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>

src/gameplay.js

@@ -8,7 +8,7 @@ import { W } from './render.js'; // runtime-only cycle (render imports gameplay)
 import { updateDrill } from './drill.js';
 import { endRun, beginRun, MODE_CLASSIC } from './stats.js';
 import { updateZombies, updateParts, spawnZombie, spawnRacketZombie, spawnMachine, spawnChapterBoss, zombies, gore, explode, meleeSwipe, extras, parts, pellets, shots, playerGore, eatenBleed, resetZombies , firePellet , spawnBarrel , fireBeam , pops, popText } from './zombies.js';
-import { proceedAfterClear, startDuel, startHorde, warnHorde, resolveInterlude, watchdog } from './beats.js'; // runtime-only cycle: beats calls back into cheer/aside/endBurst/deliverTin/showModal/logSwing
+import { proceedAfterClear, startDuel, startHorde, warnHorde, resolveInterlude, watchdog, updateBench, benchKey } from './beats.js'; // runtime-only cycle: beats calls back into cheer/aside/endBurst/deliverTin/showModal/logSwing
 
 // ------------------------------------------------------------- ballistics ----
 // Launch ball from (x0,y0,z0) so it arrives at (tx, tz) with horizontal speed s under gravity g.
@@ -1157,6 +1157,9 @@ function meleeCooldown() {
 }
 
 export function keyPressed(code) {
+  // THE SPRITE BENCH takes the key before anything else reads it: it is a back-room art test with no
+  // ball and no scoring, so every other meaning a key has here is meaningless inside it.
+  if (G.bench) return benchKey(code);
   // Dead men toss no balls. The restart tap lives in main.js (maybeRestart); everything below —
   // melee, parry, and especially the pretoss branch — must not run while the death animation plays,
   // or a panic tap conjured a ball that hung frozen midair over the corpse (update early-returns
@@ -1477,6 +1480,7 @@ export function update(dt) {
   // --- zombies + transition timeline
   if (G.mode !== 'tennis') updateZombies(dt);
   else updateParts(dt);
+  updateBench(dt); // the sprite bench's pacing body — a no-op unless the back room opened it
   updateDrill(dt); // the coaching drill's round clock. It MOVES its bodies (they carry v = 0, so
                    // updateZombies' shamble skips them) and updateZombies still runs the contact
                    // and ball-hit tests against wherever this put them — that split is the design. // tennis has no zombies but its bounces still kick up dust that must settle
@@ -1545,7 +1549,7 @@ export function update(dt) {
 
   // --- racket zombies rally from the far court (splatter only, between hordes)
   if (G.mode === 'splatter' && !G.horde)
-    for (const rz of zombies) if (rz.variant === 'r') racketAI(rz, dt);
+    if (!G.bench) for (const rz of zombies) if (rz.variant === 'r') racketAI(rz, dt); // the bench drives its own body
 
   // --- ball physics
   if (ball.active) {