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>
