Die the way people die in the films

The old death was a red tint and a shake for half a second, then a puff of gore.
That reads as the sprite having a moment, not as being eaten.

Now it takes four and a half seconds and it is a crowd doing it. You are dragged
to your knees fighting it (new frames, p_die1/p_die2, alternating), blood coming
out of you the whole time — a constant spray and a stain that keeps widening,
with the wet work on a loop underneath. Every body on court drops what it was
doing and converges: each claims a spot in a ring around you, kept from wherever
it was standing, so they crowd in from all sides instead of stacking on one
pixel. Then you are pressed flat into the ground while the ring closes over you —
you are drawn INSIDE the crowd's z order, so the ones between you and the camera
hide you exactly as they arrive — and what is left is the mound, with them still
feeding over it when the summary finally fades in.

Also: the wounded shamblers were stepping their two frames at half the cadence of
the healthy four, which reads as frozen next to the crowd they walk in. Same
clock now. (They were animating — verified frame by frame — just too slowly.)

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

config.js

@@ -253,7 +253,12 @@ export const TUNE = {
 // stand sitting back down while the applause was still audible.
 export const APPLAUSE_T = 4.2;
 
-export const EATEN_BURST = 0.5, EATEN_SUMMARY = 1.6, EATEN_RESTART = 2.2;
+// A: they drag you down and you fight it on your knees · B (EATEN_BURST): the crowd closes over you
+// and what is left is the mound · C (EATEN_SUMMARY): the summary fades in over them still feeding.
+// It is deliberately long. Oliver: "the movies surround and bite them, blood spills, and then the
+// person basically drowns in the zombies" — that cannot happen in half a second.
+export const EATEN_GRAB = 0.9, EATEN_BURST = 2.3, EATEN_SUMMARY = 3.6, EATEN_RESTART = 4.6;
+export const EATEN_FEED_R = 1.15; // m — how tight the feeding ring packs around the body
 
 // UI accent colours, one place so the whole HUD can be re-tuned at once. Deliberately
 // desaturated from the original arcade primaries: they were shouting over the artwork.