Zero Cool
Script kiddy to kingpin. Build the crew, take the neighborhood.
Zero Cool is a street-to-kingpin crime empire game for PC, premium and one-time purchase with no in-app purchases. You start as a script kiddy with a rig in a bedroom and four hacking verbs, and finish running a neighborhood. Five chapters, each recruiting one crew member with a skill of their own: the hacker, the enforcer, and the ones after them. Underneath sits a living city that keeps moving whether you are watching or not: around 200 simulated residents, a law system that reacts, rival factions, territory that changes hands, and a market that prices itself. The project began as a pure hacking sim and pivoted in July 2026 to the crime empire above. Hacking became Chapter 1 and the crew's first skill, and roughly eighty percent of the original engine carried straight over.
Screenshots //
Dev log //
The longest and most self-aware log in the portfolio, because this project changed shape halfway through and the history says so out loud. Everything before 25 July 2026 is a solo hacking sim: four hacking verbs, a living-city clock, a 200-NPC simulation, law, factions, territory and a market. On that date it pivoted to a street-to-kingpin crime empire, and rather than restart, hacking was demoted to Chapter 1 and the crew's first skill while roughly eighty percent of the built engine carried over intact. The entries after the pivot are mostly the city becoming somewhere you would believe in: trimming bands, putting real lights in the club, and a long run of art-pipeline work against a counted inventory of what the project actually owns.
- Stale docs swept: the live claims corrected, the dated history left alone
- Look re-run after the dressing: 57 clauses, 0 failed, and the zero is the finding
- 9.10: the club frame is taken and the room reads as a shop, with one artefact I could not identify
- Close-out: the Gun Club dressed, C2 finished, floors raised, records made true
- Trim bands and real lights in the club, and "exclude it from Ambience" turned out not to exist
- Art reference: read Synty's own screenshots, and props are the smaller half
- 9.2 / 9.8 / 9.10: the Gun Club counter was walling off the shooting range, measured
- The owner's five placements ship, and the clause guarding them was a tautology I did not see
- Each weapon gets its own seating, in the tuner AND in the shipped code
- Tuner: switching weapon or mount no longer throws the owner's work away, and 1 is the pistol
- The placement tuner: the owner moves it live, the file records it, I read the file
- C8.1: the grip frame, reframed and taken - 0.65 m with the aim lifted 0.12 m, because 0.55 m centred on the bone cropped the muzzle off the top (fov is VERTICAL in Godot, so that was a 0.336 m tall frame against a 0.27 m reach). The lift is in world up and a fixed distance, NOT derived from the weapon, so a mis-seated gun still shows up off-centre. Frame read back: slide, barrel, muzzle bore and trigger guard all legible, and the handle runs down into the fist. Shot 84/84 exit 0, window OFF SCREEN.
- C8.1 round two: he was holding the middle of the gun, and the mesh said so without a window
- C6.1, C6.2 and C8.1: the frames are taken and read, and the hip shot found a real holster defect
- C6/C8.1: two boxes closed by reading frames already on disk, and the gun camera was two bugs
- Close-out 2->8: phases 2, 3, 4 and 5, and two fixes that were reverted on purpose
- Every note checked against the code, and the Gun Club interior is a whitebox
- The save fix was committed a week ago, and C0 found two more like it
- Phase 10 is done but Perf: the range is a mission, and it shipped uncompletable
- 10.1-10.4: the shooting range, and a clause that could not run
- 9.1-9.6: the Gun Club is a building you walk into
- The grip: derived from the bone's axes, and asserted as a number
- 8.8: the frames exist now, and they found two defects the clauses could not
- Phase 8 review: aim() could not hit anybody, and nine more
- 8.7 + 8.8 floors: eight breaks all red, and two of them were my clause first
- Gates are green on the box, and four things the box corrected
- ci/gates.sh: detect art by a binary, not by a .tscn, and use the staged Godot
- 8.4 + 8.5: aim down sight, and a second break that came back green
- 8.3: the gun is in your hand, and it goes on your hip
- 8.2 + 8.6: a round you can see, and the crime that moved with it
- 8.1: bullets travel, and the "1 metre" report was never a shooting bug
- 8.0: the weapon ladder, and a switch that actually chooses
- 4.3 is gated on the verdict, and the exit code is still checked against a name
- The rebuild leak does not exist: the instrument was aliasing with the rebuild
- 4.3: the 90-second probe that saved four hours, and two crashes it named
- 4.4: the balance figures get numbers, and the rival gets quieter as you climb
- 4.5: the break test was a comment, and a comment does not re-run
- Perf is GREEN 3/3, and the 26.1 that reopened Phase 3 was contention
- The tail hunt: it is render-side, and "60 bodies" was the cap all along
- perf_when_clear.ps1: the clean-table check stops being something to remember
Showing the 40 most recent of 297 logged changes.
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