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>
The setup screen picks WHAT before WHO and WHERE. Three rows out of a table,
in the court row's own markup:
CLASSIC TENNIS is not the opener with the turn switched off and left there —
it is the mode the other two are built on, so it gets real match scoring: six
games with a two-game lead is a set, best of TUNE.classicSets is the match,
the board shows the sets column (hidden until now outside splatter) and the
bar under it says which set this is. The CPU stops rubber-banding and flubs
less: aiFlubLoss exists to get a new player PAST the opener, and a mode whose
whole promise is a real match cannot be won by an opponent that falls apart
the moment he goes ahead. No tiebreak — 6-6 plays on to 8-6. Marked ponytail.
That needed a second ENDING, the one with no corpse in it: G.done, the same
summary and gated tap as the death screen, its own words (GAME, SET, MATCH. /
BEATEN.) and the man still standing. The three endings now share one block
rather than three copies of it.
Caught by the first classic test: stats banked only the FIRST classic run of a
session. `banked` was cleared by the next KILL, and a classic match has no
kills in it at all — every later match was swallowed by the double-bank guard.
beginRun() is the honest reset and restartRun calls it.
ZOMBIE TENNIS from the menu is one line; the back room keeps its door.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Three asks. The placement ring: an aimed rally hit stamps a gold ring that
fades where the shot is going — flick, watch it bite the corner, learn the
cause. Not stamped for unaimed hits (marking scatter would teach noise), gone
in 0.8s (a permanent ring reads as a target rather than feedback).
The opponent's width is the ladder's third dial. Its returns scatter off
aimError x (1 - quality), which painted lines from game one. matchWideBase
2.1 keeps opponent one inside what an auto-run player can cover — measured,
25 returns all inside +-2.2m — and matchWidePer earns 0.4m per rung, so
line-painting is the late ladder. Speed, reliability, width: three dials.
The blood vignette replaces the temporary border. The old wash flashed 0.3s
and vanished, so between hits the screen said you were fine. A radial
vignette reads G.hp directly now — its depth is your damage fraction,
permanent until healed, hit pulse riding on top. Global: the hp channel is
global. Same no-HP-bar philosophy one layer out; at 1 hp the frame is
properly blood-rimmed and the court centre stays legible.
44 tests, 12 seeds clean.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
"the player is too weak in this mode. also the killing by smashing occurs too
often. i cant really control it. maybe obsolete? also the serving after the
first serve does not happen from behind the groundline".
matchPlayerHp 8 — the match brings its own pool. The gore mode's 4 was an
inheritance, not a decision, and a real game has rallies you deserve to lose
without the run ending.
Regicide is out of the match (kept in the duel, where any-weapon-counts is
the point of sudden death). In a full game every hard serve that happened to
meet the body was a free kill nobody aimed. A match ball never damages the
opponent — it passes through like a soft ball and racketAI plays it — so the
wound stages are exactly the scoreboard. That also made hp-per-opponent
meaningless, so the ladder escalates in racketAI instead: +12% speed per body
felled, whiff chance x0.82 per rung.
And serving resets to behind the baseline with real deuce/ad mirroring:
setupPoint's "serve from wherever you're standing" branch now excludes the
match, which falls through to the tennis positioning. Verified live: second
serve from z 24.3, x mirrored to the ad side, opponent unwounded by anything
but the score.
38 tests, 15 seeds clean.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Triage failed the only test that matters — "i think the normal player does
not grasp this" — and the lesson across four drill designs is that every
invented rule needs teaching, while the rules the scene already implies need
none. So the new mode is the game's own oldest rule: tennis.
MATCH TEST in the back room (#match). One game per opponent, real 15/30/40
scoring. Built on top of the duel machinery: G.match runs a permanent
interlude, which is already what makes serving tennis-like, hides the rack,
quiets the spawn director and wakes racketAI. The one change is in
resolveInterlude — a settled point feeds matchPoint instead of ending
anything. About 90 lines for a whole mode, because the deepest system in the
repo was already built.
The score is the body: a quarter of its pool per point won, floored at 1, so
a love game walks the racket zombie through every wound stage and the game
point fells it. Its points draw your blood — hp--, eaten at zero, matchHeal 2
per game won is how you last. Regicide is inherited: kill the body mid-game
and the game banks by hand.
The timing is drawn, per Oliver's ask: an approach ring around the incoming
ball that kisses a fixed inner ring exactly at the sweet contact distance
(gold inside the band), and an apex band beside the toss spanning the same
0.12m keyPressed scores as perfect, with a tick riding the live ball. Both
cues use the mechanics' own numbers, so the picture cannot lie.
Verified by autopilot: 7 games in 90 simulated seconds, opponents 1..8, pools
4/6/8/10, wounds tracking points exactly.
36 tests, 15 seeds clean.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The sequence drill tested nothing — the strip was always visible (no memory),
the batch was slow (no urgency), the aim was easy (no execution). A checklist
with gore, and Oliver said so: "not interesting enough to keep me playing".
Settled in discussion, he picked triage + streak. One rule: always kill the
body that would reach you first. Nothing is called, nothing shown — the court
is the puzzle. arrival = distance / speed down a held lane, and the roster's
speed spread means the answer is not the closest body: a runner at the far
baseline beats a roller at the service line. Court sense — and it trains the
exact target-priority read the gore mode rewards.
Wounds are free: only the kill is judged, so pre-softening a heavy while it
is third in line is legal and eventually necessary. The slack (0.9s) makes
near-ties legal both ways, or the rule is a coin flip. The streak is both
punishment and payout: x1..x5, a misread shows OUT OF TURN and resets it, and
nothing else happens — the queue keeps walking. Caught is the real setback.
Best score banks to localStorage; the world board can carry it if it ships.
drillMark draws a chevron over the queue head for playtest calibration. It
answers the exact question the mode asks, so it must be off in anything
shipped.
Deleted: the alphabet, the batch, the strip, the eaters. Shamblers are
first-class stream members with pts 20; a roller is 100.
30 tests, rewritten around arithmetic riggings (known speeds and distances)
instead of luck; 20 seeds clean.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
"remove the mob boy - make the normal zombies rarer and not so close to the
color gang".
sendBoy refuses during a drill, guarded at the function rather than at the
call sites — same shape as its existing G.interlude guard, so every present
and future caller inherits it. He is one more body crossing the lanes you are
reading colours down, and unlike everything else out there he is neither the
puzzle nor the threat. Measured: 0 boy-frames in 90 seconds. Gore no longer
gets mopped in this mode; the existing 40/30 caps are what bound it.
The eaters are rarer — every 12s falling to 5s, capped at 3 on court. At the
old rate they were a second crowd rather than an interruption, and a threat
you break off to deal with only works if breaking off is occasional. 8
arrivals in 90s where the old numbers gave ~13.
And they enter wide of the colour gang: best-of-9 lane sampling against the
bibbed bodies, the same trick the batch uses. Narrowest clearance measured
across 8 spawns was 0.91 m. They still converge on you afterwards — that is
what they are for — this only decides where they walk in, so they stop
screening the bodies you are trying to read.
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>
THEY KEEP COMING is a 2.4s 'over' beat again (warnHorde in beats.js) instead of a
flash raised on the same frame the wave lands, and the chapter boss walks on behind
an overlay — his name in red over ENTERED THE COURT — held for 3s by the new
self-dismissing modal clock (m.hold) rather than announced on a routine-set card.
startHorde returns a bool: if the court has been taken when the warning expires the
pendingHorde latch is re-armed rather than the set losing the horde it paid for. The
warning ticks on its own clock, not on the 'over' beat, so a beat that moves the
phase underneath it can't strand it (the mgT lock, again).
Three tests, 15 total.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
wuwiandClaude Opus 5