- The gore bed is "Dystopian Survival", made loopable: the last ten
seconds cross-faded into the first ten, 203.5 s, as MP3 at 128k (the
decoder strips the encoder's delay, so the seam has no gap). High-pass
at 40 Hz instead of 800, level matched to the menu theme.
- The prologue no longer drops into gore for a moment: after the turn,
act I's card and cup take over directly.
- RESET STORY under the build stamp (two taps; test only). It resets
the story, league, cups and title, keeps the level, and pushes at once
so the mirror cannot hand the old act back.
- The story screens have sound: a whoosh and a boom for the act card,
applause and the rack's own click as each weapon lands, applause and
a pock per arcade door on the act's end.
- Chapters are six games: mid-boss after three, the horde after four,
the act boss after six.
v384, staging only.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Oliver, three notes; two of them are here.
"when the opponent serves the player does not stand at the baseline - but
that's how it should be." setupPoint's receiving marks sat over a metre
INSIDE the court on both sides (22.5 near, 1.2 far) — where you stand to
attack a second serve, not where you wait for a first one. They mirror the
server's depth now, in the one line every serving mode shares.
"when serving results in an out there should be a second service... the
umpire should announce 2nd service and the player must get another chance."
True in tennis mode since forever and absent everywhere else: the duel, the
match and the death match had no service rule at all, so a serve long or
into the net was judged as an ordinary ground stroke — a point, and in the
match a point costs blood. The out branch of onBounce's interlude block
routes a serve to fault() instead, so the second serve, the HUD line, the
umpire and the double fault all come for free.
Three things it dragged out with it:
- fault()'s double-fault branch called pointTo — TENNIS scoring — which in
an interlude banks a number and skips the mode that owns the court. It
goes through resolveInterlude there now. Nothing had ever reached that
line from a duel or a match, because those modes could not fault.
- startDuel never reset G.serveNum: harmless while a duel could not fault,
the next duel's death loop the moment it can.
- the match puts the body back on its receiving mark for the second serve
(placeReceiver, split out of matchReady, which resets the serve number).
"Fault. Second service." is one voiceSeq — a second voice() call would be
dropped, one man one microphone. New recording via the usual say/afconvert.
The service BOX is still not enforced in the match, deliberately: this is
strictly more forgiving than what shipped. The lob gesture is OPEN 14.
4 new tests, 110 pass.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
CLASSIC TENNIS, third time asked and this time actually found. Both cues open
with a mode gate and I checked the wrong two features twice: drawApproachRing
(the closing circles that show when to tap) and drawApexBand (the serve bar
with the gold perfect window) each began `if (!G.match ...)`. So the mode whose
whole pitch is "if the core tennis is good everything else is good" was the one
mode with neither. They run on `G.match || G.mode === 'tennis'` now — the gore
mode stays out on purpose, there is no rally there. A test reads both function
bodies and fails if either is ever gated on the match alone again.
(The two I kept pointing at — the landing ring and the placement ring — really
are shared. They were just not the ones being asked about.)
THE BOUNCING WAS IN THE ART, and measurable: the six generated families came
back with the shuffle frame 30-44 px shorter than the stance it walks out of,
against 9 px on the hand-made racket family. The game draws every frame at its
own PNG height, so the body rose and dropped once per step. A walk cycle is one
drawing with the legs moved and must be one height; _zsheet levels the stance
and the stride pair now and leaves the forehand its own, exactly as the serve
and the fall keep theirs. All seven families re-cut: spreads are 1-8 px.
THE BENCH GETS BUTTONS. Arrow keys are not a control scheme on a phone, which
is the device the walk has to be judged on — so every family and every wound
stage was unreachable from the place the problem shows. Three on-screen pads:
BODY, WOUND, POSE, the two-way ones split left/right. Geometry lives beside the
drawing and input hit-tests the same function, the rule the rack established.
THE FALL is quicker still (0.05/0.07/2.0/0.30): drop, lie there, get up.
Three umpire lines pulled — ump_wound_you, ump_felled, ump_wound_opp2. Not
funny enough to keep. Files deleted, call sites collapsed to the two that stay.
60 tests green.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
THE FLICK, again. "i can barely reach the extremes of the court." It could
reach 3.3 m against a 4.115 m line — safe, and too safe. TUNE.flickWidth is
3.95 now (96% of the way to the corner, 17 cm to spare) with flickReach 0.42,
which keeps the guarantee intact: reach x timing + scatter stays inside the
line at EVERY quality, worst case 4.06. 20% more reach, still impossible to
send out by aiming.
A FORWARD FLICK IS A SMASH. Up-screen is the far court, so flicking into it
asked for depth and nothing else — a direction with no consequence behind it.
It buys pace now (smashBoost, scaled by timing). Deliberately NOT distance:
solveShot still lands it on the same spot, so the shot arrives flatter and
sooner rather than longer. A smash you can hit out on a whim is just the old
bug wearing a hat.
THE FALL HOLDS. "the opponent should fall and then lie there for a quick
moment, the player stands up too quick." fall3 goes 0.30 -> 0.62. A corpse
that touches the ground and is instantly upright reads as a stumble.
THE CARD. Ten opponents, six of them NEW bodies off the one-sheet pipeline
(shambler, ball boy, steward, runner, groundskeeper, line judge), with the
club pro's own body and the brute woven in as 7 and 8. It is a ladder of
STAFF: the further you get, the further up the club the thing across the net
used to be. Narrative and difficulty are the same list read twice, and a test
walks all ten — whiff must fall every rung, names must fit the board's 8-char
slot, speed may zigzag by character but never regress.
Steeper per rung (speedPer .08->.11, pacePer .035->.05, flubKeep .82->.76):
"in general this is too easy now". With aimed returns no longer sailing out,
the player stopped handing over free points and the ladder had to earn them
back. The opening got SOFTER at the same time — 0.72 where the old first
opponent was 0.85.
THE UMPIRE WAS MUTED IN THIS MODE and nobody noticed. aside() refused during
any interlude; the match runs on a permanent one. So the single mode that is
literally a tennis match he is sitting over was the one mode he never spoke
in. Same bug shape as sendBoy, same fix. Six dry lines via say -v Daniel: two
on taking a limb, two on your blood, one when there is nearly none left, one
on felling the thing. asideEvery still gates him.
...and sendBoy had the identical bug, so the mop boy now comes out between
games to the FAR court, where one body has been bleeding through four wound
stages. Between games only, never mid-point.
The line judge took two rolls: the first cut to 6 figures in its last row and
_zsheet.py refused it rather than mis-slicing. That refusal is the feature.
59 tests green. Verified in the browser: SHAMBLER on court in its own body.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Oliver played it: "the auto aim just mean no skills involved at all. this
should just go away.. there is no penalty at the moment.. make some
variations of the position on the court and the color".
The first two notes are one finding. With the shot locked to the called body
it was unmissable, so the fault could never fire — there was no penalty
because there was no way to earn one. Both snaps are deleted. What replaced
them is one line: aimTie is 0 during a drill. That is not auto-aim, it is
removing the guess — the ordinary magnet lets a nearer body inside the same
cone steal a shot aimed past it, which is right for a crowd you are mowing
down and exactly wrong where hitting the wrong body IS the failure. An
unaimed tap now lands on grass.
And the variation:
- six colours (purple, white) with the court dealt three to five of them, so
which colours turn up and how many decoys there are are live questions. At
four out of four every round dealt every colour and only the order moved.
- PLACEMENTS: fan, cluster, column, stagger, wing — weighted, mirrored per
round, lanes shuffled against the bib order. column stacks bodies in one
lane, and the ball hits the first thing it touches, so feet matter.
- pips are dice faces now, shared by bib and HUD chip. A row of five dots has
to be counted; a die is recognised.
Measured over 30 deals: all five shapes, counts even, all six colours, and
the first target screened by another body in ~10% of rounds. Verified end to
end in the browser that FAULT and DOUBLE FAULT both fire.
26 tests, including a named regression for the auto-aim staying gone.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The late game is repetitive because the optimal move never changes: kill the
nearest thing, now. This is the first swing at a mode where it does — a
coaching drill where the umpire CALLS a colour sequence aloud while bibbed
bodies take their marks, and you must put them down in that order while they
walk at you. Uncalled colours are decoys you have to ignore. Two faults is a
double fault and the round is theirs.
Back room only (DRILL TEST, or #drill): this is a feel-test for one question —
tense, or just noisy? — so it keeps its own round count and touches neither
tennis scoring nor the run.
- voiceSeq: voice() drops a line that would start while the umpire is still
talking, which is fatal for a list. Decode first, queue at accumulated
offsets, and the anti-overlap rule is satisfied instead of fought.
- Four colours with PIPS as well as hue — red/green alone makes the mode
unplayable for ~8% of men.
- drawBib is a ponytail-marked overlay that knowingly breaks the sprite rule;
it is the thing to delete if the mode survives.
- BOTH target pickers snap (flickTarget and zombieTarget). Snapping only the
slingshot left fifteen tap-serves in a row scoring nothing.
- Contact costs the point, not the run — permadeath stays in the gore mode.
- startDrill disarms the ordinary schedule; updateDrill redeals and logs an
INVARIANT if anything empties its court.
Eight new tests (24 total) pin the ownership contract both ways, the call
beat, the win, the double fault, the un-winnable-round guard and the death.
PROJECT.md carries the four open questions for the playtest.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
- opening CPU beatable in a game or two (softer cap, more whiffs, rubber band)
- modals are for calm courts only; live-court news is a card now
- the transition howto is gone: a ghost hand teaches the pull, the toss,
the apex and the swing, each on the exact struggle it answers
- a shot barrel keeps your weapon and glows its slot instead
- switching weapons clicks, the live tile is unmistakable
- barrels come faster the deeper the run goes
- the umpire triple-tap cheat is deleted
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
zombie-mode: 5.9 MB of 24-bit WAV down to 287 KB. Its master is 982597 frames
at 48 kHz, so loopEnd is the un-round 20.47077 — the decoder hands back
20.4787, and those 7.9 ms of AAC padding would tick once a loop. Nothing in
assets/audio/ is a multi-megabyte WAV any more.
o_run1/o_run2 had no racket in either hand. The cause was the batch prompt:
opponent_run never said "racket", and its reference sheet was built from the
racket-less frames it was replacing, so there was nothing to copy one from. It
is a ref_only batch off o_idle1 now — same man, front-facing, racket in his
right hand — with the subject spelling out that he still carries it mid-stride.
The stride reads as well as the old one did.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
8.3 MB of WAV down to 768 KB, on a file that downloads on every page load
before the player has decided to play anything.
loopBed takes the full filename now, because the beds are a mix of .wav and
.m4a — fadeBed's key has to match it exactly, extension included, or a duck
silently no-ops.
It also takes an explicit loopEnd, and the theme passes 48. AAC pads its last
packet, so Chrome decodes this 48.000s master to a 48.0174s buffer: 17ms of
silence spliced in at every seam, once a loop, on the title screen. Trimming
the seam is what keeps the loop seamless.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
background-music.wav loops under the title screen and the court picker, ducks
out when a court is picked, and fades back in at the death summary — the end
screen is a menu too, so the zombie bed ducks out as this one comes in.
It starts at BOOT, not on the first tap, so the title screen already has music.
That needed loopBed to call audio() before its already-started early return: the
theme plays into a context the autoplay policy holds suspended, and the call
that wakes it is a second menuMusic() from the first tap, which used to return
at the beds.has guard without reaching AC.resume().
fadeBed also now records a duck for a bed that is still loading, and loopBed
starts that bed silent. An 8 MB file ducked mid-fetch would otherwise come up at
full level, seconds later, over the match. Same latent bug applied to zombieDuck.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The umpire is situational again. Each line is tied to the thing that justifies
it — a new variant appearing, the court filling, one crossing your baseline, a
game lost, a horde, a changeover — behind one shared cooldown, so several
triggers at once still yield one remark. The random timer pool is gone, the
interval went 26s to 55s, and ump_out_of_order, ump_let and ump_no_appeal are
deleted.
"Visually the ball is not yet at the player but somehow the player already is
hit" was real and measurable. The hostile-ball hit test reused the parry's
hypot(dx, dz*0.8), and weighting depth shrinks it: contact fired while the ball
was still 0.68 m up-court and drawn up around his head. It has its own
unweighted test now, and contact lands at 0.25 m with the ball on his chest.
The parry keeps its weighting — a racket sweep really is wider than it is deep.
On "everything is a tad too small": measured first, because higher-resolution
sprites are only half the answer. At RES 3 the player rasterises into 170
device pixels from a 112px source — upscaled 1.5x — while a far shambler is
downscaled to 78. So near bodies needed resolution and far bodies needed the
camera.
Camera: pushed back and lengthened (camZ 42->48, camF 580->760) to flatten the
perspective so distant bodies grow relative to near ones rather than everything
zooming, camY raised for a steeper look-down, horizon re-centred. Far shambler
26->30px, boss 39->45px, player unchanged, court in the same band.
Sprites: the original sheets were still in the repo at full resolution, so
nothing needed regenerating — IDLE_TARGET_H went to 224 and every sheet was
re-sliced. The sheet-to-output mapping was never recorded, so it was recovered
by matching sliced frames to existing assets by image signature: 58 came back
from sheets, the 29 without a confident match were 2x-upscaled to stay on the
shared scale, since a sprite off that scale renders at half height.
Tennis untouched: 50 hits / 0 whiffs. 45-game soak clean, all four chapters.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Five reports from Oliver's second playtest.
The parry was too generous — at 6 m of arm with a 0.34 s window the shot flew
into reach on its own, so any tap once it was vaguely close worked. 3.4 m /
0.2 s / 1.7 m reach now: a tap at 4.5 m is rejected and costs blood, 3.2 m and
in returns. The boss telegraphs in 0.5 s against the machine's 0.9 and throws
harder, because a boss should be worse than furniture.
His three balls were decoration: fanned ±1.9 m across space, so only the middle
one could ever reach you. They are a timed salvo now — three shots 0.42 s apart,
each aimed at where you are at that moment. hurtGrace still caps a whole volley
at one point of damage, which is what it is for.
Every chapter was the same boss. Three designs cycling now, each with its own
sheet, stride, throw pose, wrecked skin and wrecked-throw skin: the
GROUNDSKEEPER, the LINE JUDGE, the CHAIR UMPIRE with his chair strapped on. The
chapter card names them. Designs are data in BOSS_ART, so a fourth is a sheet
plus a row.
Healing announces itself with a first-aid tin and a red cross instead of a 1.4 s
flash. And 14 new umpire lines: ten sarcastic asides on a jittered timer, four
hooked to specific beats. He still has not acknowledged that the match became a
massacre, so he keeps officiating it.
Two traps found and written into the pipeline notes. Sprite loads now carry
?v=SPRV, because python http.server sends no cache headers and the browser
caches 404s — a name added before its PNG exists stays permanently missing for
that browser. And a scripted replace that silently didn't match left drawZombie
on the old hardcoded boss names while everything else moved to BOSS_ART; the
built-in fallback hid it perfectly, all four designs rendering as design 1 with
no error. Assert your rewiring edits matched.
Tennis untouched: 30 tapped points, 50 hits / 0 whiffs. 45-game soak clean.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Wire the new assets/audio/*.wav samples over the synth SFX:
- Ball hits: per-side tennis-player / tennis-opponent on serve & return,
now with a stadium reverb tail (same convolver as umpire/aww).
- Crowd: tennis-applaus on your points/games (louder on big moments);
tennis-aww when the opponent scores or you're eaten (reverb tail).
- Ambient bed: tennis-ambient-loop from first tap, 500Hz lowcut, low vol.
- Zombie music: zombie-mode loop when splatter kicks in (800Hz lowcut),
fades out for the 1:1 sudden-death duel and back in after.
- Headshots: random headshot-1/-2 on every zombie kill (killZombie).
audio.js: sfx() one-shot player w/ rate+reverb opts, loopBed() beds with
duck/fade, aww() wrapper, hotter reverb send on the umpire voice.
Also: normal opponent aiFlub 0.09 -> 0.14 (a little easier to beat).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Oliver's six complaints, addressed:
1. Opponent never came — a racket zombie now spawns on EVERY game you win
(if none alive); endHorde no longer double-spawns
2. No wave-cleared feeling — sweepCourt: at game end the surviving wave
collapses, every game gets a real beat (gameBeatT 1.6 / changeover 4.5),
and 'GAME N' announces the next wave when play re-arms
3. Serve-posture lockup during machine gun — root cause: any 'over' beat
expiring into setupPoint() -> pretoss during auto-fire (no movement outside
rally, no serving during horde/GUN). The over-expiry now returns auto-fire
modes to 'rally', never the serve loop
4. Forced bomb spending — specials commit ONLY on deliberate serves: flick
(or arrow-aimed keyboard serve) fires the tin, plain tap keeps it; serve
prompt teaches it ('FLICK FIRES THE BOMB - TAP KEEPS IT')
5. Auto-aim — free-aim: the flick vector maps to a landing point (length =
depth, up to 22m), zombies within zSnap 1.4 magnet the shot, otherwise the
ball lands exactly where flicked; taps keep the old auto-target assist;
flicks now also work at the toss apex
6. Zombies walking through you — option (a): touch is honest. eatenR 0.9
(brute +0.2) matches the visual sprite overlap
Phase 13 — SUDDEN DEATH interlude: court clear + un-dueled racket zombie +
about to serve -> 'Quiet, please. Play will resume.' / 'Sudden death.' One
point under REAL tennis rules (line calls live, the boss plays every ball,
spawns paused). Win (line call, double bounce, or regicide by any weapon) =
the next tin delivered on the spot; lose (out, or its return passes you) =
a game on their scoreboard + an instant 5-shambler surge. One duel per
opponent. New lines: play_resume.m4a, sudden_death.m4a.
Verified in browser: horde 'over' beat -> rally (lockup dead); game win ->
sweep + boss + beat -> SUDDEN DEATH chains naturally; duel lose path (GAME.
THEM., surge 5, scoreboard), no re-duel, fresh-boss duel, bomb regicide ->
tin on the spot; tap serve keeps stock, real touch-flick consumes + lands
at the flicked point, magnet snaps when near; eaten at 0.85m; tennis 11/12;
no console errors. PLAN.md/HANDOFF updated: plan v2 complete.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
- Camera shake (G.shake, decays over 0.35s; HUD stays steady via transform reset)
- One white flash frame (G.boomFlash overlay)
- Scorch crater: near-black stain the boys mop 10x slower — the lawn scars
- Hitstop 0.1 -> 0.18
- Umpire loses composure: 'Order. Order, please.' (new order.m4a), rate-limited
so bomb chains don't spam him
Verified: explode kills cluster of 4 (MASSACRE x4 chains), shake/flash set and
decay clean, 2nd bomb order-call suppressed, 1s of mopping erases blood (0.9->0)
but not the crater (1->0.84); screenshot mid-shake; no console errors.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
- Spawn director: gap and court cap scale with games finished (runGames);
game 1 is three lonely shamblers, late runs approach zSpawnMin/zMaxCap
- Changeover after odd games: 4.5s forced breather, no spawns, no serving
(melee still works), boys mop, umpire calls 'Time.' (new time.m4a)
- 6 games = a set; set end launches the horde (replaces the splatGames>=2 trigger)
- Zombies taking a game sets shameGame (phase 9 withholds the delivery)
- Eaten = the run is over: GAME, SET, MASSACRE summary with games/sets survived
and best run (localStorage); HUD shows sets in splatter (SETS·GAMES PTS)
- spentBall() helper so dead-ball paths can't clobber a changeover's beat
- T surface: splatPoint + explode exposed for verify scripts
Verified: game-1 cap 3 held 25s; changeover blocks taps+spawns then resumes;
6 games -> set+horde -> racket zombie; runGames=6 tempo ~6 spawns/10s;
eaten writes best; tennis regression 11/12 CPU returns; no console errors.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
A single shot that splatters ≥2 zombies now escalates: DOUBLE KILL /
TRIPLE KILL / MASSACRE ×N flash, louder crowd, and a new umpire line
(double_kill / triple_kill / unbelievable m4a, recorded say -v Daniel).
ball.kills tracks the streak, reset on every fresh shot (doHit + hitServe).
zombies.js imports cheer (now exported from gameplay). The splatter pace
cut is now TUNE.zPierce (0.75, was hardcoded 0.5) so a hot ball plows
through a lined-up lane instead of stalling on the first kill.
Verified via window.T: a low ball down a one-side lane kills 3→TRIPLE and
5→MASSACRE ×5 with escalating flash, streak resets on the next serve, the
three new lines serve 200 and match the existing m4a format, no crash when
the ball dies mid-streak, no console errors.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Win your first game and the applause cuts off mid-clap. The palette drains,
the umpire lowers his voice ('Quiet... please'), your opponent turns — torn
red polo, dragging his racket — and shamblers come over the billboard wall.
The scoreboard rewrites CPU to THEM. 'Play.'
- zombies.js: shamblers walk your way; quality shots splatter them (gore
decal + particle burst + wet synth splat), weak sitters only stagger them
back; one crossing your baseline is a point for THEM
- tennis scoring machinery keeps running untouched: fifteen, thirty, deuce,
and 'Game, set... massacre' on a game win, all in recorded umpire English
- ball boys mop the gore they pass (their destiny fulfilled)
- transition: palette lerp, scripted spawns incl. the turned opponent,
new recorded lines (quiet_dark, remain_seated, play, new_balls)
- moan ambience, drained splatter palette, all zombie params in TUNE
Verified: transition triggers on first game win, splat/stagger/baseline
scoring all correct, dead-ball flow feeds fresh serves, tennis mode
regression clean (6/6 returns, 6/6 points resolved).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
- 23 pre-recorded umpire lines (macOS say, en-GB Daniel) played via WebAudio,
works on mobile; speechSynthesis stays as fallback only
- umpire chair + two ball boys (generated sprites) dress the court
- court redrawn: doubles alleys, white perimeter border, clearly darker out area
- intro overlay with control symbols; first tap dismisses it and unlocks audio
- nginx now serves everything Cache-Control: no-cache so a reload always
revalidates and picks up new deploys
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
wuwiandClaude Opus 5.5