HANDOFF-MATCH.md: scoring model A, and the slice to make the match a real mode
Temporary file, written because a session ran out of context mid-slice — fold into PROJECT.md and delete when the work lands. Not in the Dockerfile COPY; docs are not served. Records the decision (A: blood-only, measure becomes opponents felled) and the finding behind it: Oliver believed losing a match killed him, when he was bleeding out during deuce wars. That misreading is itself the bug — model A only works if the player can see they are bleeding, not losing. Also carries the build order (summary+measure, named ladder with personalities, wound-driven play, the fall animation, menu, flick teaching, opponent serve games), the flight-recorder recipe that ended four rounds of guesswork, the traps this mode already sprung, and the do-nots. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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# HANDOFF — ZOMBIE TENNIS, making it a real mode
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**TEMPORARY FILE.** Written 2026-08-12 because a session ran out of context mid-slice. When the work
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below is done, fold anything durable into `PROJECT.md` (the only planning document) and **delete
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this file**. It is deliberately not in the Dockerfile COPY — docs are not served.
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**Read `PROJECT.md` first, as always** — especially "How to work on this", the invariants, and the
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drill/match session logs (passes 13-23), which carry the reasoning behind every number named here.
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---
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## Where things stand
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Zombie tennis is a **back-room prototype that plays well on a real phone** ("big improvement on real
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mobile"). Entry: splash → five taps in the top-left corner (`#hot`) → **MATCH TEST**, or `#match`.
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Sibling prototypes there: WEAPON TEST, BOSS TEST, DRILL TEST (the abandoned cognitive mode — see
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below). 49 tests green, seeds clean. Last commit `9b9f18d`, `index.html` at `?v=176`.
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**What it is:** real tennis against the racket zombie. One game per opponent, tap-and-timing
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controls, the deuce/ad serve positions, and **the score is the body** — each point you win takes a
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quarter of its pool and walks it through its wound stages; the game-winning point fells it and a
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fresh opponent shambles on. Its points draw your blood (`matchPlayerHp` 8, `matchHeal` 2 per game
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won). It runs on a PERMANENT interlude — `G.interlude` is what makes serving tennis-like, hides the
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rack and wakes `racketAI` — and the only change is in `resolveInterlude`, which feeds `matchPoint`
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instead of ending anything. All of it is ~120 lines in `beats.js`.
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**The ladder** escalates in `racketAI`, not hp: speed (`matchSpeedBase`/`Per`), whiff
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(`matchFlub`/`FlubKeep`), width (`matchWideBase`/`WidePer`), pace (`matchOppPace`/`PacePer`). Player
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side: `matchAssist`, `matchReach`.
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---
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## THE DECISION JUST MADE — scoring model A
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Oliver picked **A: blood-only**, of three options offered:
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- **A (chosen)** — the run is one long bleed across opponents; losing a game costs nothing but the
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blood already spent, and heals are how you last. **The measure becomes OPPONENTS FELLED.**
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- B — tennis-true: a lost game ends the run. Rejected for now (worth one playtest someday; it might
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be the mode's real personality).
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- C — hybrid, lost game drops a rung. Rejected.
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**Important context for whoever implements this:** Oliver believed losing a match killed him
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("i really die losing one match"). It does not — he was bleeding out during deuce wars and hitting
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zero at their game point. **That misreading is itself the bug to fix**: the mode is not
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communicating its own rules. Model A only works if the player can see they are bleeding, not losing.
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---
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## The build slice, in order
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1. **Run summary + the measure** *(small, do first — it is what makes A legible)*
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- Track and display **opponents felled**, not `G.runGames`. Today `matchGameWon` bumps
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`G.runGames` (beats.js:308) because every mode uses it as the ladder metric; the match needs
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its own count (`G.match.opp - 1` already is it) surfaced on the death screen and in a
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match-specific localStorage best (`drillBest` is the pattern to copy).
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- Death screen should speak tennis: "FELLED 3 OPPONENTS · 14 GAMES". `killPlayer` already owns
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the single death path and the run summary.
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- While here: make the blood legible so A reads correctly. The vignette exists (four linear edge
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fades, sqrt curve) — check on a phone whether hits 1-2 of 8 land hard enough.
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2. **Named opponent ladder** *(medium, mostly data)*
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- `BOSS_ART` already holds **ten named designs with wound stages and throw frames** —
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GROUNDSKEEPER, LINE JUDGE, CHAIR UMPIRE, HEAD COACH, PHYSIO, SPONSOR MASCOT, THE CHAMPION at
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ten. Rung N gets a name plate and a personality row.
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- Personalities are the point, not the names: serve-and-volley, drop-shot merchant, **body-shot
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thrower** — note `shots[]` and the PARRY are fully built and completely unused in the match.
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That is the cheapest depth available anywhere in this mode.
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3. **Wound-driven play** *(small, big payoff)* — the injuries should MEAN something: a one-armed
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opponent loses reach, a headless one flubs more. Score-is-the-body becomes score-changes-the-game.
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Read the fraction the way `drawZombie` and `bleed()` do (never literal hp).
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4. **The fall animation** *(art pass — Oliver's idea, and a good one)* — point lost → the corpse
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COLLAPSES → drags itself up minus the limb. It explains the wound stage popping between points and
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gives every point a payoff beat. `matchReady()` is the natural slot. **Constraint: draw frames,
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do not fake them** (settled rule) — this needs a small fall/rise sheet per design through
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`assets/_regen.py`, not a JS rotate/sink.
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5. **Menu entry** *(small)* — the three-mode select Oliver planned: CLASSIC TENNIS / ZOMBIE TENNIS /
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SPLATTER GORE, replacing the back-room door for this mode.
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6. **Teaching** *(small)* — a ghost-hand lesson for the PLACEMENT FLICK. It is the counter-attack
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(flick during the swing aims the return; wrong-footing is how points are won) and it is taught
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nowhere on touch. The placement ring (`G.placeMark`) already shows the result; nothing teaches
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the cause.
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7. **Opponent serve games** *(bigger, later)* — the zombie never serves today. Alternating service
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is real tennis and doubles the skill surface (return timing).
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Expansion ideas that survived discussion, in `PROJECT.md`'s LATER: the **tournament frame**
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(QUALIFYING → ROUND OF 16 → THE FINAL vs THE CHAMPION — gives the run a destination), the Hawk-Eye
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**challenge** as an earned continue, sudden-death deuce past a rung, doubles, and **item 7:
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multiplayer** (ghost match first).
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---
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## THE TOOL THAT MATTERS: the flight recorder
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Four rounds of "still the same behaviour" were ended by watching Oliver play, not by measuring with
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an autopilot. **Autopilot measurement lied for three passes straight** because the autopilot set
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`autoAssist` by hand and therefore had legs the real player did not.
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Recipe — inject into the Browser pane, let him play, then read it:
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```js
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window.__rec = { losses: [], wins: [], trail: [] };
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let lastPts = '0-0', lastHp = null;
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setInterval(() => {
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const T = window.T; if (!T || !T.G.match) return;
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const G = T.G, ball = T.ball, P = T.P;
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window.__rec.trail.push({ pts: T.score.pts.join('-'), phase: G.phase, hp: G.hp,
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bx: +ball.x.toFixed(1), bz: +ball.z.toFixed(1), bAct: ball.active, bLast: ball.lastHit,
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px: +P.x.toFixed(1), pz: +P.z.toFixed(1), swing: P.swingT >= 0 });
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if (window.__rec.trail.length > 100) window.__rec.trail.shift();
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const pts = T.score.pts.join('-');
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if (pts !== lastPts) {
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const wasO = pts.split('-')[1] !== lastPts.split('-')[1] || (pts === '0-0' && G.hp < (lastHp ?? G.hp));
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(wasO ? window.__rec.losses : window.__rec.wins).push({ at: pts, from: lastPts, trail: window.__rec.trail.slice(-30) });
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lastPts = pts;
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}
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lastHp = G.hp;
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}, 16);
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```
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Then classify each loss by: minimum player↔ball gap, whether he swung at closest approach, how far
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he ran, where the ball died. That triple diagnosed every defect in the contact chain.
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- **Sample at 60 Hz, not 20** — a 20 Hz sampler overstates closest approach by up to ~0.5 m on a
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20 m/s ball, which is the entire size of the effect being measured.
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- It is passive. Do not "help" the player from inside it.
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- A page reload wipes it. Re-arm after every module refresh.
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---
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## Traps this mode has already sprung (do not re-learn these)
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- **`autoAssist` is 0 on `pointer: fine`.** The desktop pane has no auto-run. The match floors it
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with `matchAssist`, and `assistK()` is shared by the mover AND `intercept` — computing
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reachability with the raw knob made the planner answer "run home" forever.
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- **The contact chain is three separate things**: LEGS (`matchAssist`) → DESTINATION (`assistK` in
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`intercept`, plus the `anyHit` short-ball candidate that chases dying rollers) → REACH
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(`matchReach`). Each was a separate defect found in a separate recorded session.
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- **`ball.lastHit` must be stamped by `tossBall`.** A stale `'O'` on a toss from behind the baseline
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read as the opponent's passing shot: a point and blood PER TAP. Fixed, but the shape recurs —
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anything that revives the ball must own it.
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- **`G.serveNum` is only reset by tennis's `pointTo`**, which the match bypasses. `matchReady()`
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resets it; a new mode with its own point boundary must too.
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- **A 20 Hz snapshot of a population that legitimately empties is not a measurement** (this cost a
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flaky test that blocked the pipeline). The suite is **seeded** — `SEED=1234 node test.js` fuzzes;
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a fixed seed can silently turn a guarded test into a no-op, so check guards still run.
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- **`?v=` in index.html on every push, or phones keep the old build.** Bump `SPRV` too if sprites
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change.
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## Do not
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- Re-add regicide to the match (killing the body with a smash) — removed deliberately; it made every
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hard serve a free unaimed kill and smeared the score-is-the-body relationship.
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- Turn `drillOneShot` on as a default — it skips every `ZWOUND` stage, so the roster's best art never
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renders.
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- Touch the gore mode's contact/recovery rules while tuning the match. `matchReach` and the
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centre-recovery are match-only ON PURPOSE; gore splatter's tight contact and depth-only recovery
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protect the sidestep.
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- Revive the TRIAGE DRILL without a new idea. It is still in the back room and it works exactly as
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designed, but it failed the only test that matters: *"i think the normal player does not grasp
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this."* Four designs died learning that **an invented rule needs teaching; the rules a scene
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already implies do not.** That is why the match is tennis.
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