary → nothing happens in the world.

There is always a visible, continuous separator between them, and the tape side never carries a button that reaches into the world.

Two consequences worth stating: there is no text input anywhere (the tape channel is voice, opened with talk), and colour carries the rule — the world and Paul speak in bone white, tapes in amber. If something is amber, a tape said it.

There is also no "token" economy. The wireframe deck metered advice, but canon has no such concept and the wiki describes Dex as commenting continuously. If scarcity is ever wanted, the canon-native lever is the operator licence — without one a Personal Tape runs in restricted mode, and Paul certainly has no licence.

Structure

main.go                  flags + inkwell.Run
internal/names/          entity names and world-state keys
internal/theme/          realworld-93 + nokia-punk
internal/world/          unsaved runtime state, custom actions, action pump
internal/ui/             HUD: layout, custom widgets, coloured text
internal/content/        one file per registered entity, by kind
internal/boot/           wiring

world deliberately knows nothing about the HUD or the content — both build on it, so the reverse would be a cycle:

names ← theme ← world ← ui
                  ↑      ↑
               content ──┴── boot ← main

Content is one registered entity per file, grouped by kind:

internal/content/
  asset/      alley_background.go
  character/  paul.go  dex.go  mystery_tape.go  support_tape.go
  item/       noodle_letter.go  black_market_armilla.go  mystery_tape.go
  dialog/     dex_talk.go  mystery_tape_silent.go
  script/     tape_insert.go  awakening_finale.go
  scene/      alley.go

Adding a scene means adding scene/<name>.go and one line in scene/scene.go. Nothing else moves.

Engine workarounds

Five inkwell limits turned up during implementation that the engine README does not mention. All five are worked around on the domain side; each is a candidate for a small engine change.

drawText discards colour. In asset.text.go the colour argument is _ = c and rendering goes through ebitenutil.DebugPrintAt, which only draws white. Every text colour in Theme is therefore inert. Workaround: ui/text.go renders onto a scratch image and blits it tinted with ColorScale. The custom widgets colour correctly; the built-ins (StatusLine, DialogBox, TopBar, InventoryBar) are still white. Fix: move drawText to text/v2 — no call site would change.
queueAction is unexported, so a domain widget cannot start an action. Workaround: the pump in world/action.go drives its own Runner through the exported inkwell.Ctx. Caveat: it runs alongside the engine's script runner, not instead of it.
The "Nem ehhez." flash is hardcoded in core.engine.go for an item/hotspot pair with no OnUseWith, and cannot be replaced from the domain. Workaround: UseWithGuard — widgets tick before the engine's handleSceneInput and can consume the click, so unauthored pairs fail in character instead, escalating on repeats.
No exported CurrentScene(), but the pump needs Ctx.Scene. Workaround: world.EnterScene is the first step of every scene's OnEnter; the domain tracks it.
Widgets have no Visible field and the Manager cannot unregister, so the built-in HUD cannot be hidden during a cutscene. Workaround: the gate wrapper in ui/ui.go forwards Tick/Draw/BlocksClickAt only while the HUD is visible.
Run hardcodes a 4× window (core.dsl.go), which at 640×400 would be 2560×1600 — bigger than most laptop screens. Workaround: the windowSizer widget resizes once on the first tick, since Run sets the size before entering the loop.

Also: the inkwell README gives the module path as git.teletypegames.org/games/inkwell; the real path per its go.mod is git.teletypegames.org/engines/inkwell.

Known gaps

No art. Everything is an inkwell placeholder.
Spent dialogue choices are hidden, not struck through. DialogueChoice.Once hides them; the deck wanted them struck through but visible, so the list becomes a memory of what you already tried. Needs a thin override over DialogBox.
Only beat 3 exists. The alley is a vertical slice; boot.opening sets the police-tip flag that beat 2 will eventually set.
The render has only been inspected once, by the author of this repo. Geometry is covered by tests and a layout dump, but this environment cannot take a screenshot (both synthetic keystrokes and screen capture are blocked by macOS privacy permissions), so every visual judgement has to come from you.

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