# The Joke Shop — Sunset Strip map notes The game's second venue is a fictional comedy club called **The Joke Shop**. Its block, canopy, blade sign, entrance and hillside are based on the real Comedy Store at **8433 Sunset Blvd, West Hollywood, CA 90069**. The club name and the game's guest stories are invented. The building is a stylized reconstruction, not a survey-accurate model: the playable frontage is 27 m, while the real parcel is much deeper and contains several rooms that the game does not enter. ## Real site | Item | Reference | | --- | --- | | Address | 8433 Sunset Blvd, West Hollywood, CA 90069, United States | | Real venue | The Comedy Store (comedy club and theatre) | | OpenStreetMap | Way [`428854155`](https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/428854155), centroid 34.095265, -118.373965 | | OSM tags | `amenity=theatre`, `building=commercial`, `height=12.2`, `start_date=1940`, `wikidata=Q3520350` | | Footprint | OSM polygon bounding box about **47.1 m × 41.2 m** across the club and rear parcels | | Street | Sunset Boulevard, a major east–west arterial on the Sunset Strip | | Setting | Dry Hollywood Hills directly behind the club, with houses and palms rising above the roofline | The building began as **Ciro's**, a 1940 nightclub; it became The Comedy Store in the early 1970s. Its street front is a low black hall under a deep, signature-covered canopy, with the circular blade sign above the roof, red curtains along the frontage and the main entrance set toward the west end. The hillside houses behind it are part of the silhouette from the sidewalk. ## How the map maps to the real site | Real element | Game implementation | | --- | --- | | Low black comedy hall | 27 m × 12 m footprint, 8.4 m street wall; matte black concrete surface with a low plinth and parapet | | Deep overhanging canopy | 4.9 m sloped slab dropping about 1 m to the outer fascia; the fascia carries white signature lettering and the club name | | Signature-covered front | Two `Label3D` signature bands on the fascia plus a smaller wall panel, so the handwriting reads at gameplay distance without dozens of decals | | Circular blade sign | 3.9 m white disc with a black rim on a roof pole; `THE JOKE SHOP` lettering faces the street | | Red curtains | Four three-fold velvet bays with tiebacks between the entrance and the east end; a red velvet entrance curtain | | West-end entrance | Recessed opening at x = -8.8 m with a low step, brass pulls and the door-lock indicator | | Warm practicals | Sconces along the wall, canopy downlights, entrance wash and three ground uplights; all off in daylight and switched by `set_night_mode()` | | Neighbouring low-rise frontage | Cream Mediterranean block west (balconies, red awning) and white commercial block east (ribbon windows, lobby) | | Hillside and houses | Fog-free unshaded 60° ramp behind the rear wall with stucco houses, shrubs and palms; its tint drops to a dark silhouette at night | | Opposite side of Sunset | Low retail row, rooftop billboard, neon and palms as background context beyond the far kerb | | Sidewalk furniture | Palms, queue barriers, stanchions, bins, planters, a-frame sign, hydrant and a parked sedan; prop placements pass the shared validator | ## Scene composition - **Frontage:** 27 m wide, façade centre at z = -8.0, front face at z = -2.0. - **Sidewalk:** 38 m wide × 14 m deep, meeting the kerb at z = 11.9. - **Street:** 90 m × 24 m, with the four-lane markings reused from the Hollywood block and a crosswalk in front of the entrance. - **Playable area:** x = -15…15, z = -0.6…14.0. The guard starts on the west side of the entrance at (-4.8, 0.1, 1.4), facing the approach. - **Map budget:** the headless audit measures **22,680 triangles across 454 meshes**, well inside the 150k/700 test budget. The same geometry serves the day and late-night looks. There is no second baked map: the phase lighting, skyline/fog tint, lit windows and practicals change, just as with the Hollywood day/night rows. ## Simplifications and limits - The real club's rear rooms, basement and roof plant are not modelled; the playable area is the street frontage only. - The 47 m OSM footprint includes rear parcels and does not match the 27 m street frontage; the game keeps the frontage proportions rather than the full lot. - Neighbouring businesses are represented by generic low-rise blocks. Their exact names and current tenants were not verified, so the docs do not claim them. - The hillside is a background ramp with simplified houses, not a terrain heightfield; it exists to restore the real silhouette above the roofline. - Signage uses the fictional **The Joke Shop** name, not the real Comedy Store wordmark. - The concept frames are photoreal; the game keeps its stylized, low-poly material treatment. The vision judge therefore still scores material and foliage detail below the reference. The remaining texture/realism work is tracked with the postponed 0.9.5 pass, not treated as a map-geometry defect. ## References The committed, license-cleared photo board for this block — with the provenance sidecar and the decisions each photo informed — is in [`screens/refs/joke-shop/README.md`](screens/refs/joke-shop/README.md), and the three-up board (real photo | generated concept | current capture) is in [`screens/boards/README.md`](screens/boards/README.md). - OpenStreetMap way 428854155: - Wikimedia Commons photographs used for proportion and material study: - - - - - AI art-direction frames: [`screens/concepts/joke_shop/`](screens/concepts/joke_shop/README.md) - Verification: `godot --headless --path . --script res://src/test/test_runner.gd` (`test_joke_shop_uses_the_real_sunset_strip_layout`, `test_joke_shop_geometry_stays_inside_the_map_budget`), and `godot --path . --script res://src/test/capture_realism.gd -- --stages=joke_shop_day,joke_shop`. The committed gallery passed `tools/check_screenshots.sh` (13 good / 0 bad) and the screen-design judge (13/13 match, 0 diff). The latest local realism run reports a reference gap of 0.454 for the night entrance.