Write down the leftovers and what four playtest rounds taught

Adds two sections to HANDOFF. "How to work on this" records the meta-lesson:
every single "this feels odd" note Oliver gave turned out to be a real defect
rather than a tuning preference — seven for seven — so the rule is to measure
before touching a tuning value. It also records that screenshots are not a
verification tool at phone scale (small pixel art is unreadable, and a silent
sprite fallback renders a wiring bug as working code), that drawImage
instrumentation is what settles those, and that a scripted str.replace which
matches nothing is a silent no-op that must be asserted.

"OPEN — leftovers" lists the ten known gaps in priority order: RES 4 unverified
under load on a real phone, the horde melee fix unplayed, the player idle frames
upscaled rather than re-sliced, asymmetric boss wound stages, only three boss
designs, landscape drifting untended, cards without an entrance, the deliberate
chapter-skip, parked step 6, and one audio line to confirm.

Also corrects the module map: there are three runtime-only import cycles now,
not two — state<->zombies joined when sendBoy started reading gore.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>

HANDOFF.md

@@ -5,9 +5,10 @@ everything they specified is shipped, and what still matters from them is record
 long history, `~/.claude/projects/.../memory/splatter-tennis-history.md` is auto-loaded; for the
 detail of any individual change, read the git log.
 
-Last updated 2026-07-30, after Oliver's FOURTH playtest round (viewport, horde survivability). All playtest
-rounds are closed at the bottom. Step 6 (crowd turning, ball-boy catcher) stays PARKED by his
-decision. **Awaiting his next phone playtest.**
+Last updated 2026-07-30, after Oliver's fourth playtest round. **Start with "How to work on this"
+and "OPEN — leftovers"** (both just above the CLOSED sections) — the first tells you how his feedback
+should be handled, the second is everything known to be outstanding. All four playtest rounds are
+closed below them, newest first. **Awaiting his next phone playtest.**
 
 ## What this is
 SNES-style pseudo-3D tennis (Super Tennis reference) that transitions into a zombie splatter game
@@ -31,7 +32,10 @@ transition + `splatPoint` + ball-boy routines · `zombies.js` zombie/gore/partic
 `updateZombies` · `render.js` camera/palette-lerp/sprites/all drawing · `input.js` keys/touch/flick ·
 `audio.js` sfx + recorded umpire (`assets/audio/*`, macOS `say -v Daniel`) · `panel.js` the T panel ·
 `main.js` boot, loop, umpire-tap cheat, `window.T` test surface.
-Two runtime-only import cycles (documented in headers): input↔gameplay, zombies↔gameplay.
+THREE runtime-only import cycles (documented in headers): input↔gameplay, zombies↔gameplay,
+and state↔zombies (`sendBoy` reads `gore` to decide whether a mopping round is worth walking out for).
+All three are safe for the same reason: the imported binding is only ever touched inside a function at
+runtime, never during module evaluation.
 
 ## How the game flows
 Tennis → win a game → **transition** (`G.mode='transition'`, timeline on `G.transT`) → **splatter**.
@@ -371,6 +375,78 @@ Known generator quirks, all still true:
 
 ---
 
+## How to work on this — the meta-lesson from four playtest rounds
+
+**Every single "this feels odd" note Oliver gave this session turned out to be a real defect, not
+taste.** Not one was a tuning preference. The score so far:
+
+| what he said | what it actually was |
+|---|---|
+| "the racket zombie doesn't seem harmable, but that could just be a feeling" | 3 of 5 weapons silently no-oped on it |
+| "I could not return a single ball" | the parry was unreachable — the tap only became a swing in `rally` |
+| "the first boss is way too easy" | a flame ball re-wounded it every frame; one killed a 16 hp boss |
+| "the ball is not yet at the player but he is already hit" | contact fired 0.68 m early (weighted depth) |
+| "one of the endboss sprites is used for a normal zombie" | a case-insensitive filename collision |
+| "everything is a tad too small" | near sprites were being upscaled 1.5x from a 112px source |
+| "I die all the time at the game-20 horde" | the horde scales, the panic button was a flat 1 s |
+
+So: **when he reports a feel problem, go measure it before touching a tuning value.** The measurement
+is usually cheap (project both objects to screen space at the moment of the event; count device pixels
+against source pixels; print the schedule for 45 games) and it has found a bug every time.
+
+**Verify with instrumentation, not with screenshots.** Small pixel art at phone scale is genuinely
+unreadable in a screenshot — during the boss-design work I twice concluded from screenshots that the
+sprites were fine when they were all silently falling back to design 1. What settled it in one call:
+
+```js
+const o = CanvasRenderingContext2D.prototype.drawImage;
+CanvasRenderingContext2D.prototype.drawImage = function (img, ...a) { log(img.src); return o.call(this, img, ...a); };
+```
+
+Same idea elsewhere: project to screen coords and compare numbers, don't eyeball. A silent fallback
+(`SPR[wanted] ? wanted : <default>`) is convenient in production and *poisonous* while debugging,
+because a wiring bug renders as perfectly working code.
+
+**Assert your scripted edits matched.** A `str.replace` that finds nothing is a silent no-op. One of
+those left `drawZombie` on hardcoded sprite names while everything else moved to the `BOSS_ART` table,
+and the fallback above hid it completely. Every scripted edit in this repo should `assert a in s`.
+
+---
+
+# OPEN — leftovers, in rough priority order
+
+Nothing here is broken; these are known gaps and unverified risks.
+
+1. **`RES` 4 is unverified on a real phone under load.** It nearly doubled the fill rate (810 -> 1080
+   device px across). Oliver has not reported stutter, but he also has not played a late horde since.
+   **If the game ever stutters, `RES` back to 3 is the first move** — not reducing zombie counts.
+2. **The game-20 horde fix is unplayed.** The crowd-scaled swish (1.00 s at one body -> 0.22 s at
+   fourteen) is measured but not yet felt. If it now trivialises hordes, `meleeCoolMin` is the knob.
+3. **`p_idle1`/`p_idle2` and most `o_*` frames are 2x-upscaled, not re-sliced.** They are on the right
+   scale but gained no detail in the remaster, and they are the two most-seen poses in the game.
+   Fix by hand-slicing `_sheet_player2/3` and `_sheet_opp2/3` at `IDLE_TARGET_H` 224 rather than going
+   through the signature matcher, which assigned those frames elsewhere.
+4. **Boss designs are asymmetric.** Design 1 (GROUNDSKEEPER) has 3 wound stages and 4 throw frames;
+   designs 2 (LINE JUDGE) and 3 (CHAIR UMPIRE) have 1 wound skin and 2 throw frames each. Legal — the
+   `BOSS_ART` indices are clamped — but a chapter-2 boss degrades in one visible step instead of three.
+5. **Only 3 boss designs, cycling.** Chapter 4 repeats the groundskeeper at 43 hp and 3.67 m. A fourth
+   design is a sheet plus one row in `BOSS_ART`.
+6. **Landscape is under-maintained.** The readability pass (camZ/camY/camF/horizon), the adaptive
+   height and the safe-area work are all portrait-only; landscape still runs the old camera and a fixed
+   480x270. Portrait is the stated primary target, but landscape has drifted and is untested.
+7. **`drawCard` (the chapter/set cards) still cuts in** with no entrance, while modals swoosh
+   (`TUNE.modalIn`). Offered and not yet requested.
+8. **A chapter can be skipped.** `G.bossDue` takes the max, so going a long stretch without ever
+   clearing the court means you face the current chapter, not a backlog. Deliberate; noted in case it
+   ever reads as a bug.
+9. **Step 6 stays PARKED** by Oliver's decision: the crowd turning into zombies (spawning from the
+   stands — attacks from behind, high spectacle, `x_crowd` sheets already exist) and the ball-boy zombie
+   that catches your shots. Recorded so the ideas are not lost, not as a to-do.
+10. **`ump_no_deal` does not exist.** Oliver asked for its removal; `ump_no_appeal` was removed as the
+    closest match. Worth one confirmation that no other line is still unwanted.
+
+---
+
 # CLOSED — Oliver's fourth playtest (2026-07-30)
 
 ### The game did not use the full height of his iPhone