The opponent can serve and fall, and there is a bench to judge it on

THE MISSING ART, generated by the whole-sheet restyle method: bouncing the ball
at the baseline, the toss with the ball leaving the fingertips, the strike at
full stretch — and the fall, which slice 4 has been waiting for: buckling, down
on the knees, flat on the court face down, then dragging itself back up. One
zombie is now complete as a tennis player rather than as a body that shuffles.
(Healthy only so far; the wound variants are the next sheet.)

THE SPRITE BENCH, in the back room. No ball, no scoring, no AI — one opponent
on an empty court, walking, at the size and speed it is actually played at,
because that is the only place a walk cycle can be judged. A sheet that looks
fine at 224 px on a contact sheet is a different animal at 30 px crossing a
lawn, and every sprite argument this project has had was really about that gap.

It steps through every state including the ones the game cannot reach yet, so
the serve and the fall could be looked at the day they were drawn instead of
the day they get wired up. It prints the FILENAME it is drawing and the hp the
wound stage was read from — the two numbers that separate "the art is wrong"
from "the wiring picked the wrong art" — and it says HEALTHY ONLY where a wound
variant does not exist rather than implying one does. The stride steps off
ground covered, like the real thing: a bench animating on a clock would flatter
exactly the sprites that foot-slide in play.

It owns the court like every other mode and every start* refuses while it runs.

FOUND BY IT, ten seconds in: `start()` applies the mode the setup screen picked,
so a remembered ZOMBIE TENNIS was taking the court before the back room could —
every back-room entry (weapons, bosses, drill, match, bench) had been silently
refusing since the mode select landed this morning. The back room passes null.

And a third calibration lesson: POSE MOVES A GLOBAL COLOUR STATISTIC. A body
face down shows a fraction of the shirt it shows standing, so `redness` fell 14
points across the fall sheet without a colour changing. The measure that
survives a pose change is the shorts HUE — mid-tone neutrals, present in every
frame in the same proportion — which is why it is the one that caught the drift
Oliver actually saw.

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

assets/_regen_batches.json

@@ -1284,5 +1284,54 @@
    99,
    4
   ]
+ },
+ "racket_serve": {
+  "sprites": [
+   "z_rbounce",
+   "z_rtoss",
+   "z_rserve"
+  ],
+  "ref_only": [
+   "z_r1",
+   "o_bounce",
+   "o_toss",
+   "o_smash"
+  ],
+  "state": true,
+  "check": "loose",
+  "anchor": 0,
+  "palette_ref": "z_r1",
+  "palette_tol": [
+   12,
+   10,
+   99,
+   4
+  ],
+  "subject": "Three frames of the zombie SERVING. The FIRST reference image is the ZOMBIE TENNIS PLAYER this sheet is of — the same dead man, and he must be IDENTICAL to it in every frame: dirty yellow-blond hair, a RED CLOTH HEADBAND, a torn red short-sleeved tennis shirt, WARM CHARCOAL GREY tennis shorts above the knee (a slightly brownish dark grey, never blue-grey, never pale), bare grey-green dead legs, white socks and white tennis shoes, grey-green corpse skin, sunken eyes, a wooden racket with a pale strung head. Same build, same height, same colours, same drawing style. The REMAINING reference images are there ONLY to show the POSES to copy — never the character, never the clothes, never the skin. Copy each pose exactly. Frame 1: he stands at the baseline about to serve, bouncing the ball on the ground in front of him — copy reference image 2: upright, racket held low across the body, the free hand down with a tennis ball just under it. Frame 2: the TOSS — copy reference image 3: the free arm thrown STRAIGHT UP above the head with the ball leaving the fingertips, the racket dropping back behind the shoulder, weight rocking onto the back foot, the head tipped up watching the ball. Frame 3: the STRIKE — copy reference image 4: the racket at FULL STRETCH overhead at the moment of contact, the body extended upward on the toes, the free arm coming down across the chest. Output exactly 3 figures side by side in ONE horizontal row, all standing on the same ground line, with empty magenta between them. "
+ },
+ "racket_fall": {
+  "sprites": [
+   "z_rfall1",
+   "z_rfall2",
+   "z_rfall3",
+   "z_rrise"
+  ],
+  "ref_only": [
+   "z_r1",
+   "p_die1",
+   "p_die2",
+   "p_die3"
+  ],
+  "state": true,
+  "check": "loose",
+  "anchor": 0,
+  "palette_ref": "z_r1",
+  "palette_tol": [
+   20,
+   12,
+   99,
+   4
+  ],
+  "subject": "Four frames of the zombie COLLAPSING AND GETTING BACK UP. The FIRST reference image is the ZOMBIE TENNIS PLAYER this sheet is of — the same dead man, and he must be IDENTICAL to it in every frame: dirty yellow-blond hair, a RED CLOTH HEADBAND, a torn red short-sleeved tennis shirt, WARM CHARCOAL GREY tennis shorts above the knee (a slightly brownish dark grey, never blue-grey, never pale), bare grey-green dead legs, white socks and white tennis shoes, grey-green corpse skin, sunken eyes, a wooden racket with a pale strung head. Same build, same height, same colours, same drawing style. The REMAINING reference images are there ONLY to show the POSES to copy — never the character, never the clothes, never the skin. Copy each pose exactly. Frame 1: the knees buckle — copy reference image 2: still upright but folding, one knee giving way, the racket arm flailing out for balance. Frame 2: DOWN ON HIS KNEES, doubled over, head low, one hand on the ground, still gripping the racket in the other — copy the crumpled posture of reference image 3. Frame 3: FLAT ON THE GROUND, face down, sprawled, the racket loose beside the outstretched hand — copy the collapsed posture of reference image 4. Draw him lying down: this figure is WIDE AND LOW, not standing. Frame 4: DRAGGING HIMSELF BACK UP — up on one knee with the other foot planted, one hand pushing off the ground, head coming up, the racket gripped again, halfway to standing. Output exactly 4 figures side by side in ONE horizontal row, all standing on the same ground line, with empty magenta between them. "
  }
 }