TITLE
Hell Box — Wood Type You Can Drop

PROMPT
A typographic toy set in a letterpress print shop. Every key the viewer presses drops a big block of wood type onto the bed of a proofing press: a heavy rectangular sort with a letter on its face, in one of several poster styles. The blocks fall, knock into each other, tumble and pile up with rigid-body physics. Then the viewer pulls a proof: the pile, exactly as it lies, is inked and printed onto a sheet of paper as a poster, which is hung on a drying line. Concept: disorder turned into a composition; chance typography with real print texture.

Mood: noisy, cheerful, ink-stained; a jobbing printer's back room. Palette: newsprint/proof paper #F2E8D5, poster red #D1352B, press blue #1E3F66, chrome-yellow #F2B134, ink black #1A1A1A; wood tones (end-grain maple #C9A46A, darker #8B6B3F) for the blocks themselves, and a steel-grey press bed. Light page: the press bed is pale steel with the cream wall behind.

Blocks: each sort is a rounded-corner rectangle whose width follows the letter (I narrow, M and W wide), rendered with wood grain (thin streaks and growth rings), bevelled edges, a slightly worn ink-stained face in the current ink colour residue, and the letter drawn large, reversed (mirror image, as real type is) on the block face in one of four wood-type styles approximated with system fonts and canvas treatments: a fat slab (Rockwell/"Courier New" bold with a heavy stroke), a condensed gothic (Impact/"Arial Narrow", squeezed), a Tuscan-ish decorative (a Didone/Georgia bold with pointed median spurs grown onto the stems on canvas), and a rounded grotesque ("Arial Rounded MT Bold", round-joined stroke). Three body sizes ("12-line", "8-line", "4-line"). All letters are set as capitals. Nicks, dents and a foundry stamp on some.

Physics: a compact custom 2D rigid-body engine for rectangles (position, rotation, linear and angular velocity; gravity; SAT collision detection with clipped two-point manifolds, warm-started sequential impulses, friction and zero restitution so blocks thud rather than bounce; sleeping when at rest), tuned to be stable for piles of 40–60 blocks; walls are the press bed's furniture (wooden side rails) and the bed. Blocks can be dragged and thrown with the pointer (mouse/touch joint), and rotated with the wheel or two fingers while held. "Shake the bed" jolts everything. Performance capped: the oldest blocks are swept off the bed's right edge into the "hell box" (a crate labelled DEAD TYPE where discarded type goes) when the count or the total area of type on the bed exceeds the cap.

Typing: any letter, numeral or common punctuation key drops its block from above at a position that advances left-to-right across the bed (a red marker on the top edge shows where the next sort falls), wrapping, with slight random rotation and spin so words land legible-but-drunken; Space advances; Enter starts a new line dropped from higher up; Backspace plucks the last block away with tweezers; an on-screen type case (a compartmented drawer laid A to Z with figures and points, plus Quad, New line and Tweezers) lets the viewer tap sorts, and a text field offers the system keyboard. Style and size selectors are drawn as labelled type-drawer fronts; ink colour as four ink tins with lids off (red, blue, yellow, black).

Signature moment: "Pull a proof". A brayer (ink roller) sweeps across the pile leaving glistening ink on the block faces; a sheet of paper lowers over the bed; the press cylinder rolls across with a heavy eased motion and a slight bed shake while the impression shows through the back of the sheet; the sheet peels up and flips over to reveal the print: every letter now reading the right way round, in the chosen ink, at exactly the positions and angles the blocks lay in, with authentic letterpress texture: uneven "salty" ink coverage (noise-masked), heavier ink at one side of each letter, the faint impression of the block edges, slight slur, wood-grain showing through the solids, and a deboss shadow. Multiple pulls in different colours can overprint on the same sheet (multiply blend) if the viewer chooses "print again on this sheet", making layered two- and three-colour chance posters. Finished proofs fly up and are pegged to a drying line strung across the top of the page, swaying slightly; clicking one enlarges it; "save this proof" exports a PNG from canvas. Two house specimens ("HELL BOX" in three colours, "PRINT ANYWAY" in two), printed by the same routine, already hang on the line when the page opens.

Entrance: the word "HELLO" drops onto the bed block by block in the first two seconds, each letter in a different face and ink stain, clattering into a leaning row, followed by a smaller "TYPE SOMETHING" in small sorts that land on top of it: the hint is itself made of blocks. Typography of the page chrome: shop-sign lettering for the title "HELL BOX" in condensed caps with a hand-painted feel (slight irregular baseline), small labels in typewriter face; a framed notice in the printer's voice: "Type falls where it likes. Print it anyway."; a job ticket counting sorts on the bed, proofs on the line and sorts gone to hell. Optional sound toggle (off by default): wooden knocks on collisions scaled by impulse (short filtered noise + low thump), roller squelch, the press's rumble. Reduced motion: blocks appear in a settled jumble without falling; the proof appears on the line without the press sequence. Keyboard focus styles on all controls; the page does not trap Tab.

DESCRIPTION
A jobbing printer's back room on a cream wall: a red hand-painted HELL BOX sign, a pinned notice from the Foreman, and a steel proofing-press bed framed by wooden furniture. Keys rain end-grain maple sorts onto the bed, each carrying a mirror-reversed letter stained with old ink, and they thud, lean and stack under a small rigid-body engine. Pulling a proof plays the whole press cycle — brayer, sheet, cylinder, peel, flip — and turns the accidental pile into a right-reading letterpress poster with salty ink, slur and deboss, which then flies up to a sagging drying line of pegged, swaying proofs. Overprinting in other inks builds layered chance posters that can be enlarged and saved.

VISUAL TECHNIQUES
- Custom 2D rigid-body physics: SAT box collision, clipped contact manifolds, warm-started sequential impulses, friction, sleeping
- Per-block procedural canvas sprites: end-grain streaks and rings, bevels, nicks, dents, foundry stamps, worn ink residue, wet-ink gloss
- Glyph masks from system fonts with heavy strokes, condensing, and pixel-scanned stems that receive drawn Tuscan spurs
- Letterpress print compositing: per-letter ink gradients, grain knock-outs, blurred-mask rim, slur pass, salt and blotch noise patterns, deboss shadow and highlight, multiply overprinting
- Brayer sweep revealing inked sprites through a moving clip region
- 3D sheet with two faces (impression show-through on the back, print on the front), lowered, rolled, peeled and flipped with eased keyframe animation, then flown to its peg
- CSS-drawn shop furniture: painted sign, drawer fronts with brass pulls, ink tins, crate, compartmented type case, clothes-pegs on an SVG catenary line
- Procedural brushed-steel bed and wooden rails with brass screws
- Synthesised sound: filtered-noise knocks with a low thump, roller squelch, press rumble

INTERACTION MODEL
Type any letter, numeral or punctuation mark to drop a sort at the red marker; Space leaves a gap, Enter starts a new line, Backspace plucks the last sort with tweezers. The on-screen type case and the text field do the same for touch. Drag a block to move or throw it; turn it with the wheel or a second finger while holding it. Drawer fronts choose the face and body size, ink tins choose the colour. "Shake the bed" jolts the pile. "Pull a proof" runs the press and hangs a new print on the drying line; "Print again on this sheet" overprints the most recent proof in the current ink. Click a hanging proof to enlarge it, save it as a PNG, or send that sheet back through the press; Escape closes the enlarged view. The sound button turns shop noise on or off. With reduced motion, blocks appear already settled and proofs arrive on the line without the press sequence.