A chapter boss had no AI at all: it matched no branch in the variant chain and
fell through to the crowd's aimless wobble, so "the boss AI owns its x" was a
comment describing code that did not exist. Movement is now data on the BOSS_ART
row -- pace, shadow, surge, charge, bounce -- and bossAI is the one place it
happens. Every behaviour field is optional, so a row carrying only art behaves
exactly as a boss did before.
Three earlier drafts of those styles failed the same way: written as "walk toward
the player's x", which in splatter means arrive in four seconds and stand still,
because the player is rooted in pretoss for nearly all of a boss fight. Every
style now moves under its own power and only biases toward him. Measured over a
simulated minute each: 50-136 m travelled, none static.
Three new designs -- THE HEAD COACH (a 5-shot drill 0.14s apart), THE PHYSIO
(charges, and withdraws less than it charges, so it reaches you at 38s and that
is the fight's clock), THE SPONSOR MASCOT (gap 0, so the whole wall of five
leaves in ONE frame and is dodged rather than parried). Harder to kill: 16 -> 20
hp, 9 -> 10 per chapter, plus per-design multipliers.
Three new bodies: the ball boy (3 hp, 2 skins, from game 3), the bouncer (6/3,
game 8) and the roller man (9/4, game 15), each with a 4-frame walk and a drawn
two-frame lurch for every wound stage.
Three wound rules became one. The brute had a hardcoded stage array, everything
else a single skin behind 'abd'.includes(...), and the boss a fraction of hpMax.
The boss's rule reproduces the other two exactly -- verified: the brute still
draws z_gw/gw2/gw3/gw4 at hp 4/3/2/1 -- and keeps working when hp is not
one-per-skin, which all three new bodies need. So a multi-hit body is now a row
in config.ZWOUND and no code. bleed() reads the same call, which also gave the
steward the trickle his wound skin had always implied.
Fixes a real crash on the way past: killPlayer empties shots[] while the shots
loop is mid-iteration, so every remaining index read undefined and the frame
threw. The mascot's five-at-once volley makes it easy to hit; the shipped 3-shot
volley could always have hit it.
_regen.py gains two style blocks and a check tier. One constant used to say
"keep every colour exactly as the reference" -- right for a remaster, and it
fights every word of the subject otherwise. newart is for a new character, state
for the same character wounded or mid-throw; using newart for the wound sheets
licensed a repaint and got one, five came back with living tan skin. And the
detail gate ratchets against the file it replaces, so check: any exists for
re-rolling already-fine art to fix something the gate cannot see, such as colour.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Four things from the phone.
THE BAND NO LONGER BLINKS OUT. Cutting it at the instant of release made a
fast rally strobe — band, gone, band, gone. hitServe now records the arc it
actually fired (error included, so the ball tracks what it is consuming to
within a centimetre) and the ball eats it from behind as it flies. The aim
resolves into the shot instead of vanishing. It ends early when the ball does,
because a shambler swallowing the shot is a cut you want.
THE TARGET MARK SITS ON THE BODY. A ring on the grass pointed at the one part
of a shambler the shot has nothing to do with — the ball strikes anywhere under
1.9 m and the wound lands on the torso. So the mark rides at chest height when
there is a body to hit and lies flat only when the lane is empty. Filled and
washed out in the band's own colour instead of a hard 2px ring, which stops it
reading as a decal stuck to the lawn.
x_howto REDRAWN for the current gesture: thumb dragging back to a print, the
shot leaving as a curved band onto the shambler's chest, shadow dots beneath.
The old one still taught a straight arrow.
MACH_H 1.15 -> 1.55. Waist high read as a prop you could ignore.
Verified on a cache-busted build (the pane was serving a stale config.js, so
the first pass measured nothing): preview velocity and gravity still identical
to the fired ball, same flight time in the trail, unravel smooth to the hit.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The logo now sits exactly as it does on the title screen — same width, no menu
override — with 30px under it so the blood running off its bottom edge stops
touching the first button.
That button also had no top border to cut into: the crop was a BOTTOM band of a
taller plate, so it carried the plate's bottom border and nothing above. Both
plates are cropped to their interior now and CSS draws one consistent frame on
each, gold for START and slate for TUTORIAL.
Lettering stays live text and goes to 15px with wider tracking.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The tutorial was borrowing a court tile, the in-game how-to icon and a weapon
icon, none of which were drawn to be looked at. Four purpose-made 2:1 panels
now: the serve with a tapping hand, the slingshot pull with chevrons into a
zombie, the weapon rack, and the floodlit duel. They get the full card width
above Marvin instead of being squeezed into the text column beside him.
The menu wears the title logo instead of a Silkscreen headline, and the two
buttons wear generated plates — START GAME bloodied, TUTORIAL nearly clean.
The lettering stays Silkscreen on top: generated type is a lottery and would
not match the rest of the HUD.
Two things the art needed. Quantise the panels at 128 colours, not 64 — big
flat fields with saturated accents is where a small palette shows, and 64
turned the tennis ball beige. And find a plate by its BRIGHT BORDER, never by
the corner colour: one plate came back on a near-black margin, the other on a
transparency checkerboard that differs from itself everywhere and matched the
whole canvas.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The overlay is a four-stage machine now — splash -> menu -> {courts, tutorial}
— swapped by data-stage while the backdrop and card frame stay mounted, so the
live court never flashes through between screens.
Court tiles SELECT only. Tapping one used to start the match on the spot, which
gave you no way to compare the three and no way back out; START GAME and BACK
are their own buttons now. Headlines are 15px against the 11px body, so a screen
reads as a screen rather than as a list.
The tutorial is a data table: a Marvin pose, an optional picture already in
assets/, and his lines. Seven pages covering tennis, the turn, the slingshot,
the rack and the duel. Marvin is four new frames off x_boymop1 — waving,
pointing, shrugging, and clutching his mop in terror.
The theme no longer starts at boot. A title screen that plays at you before you
have touched it is rude, and the autoplay policy would have held it silent until
that first tap anyway.
Death returns to the menu instead of the title. The reload stays — it is the
honest full reset — and a sessionStorage flag is what picks the stage on the way
back in.
Machine-gun rounds are tennis balls, so they are drawn as balls and take the
perspective. A fixed 4x4 fillRect was exactly as big at the far baseline as at
your feet, which read as square confetti pinned to the screen.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Every roll drifts the palette and nothing measured it: a white headband on six
frames, pale grey shorts on the toss twice, brick-red shirts and brown shoes on
the swing all sailed past --tries. check: "same"/"loose" skips colour_match, and
colour_match is a global mean/sd fit far too weak to pull brick-red back to red
— a nearest-colour palette lock is worse still, it drags the duller reds into
the racket's browns.
So _regen.py measures three numbers and a batch opts in with palette_ref:
redness (r minus mean(g,b) over saturated warm pixels — brightness alone cannot
tell brick-red from red), shorts brightness (charcoal 61 vs the drift's 83), and
the near-white fraction that is the shoes and socks (brown drops it to 0.9%,
pale shorts push it to 7.9%, correct frames sit at 2.8%). Frames known to be
right cluster tightly on all three; every drifted frame fell outside on at least
one. It rejected five bad rolls in a row, then passed a good one.
The swing also kept re-inheriting its own drift: ref_sheet is built from
[lead] + the sprites being replaced, so it was showing the generator the very
brick-red frame it was about to overwrite. Copying a canonical frame over the
targets first breaks the loop — it passed on the next roll.
Swing is now a real backswing and follow-through (silhouettes differ by 1.0,
racket low behind vs up over the shoulder), both at full standing height, and
the toss and smash wear charcoal shorts again.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The "smaller when swinging or tossing" was an anchor bug, not art. _fine.py
scales a whole sheet so the --anchor frame is 224 px, and drawChar draws every
sprite at img.height/SPRITE_H — so anchoring opponent_play on the TOSS, with
arm and ball above the head, made 224 px cover the raised arm and shrank every
body on that sheet. o_swing1 was 162 px against a 224 px standing pose. Each
opponent batch now leads with a standing `ref` frame, which _fine.py anchors on
and _regen.py discards. Correctly anchored the toss is 278 px and the man is
full size; the swing is 221.
The receiver no longer slides 0.12 m side to side while waiting on a serve —
sliding a sprite sideways reads as skating, and the split-step swap to the run
frames (removed earlier) had already been the other half of that.
The idle bounce ball had one hardcoded offset for both men. They reach to
opposite sides of the screen — the player is drawn from behind, the opponent
from the front — so the opponent's ball sat out by his racket. dx and apex are
per-man now, and o_bounce/o_bounce2 were redrawn with a patting hand to put it
under.
Also: the opponent wears a RED headband, and a prompt of mine that said "white"
had quietly repainted it on six frames.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 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>
Three courts, picked on a second start-screen stage: CENTRE COURT (grass),
TERRE ROUGE (clay) and THE SLAB (hard). A court is a row in config.COURTS and
four PNGs — render() never learns their names.
Each row carries two palettes, because every court still rots: what "drained"
means on orange clay is not what it means on green lawn. Mow stripes became a
flag rather than a colour — recolouring the lawn and leaving the bands on still
read as grass. Bounce is two numbers copied into TUNE on selection, so the three
bounce sites in gameplay.js and the T panel stay untouched: grass skids low and
fast, clay sits up and drags, hard is the old baseline.
Per-court crowd sheets and ad strips. Each court's clap frame is generated from
its OWN seated sheet, not from x_crowd2 — pairing one court's crowd with
another's applause cross-fades between two different crowds.
The picker is a second panel in the existing #intro overlay, rows built from the
table. Last pick is remembered and comes up pre-highlighted; 1..N or Enter on a
keyboard.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Oliver, after playing the four-stage version on the phone: idle, then the racket
dropping on the pull, then the drive on release — "that's all, forget all the
others". At thumb speed the middle stages are never read, so they are deleted
rather than kept around: p_pull is the wind-up, p_smash is the drive, and both
come out of the photo-referenced sheet, so the whole serve is one drawing style.
The dead batches and the arm_left guard go with them. assets/_pose_ref_serve.png
is kept as the recipe: his photo sequence over our own sprites, which is what
turned a fifteen-generation prose argument into one generation.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Oliver's idea, and it is the fix for the process as much as for the frames: give
the generator the real serve sequence as an IMAGE and let it copy the poses,
instead of describing a pose in prose and re-rolling until it lands. One
generation — a composite of his five photographed frames over two of our sprites
— returned a magenta row of the whole serve in the game's own character and kit.
The four stages are sliced straight out of it, anchored on the standing figure.
_fine.py gets --defringe: its two de-fringe passes each eat a one-pixel line, and
a racket frame IS a one-pixel line — that is what had been leaving the men holding
a grip and nothing else.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The racket kept changing hands because the art disagreed with itself: p_idle,
p_bounce and p_toss held it in his LEFT hand while p_smash and p_swing used his
right, so every new frame copied whichever reference it was handed. The idle, the
bounce pair, the toss and the four wind-up frames are all regenerated with the
side named — drawn from behind, his right hand is the right-hand side of the
image, and only the racket HEAD crosses behind his back.
What separates the four wind-up stages is how far the racket has fallen, and that
needed the racket head pinned to a body landmark per frame — above his head,
beside his ear, between his shoulder blades, at the back of his thighs. Described
as "further into it each time" it drew four near-identical poses twice running.
They are wired late in the pull, Oliver's call: frame 1 owns the first half and
the three coiled frames are packed into the top half.
assets/_derive.py is deleted. Fixing generated art by mangling it afterwards is
always worse than regenerating; three guards in _regen.py turn the bad rolls that
used to install silently into automatic re-rolls — a portrait reference canvas
(the generator answered with a 2x2 grid), a non-magenta background (a green sheet
keyed away four racket heads), and a mirrored frame.
The bounce pair is one drawing from one sheet now, differing only in the free
hand, so BOUNCE_IDLE moved to his left side and was re-measured off the sprite.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Oliver, off the file browser: "the racket changes the hand in 3 and 4". It did —
the generator drew frames 1-2 right-handed and 3-4 left-handed. Both mirrored into
line with the rest of the serve (a back-view figure mirrors for free), and the
batch prompt now names the side, since the generator will not hold a prop in one
hand across a sheet unless told to.
The convention the rest of the art already uses: racket on the LEFT-HAND SIDE OF
THE IMAGE, free arm on the RIGHT — the side the game drops the bounced ball and
tosses the served one. p_smash keeps the racket on the right: that is the frame
where it has come over the top to meet the ball it is hitting.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Four new frames (p_pull1..4) turn the slingshot drag into the serve's wind-up:
racket above the head, behind the head, behind the back, fully coiled, picked off
pullFrac — the same 0..1 that sets the shot's power — so the gesture and the man
are one movement and the release snaps to the smash.
The two bounce frames are one drawing now. p_bounce2 is p_bounce with the free
arm sheared up 12px and nothing else touched, so the swap cannot flicker, and it
follows the ball instead of its rising phase; BOUNCE_IDLE was re-measured off the
sprite so the ball tops out under the palm. p_toss had the tossed ball drawn into
it — cut, canvas height kept, because the game scales him off img.height.
The runner: hip centres sat -2.0/+7.1/-6.0/-0.1 px off the sprite centre, a 13px
lateral jump at 12 frames a second, and Oliver's diagnosis was right that all four
frames leaned the same way and lifted the same leg. Frames 3 and 4 mirrored, all
four padded to one width with the hip on the centre line.
assets/_derive.py holds the three derivations, since "the same drawing with one
small difference" is the one thing the generator cannot draw.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Oliver spotted it before testing: a whole-frame mirror swaps the DRAGGED POLE
into the other hand as well as the legs. True for the one wound stage that still
has an arm holding something, so that stage gets a leg-band mirror about the hip
centre instead — legs swap, pole and stump stay put. The other three stages have
no arms and no props, so a full mirror is right for them.
The honest cost: a leg mirror leaves both feet in the same two places, so that
one frame reads as a leg swap rather than a stride. Written up with the fix that
worked for the shamblers (a passing pose, feet together) and the measurement that
tells them apart.
HANDOFF gets the session: what changed, the two lessons that cost the most (the
prompt sets the art resolution; the reference sheet is what the generator
copies), the rule that anything which must stay identical between two frames
belongs in code, and the four known limitations ranked for whoever picks it up.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
All four stages drawn from the healthy body in two sheets, so he keeps the same
bulk the whole way down instead of slimming as the wounds get worse — one arm and
his pole, both arms, ribs open, then headless.
The second frame of each stage is now a MIRROR of the first, not a generation.
Every attempt at drawing them moved the injury between the two feet — this is the
third fix for the same complaint — and a mirror physically cannot: the wound
stays on the same part of the body, and flipping a standing figure IS the stride
swap the B frame exists for.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Oliver had the diagnosis exactly right: the raised racket is part of the sprite,
so the toss and smash frames were 29% racket by height — and the game scales a
sprite off its TOTAL height, which shrank the body to fit. Measured 71% body
against the standing frame's 98%. Both are scaled so the BODY lands at standing
size and the racket now extends above the frame instead of squeezing him into it.
The bounce frames are redrawn too: racket in the left hand, right hand empty and
reaching down to the side the game actually drops the ball on, and no ball drawn
into the sprite at all.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The generator drew the second frame of that wound stage as a MIRROR of the first,
so the missing arm and the dragged pole swapped sides on every step — which is
the "wound on the left arm on one foot but not the other" Oliver saw, and it was
on the sheet, not in the frame assignment. Flipping the frame back puts the
injury where it belongs, and a horizontal flip IS the leg swap a second stride
frame wants, so the walk still reads.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The playtest list, art side. The generator had been copying the very frames I
wanted changed, so:
- The player is drawn FROM BEHIND again in every pose — standing, bouncing,
serving, swinging. He had turned to face the camera in the redraw, which is
also why he "looked at you" in different poses.
- The serve frames are back at full size. That batch had been anchored on the
toss frame, so the whole serve set came out about a fifth too small.
- The runner CHARGES AT YOU down the court instead of sprinting sideways across
it, which is what he actually does in the game.
- The brute's wound stages are drawn a pair at a time from their own A frame, so
the injury stops moving between the two feet.
- The bounce frames had a ball painted into them while the game draws a live one
on top — he was bouncing two. The painted one is gone, and the live one now
falls on the side the sprite actually reaches for.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The reference sheet is what it imitates, so building that sheet out of the very
sprites I was trying to change is why the front-facing player came back
front-facing and the side-on runner came back side-on. A batch can now name
`ref_only` — the frames it looks at — separately from the frames it replaces:
the back view is drawn from the one genuine back-view frame, the charging runner
from a front-facing zombie, and each brute wound pair from its own A frame so the
injury cannot wander between the two.
Also stopped colour-matching a REPOSE. Fitting a differently-posed frame onto the
old one's colour statistics is what greyed out the serve shorts; when the pose
changes the generator's own palette is the better answer.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Three from the playtest, all code:
Every side-on sprite is DRAWN facing left, and nothing ever mirrored them, so a
zombie walking right moonwalked — obvious the moment they close on you across
your own half. They face where they last walked now. The front-facing ones (the
turned CPU, the machine, a chapter boss) have no left or right and are left alone.
The racket zombie holds a position and only moves when the ball makes him, so a
time-driven walk cycle flicked him between two frames on the spot. His stride
steps off ground covered, like the brute's — standing still is standing still.
And the pack no longer stands on the body twitching for as long as the summary is
up: once it appears they break up and shamble away up-court. Measured — feeding
at 3s, dispersed to 3m by 6.5s.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The two that kept failing land as two-figure sheets — a dragged pole or a
held-up chair is wide enough that four to a sheet either merge into one frame or
run off the canvas whatever margin the prompt asks for. The chair spectator came
out the best of the lot (0.15-0.24 to 0.42-0.52).
Also caught x_boyrun3 and x_boyrun4 sitting at the old fidelity next to the two
frames of the same run I had already redrawn — my batch list only covered half
the cycle.
The roster now averages 0.341 inner-edge density across 111 character sprites,
against 0.237 for z_mach2. What is deliberately left alone: the chapter bosses,
the judge, the ball machine and the weapon icons — Oliver named those as the ones
that were already right.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Four more batches: the racket zombie's two wound stages with their stride twins,
the umpire and the ball boy's sprint, his mop-carry walk and his mopping cycle.
Detail roughly doubles on all of them.
Also stripped the last dozen key-colour pixels off p_die5's rim — edge pixels
only, because a racket's strings are legitimately pink and a blanket filter
would eat them.
The brute's wound stages and the chair spectator are re-running as smaller
sheets: four figures carrying a dragged pole or a held-up chair either merge
into one frame or run off the canvas whatever margin the prompt demands, so
they go two at a time.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Both full sets through the same pipeline: stances and ball-bounce, serve toss,
smash and both swing frames, the four-frame run, and the five-frame death. The
opponent's ten frames with them. Inner-edge density roughly doubles across the
board — the serve frames go 0.22-0.32 to 0.41-0.54.
_regen.py retries a rejected batch itself now (default three attempts). A
rejection is usually just a bad roll — two figures drawn close enough that the
slicer sees one frame, or a limb off the canvas — and re-rolling fixes it without
me sitting in the loop.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
assets/_regen.py plus a batch file: build a reference sheet from the sprites in
the repo, ask for a HIGH-resolution redraw, slice with _fine.py, colour-match
each frame onto the one it replaces, install. The point of the whole thing is the
style block — the old prompts specified coarse art and got it.
It refuses to install a bad sheet. Wrong frame count, any figure touching a
canvas edge (that is what clipped z_f1 in the first place), or a redraw that is
not measurably finer than what it replaces, and the batch is left alone with a
reason printed. Re-running a batch is the fix; three of the first eleven needed
it. The bar is 1.25x inner-edge density rather than 1.5x, because a sheet that
already has blood on it starts high and a genuinely finer wounded body still
scores a smaller gain.
Done so far: both shamblers and their wound skins, the brute's walk and its two
sets of wound stages, the steward and his wound skins, the turned CPU.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
I had been measuring the wrong thing. The complaint is not the PNG's size or its
upscale factor, it is how fine the DRAWING is — how many pixels make up the
figure, and whether there is room in it for teeth, fingers, seams and folds. On
that, my own prompts were the cause: every sheet this session ordered "every art
pixel is a big square block about 8 screen pixels across" and "flat blocks of
colour, no shading", which is a specification for coarse art. The generator
followed it exactly.
New recipe, proven on the runner's four frames: ask for HIGH resolution — "build
the figure out of 90 to 110 pixels of height instead of 40" — and enumerate the
detail it should spend them on (teeth, sunken eyes, individual fingers, tracksuit
seams and side stripe, torn edges, ribs, laced shoes, four or five shades per
material with hatched shading). Inner-edge density went 0.15-0.22 to 0.43-0.49;
z_mach2, which Oliver holds up as the good one, sits at 0.24.
z_f1 has been clipped on its right edge since it was made — the generator ran the
figure off the sheet. The new sheets demand 150px of empty margin at every edge
and it is whole now.
The rest of the roster is still the coarse style and wants the same pass.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Audited every sprite by detecting the art-pixel BLOCK SIZE each one was actually
drawn at. The set splits cleanly in two: 29 sprites are 112 art-pixels tall on a
2-pixel block — literal 2x upscales, carrying half the detail — against 200-224
for everything drawn since. z_f3 and z_bw are in the first group, z_chairt and
z_mach2 in the second, exactly as Oliver called it.
Regenerated at full detail so far: the player's idle pair, toss and smash (he is
on screen the whole game, and his own run and death frames were already fine, so
he was mismatched against himself), plus the two wounded shamblers and the
runner's three frames — where the wound skins were the worse case, since their
newly drawn second frames were full-detail and their A frames were not.
New pipeline step for it, assets/_fine.py: detect the generator's art-pixel grid
and snap to it, common-scale in ART pixels off a chosen anchor frame (so a smash
with the arm overhead stays legitimately taller), quantise back to the sheet's
own palette, and de-fringe the key colour twice — the generator does not always
return a pure magenta and the halo survives as a rim on a green court.
Still half-resolution, in order of how much they are seen: the brute's seven
wound stages, the seven opponent frames, the racket zombie's two wound skins,
and x_ump / x_boyrun1 / x_boycarry2 / x_boycarry3.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Two of the same mistake, both called out.
The wounded feet still did not move because a mirror cannot move them: flipping
the legs swaps WHICH leg leads but keeps the two feet in the same two places, so
the spacing never changes and the body still slides. Measured it — mirrored feet
sat at -35/59 against the original's -34.5/60.5. What a walk actually needs is
the PASSING pose, feet together under the body, so the gap opens and closes.
Drawn now for all three wounded skins: 75->65, 95->68, 79->69 px between the
feet. (The mirror also clipped the steward's hanging arm into a floating
fragment, which is what Oliver spotted. Gone with it.)
The death was one sprite scaled down, which miniaturises a man rather than
killing him. It is five drawn frames now — arched back, knees, hands, face down
in the pool, a flat heap — each genuinely shorter than the last (100/84/60/47/20%
of standing height, common-scaled off one sheet) and each drawn at its own
height. No scaling anywhere in the sequence.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The pair alternated but the feet stayed put: the generator had swapped the arms
and torso and redrawn the same legs. Measured it rather than squinting — the
lower third of the two wounded frames differed by 3.7% and 4.6%, where a healthy
walk pair differs by 60-70%. That is a body sliding, which is exactly what Oliver
saw.
Regenerated with the stride as the entire brief (33% for the shambler), and where
the generator would not move them, mirrored the leg band in place instead: a
side-on walk swaps its stride under a horizontal flip of the legs alone, same
pixels, same palette, no dice roll. The coated shambler and the steward are that
(28% and 31%).
Audited every wound pair the same way while I was in there — the racket zombie's
two stages and the brute were already fine.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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>
The last two bodies still shuffling on two frames. Both get their in-between
strides, generated against their own art and fitted per channel onto it.
The chair-down stagger was walk frame 3, which a four-frame cycle would have
walked straight through — it is its own sprite now (z_sdown), picked by state
rather than by where the cycle happens to be.
Also fixed a strobe that predates all of this: z_c2's racket was drawn BLUE
while every other frame of the same zombie carries a brown one, so it flashed
once per cycle. Remapped onto z_c1's racket palette.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
It was furniture in the most literal sense: bolted to one spot, three hits from
scrap, and when it died it bled and a ball boy came out to mop it.
- It trundles to a new spot every seven seconds or so, and CANNOT fire while it
rolls. That is honest (a rolling cart cannot aim) and it is the window you use
to close on it — but it also means it stops being a landmark you can ignore.
- Six hits, not three, and it wears them: dented at two thirds, split open and
sparking at one third, smoking where it stands once it is that far gone.
- It comes apart as MACHINERY. No blood decal, no gore mound, no mop boy — a
flash, sparks, torn metal and a column of dark smoke over a scorch mark. Smoke
is a new particle flavour that rises and spreads instead of falling.
Damaged sheets keep the healthy cart's footprint: the generator drew the smoke
plume into the sprite, which would have shrunk the cart as it took damage, so
the plume is cropped off and the smoke is drawn procedurally where it can move.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
A wound skin was a single still, so anything hurt froze on one frame and slid
across the court. Every skin has its …b twin now — the stride swapped, stepped
off the same clock as the healthy walk — for both shamblers, both racket-zombie
stages, and the steward, who had no wounded state at all.
The steward also died like a shambler at 3 hp, which made a bigger body read as
decoration. Five now, with a wound skin to show the second half of that. hpMax
is recorded on every body that has hp, so "hurt = show the wound" is one rule
instead of a per-variant constant to remember.
First pass at the wound frames was rejected on sight and deserved it: the
generator drew small figures with fine pixels on a GRADIENT background, and a
nearest-neighbour downscale to sprite height shredded the outlines. Regenerated
two at a time, drawn large, chunky pixels, flat background, hard black outline —
then fitted per channel onto each frame's own healthy twin.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Last body still walking on two frames, and the slowest thing on court, so the
lurch was the most visible. Same treatment as the player: the whole cycle
regenerated in one pass, then fitted per channel onto the mean and sd of the
frames that stay — the four wound skins — so a healthy brute and a wounded one
are the same colour (mean error about 1 of 255).
Its cycle steps off DISTANCE WALKED, not time, the same rule its wound lurch
already used: at brute pace a time-driven cycle is pure foot-slide. Four frames
over the same metre, so the cadence is unchanged.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Two frames is a lurch, and he is on screen the whole run — during a horde he is
the only thing moving. Regenerated the whole cycle in one pass rather than
bolting two new frames onto the old pair, so the four are consistent with each
other, then fitted them per channel onto the mean and sd of the frames that
stay (idle + swing): mean error under 3 of 255, so he does not change colour
when he starts moving.
The pick is frame-count driven, not hardcoded — the opponent has no run3/run4
and stays on two, and the cycle RATE is unchanged either way: more frames
subdivide the stride, they do not speed it up.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
A new ordinary body between the shambler and the brute: a stadium security
steward in a hi-vis vest, 2.15 m, three hp, a touch slower. Deliberately the
mildest thing in the advanced pool — no wound skins, no special rule to learn —
so he can unlock early (game 4) and thicken the ordinary crowd, which a mix of
two shamblers never did. A fifth of horde spawns come out as stewards too, so a
grown wave is not one body dying at one range.
Sheet generated against the existing shambler walk (assets/_sheet_dwalk.png),
sliced to a 4-frame cycle, so he shambles as smoothly as the crowd he walks in.
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>
Six reports from Oliver's first playtest of the boss build. Two mattered.
A boss sprite turned up in the shambler crowd because z_B1.png and z_b1.png
are the same file on a case-insensitive filesystem — writing the boss frames
silently overwrote the 'b' shambler's first two frames, and `ls` only ever
showed the original lowercase name. Restored from HEAD~1, boss frames renamed
z_boss*, and the rule is now in the asset pipeline notes.
The parry was unreachable, which killed the entire new mechanic: P.swingT is
only set in keyPressed's `phase === 'rally'` branch, and splatter sits in
pretoss almost all the time, so every tap aimed at an incoming shot tossed the
serve ball instead of swinging. An incoming shot inside parryArm now owns the
tap in every phase, with its own generous reach and window — this is a phone,
one thumb, against something aimed at you. The three fail cases (too early,
too late, no tap) are what keep it a timing skill. The swish no longer eats
shots: it runs first in keyPressed and was swallowing the very ball the parry
was about to return.
One flame ball killed a 16 hp boss, and that was a bug rather than tuning. A
flame ball is not consumed on contact (full pierce, so it can cut a lane) but a
boss is not removed when hit, so the same ball re-wounded it every frame. Boss
bodies now take a contact cooldown and flame spends itself on them. Chapter 1
costs 4 flame balls or 16 clean smashes, and bossHp goes 10 to 16.
The boss had no wounded state while throwing — correct, the wound skins were
standing poses only. New sheet gives all four damage states their own overarm
pitch. The ball machine's four painted rects are replaced with a real sheet,
idle and firing, keeping only the muzzle glow procedural because the telegraph
has to read at 20px tall. And the player's blood no longer sits on him as a
painted layer: live drip and the screen-edge wash, nothing else.
Tennis untouched: 30 tapped points, 50 hits / 0 whiffs. 45-game soak clean,
all four chapters firing.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Steps 4 and 5 of the late-game depth plan.
The ranged channel. A rogue ball machine gets wheeled onto the far court every
four games: it never walks, never crosses your baseline and never scores, so
it is a standing threat you choose when to deal with — the target-priority
decision the game was missing. Its shot is a real arc solved like a serve, not
a flat bolt, so it reads coming in and the swing window has something to meet.
Three outcomes: a swing inside the volley window returns it as your own ball
flying up-court (an extras clone, so "a parry is a weapon" cost nothing to
build), the panic swish bats it away, and letting it reach you costs blood.
The swish path is load-bearing, not politeness: in pretoss the player is
rooted and cannot swing at all.
Contact still kills outright — that stays a separate channel, and killPlayer()
is now the single death path for both causes so the run summary and the best-run
write cannot drift. Health is drawn on the man: procedural spatter at fixed
anchors, a live trickle, and a red wash from the screen edges. No bar. Healing
is winning a duel, which finally gives the duel a reason to be wanted.
Chapter bosses every ten games, with their own sheet — a colossal zombie
groundskeeper hauling a ball hopper, coming apart through arm-off, ribs-out and
headless-still-throwing. Chapter 1 is 10 hp and 2.7 m, chapter 4 is 34 hp and
3.67 m. It outranks the set and duel beats at a clear, because a boss walking
into a standing wave is unreadable. And it fixes the economy: a chapter-4 boss
costs 12 bombs or 100 rounds or 34 side balls against a per-type cap of 9, so
no single weapon can take one and a banked mixed arsenal is mandatory.
The racket zombie is demoted to an occasional opponent, as asked — appearing
every won game is exactly why he read as the boss.
Five silent bugs found on the way, all in HANDOFF: a blast deleted a 34 hp boss
outright (isBoss() exists to stop that class recurring), the machine's hp did
nothing because it fell through to the one-shot fallback, the boss both scored
and fired its card, the machine gated the hand-clear, and a boss died with a
shambler-sized gore burst.
Tennis untouched: 30 tapped points still 50 hits / 0 whiffs. 45-game soak clean
with all four chapters firing.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
All eight issues from Oliver's 35-game retest.
The freeze (1 and 6 — one root cause): the movement block, pose update
included, lived inside `if (G.phase === 'rally')`, so every 'over' beat and
every pretoss stranded the player mid-animation while the zombies walked on.
It now also runs whenever splatter is in any phase but 'toss' — 'toss' is the
aim, and the thumb is busy. Tennis keeps its old gating.
The rest:
- the mop boy is waved off the sudden-death duel and barred for its duration
- triple-serve clones inherit the serve's topspin gravity, so the wings stop
floating while the centre ball dives
- "Time." belongs to the changeover's own countdown, not to whatever beat
happened to expire while the breather ran
- the tutorial illustration is a finger pressing and pulling back now, not a
curved arrow that read as a scroll
- aiming holds the pretoss stance; the smash plays when the shot fires
- GAME N sits on the scoreboard permanently
HANDOFF records all eight as closed with what the fix was, plus two ways a
soak rig lies to you and why the CPU-return benchmark can't be reproduced
from the number alone.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
- The crowd sat in the dark, worst of all in splatter mode where you spend the
game. Both crowd frames get an identical gamma lift (means 30/14/39 ->
42/22/56) and the rot tint drops 0.5 -> 0.26. The curve MUST stay identical
across the two frames or the clap swap flashes brightness; _sheet_crowd1.png
keeps the pre-lift original.
- The splatter hint led with the tap when pulling is the whole gesture. It now
reads PULL BACK TO AIM - RELEASE TO FIRE, and after 1.5s of sitting in the
serve stance untouched a ghost thumb slides back while chevrons grow up-court
on a loop. Pull back, shoot forward is an inverse relationship that a line of
text cannot carry on its own.
- The mop boy has three sheets instead of two: the push cycle now plays ONLY
while he is stopped and working, a new carry sheet walks him upright with the
mop shouldered, and the run sheet stays for the tennis-mode ball fetch. He was
mopping thin air the entire way to the stain.
Sheet note: frames 2 and 3 of the carry sheet merged (a mop handle bridging the
gap), so it is cut at the true column gaps plus the thinnest column inside the
merged pair, then common-scaled — same technique as the brute stride sheet.
26-game soak clean. Serve returns 133/150 = 88.7% +/-2.6%, 30 human-tapped
points = 50 hits / 0 whiffs.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The freeze first: G.mgT only counted down inside `G.phase === 'rally'`, so
anything that moved the phase mid-burst — a scheduled duel calling setupPoint —
stranded it above zero forever. mgT > 0 is one of keyPressed's early returns, so
no tap could serve again, and the yellow shape over the player's head was
drawMgRacket's muzzle flash still being drawn. Fixed at the root (the clock ticks
in every phase, only the pellets are gated on rally) and semantically: starting a
duel cancels any burst, because the duel is tennis.
The mop boy now does an actual round: walk to the biggest nearby stain, stand on
it and push the mop while the cycle animates in place, scrub it out, move to the
next, then leave. Gore fades ~3.5x faster while he is stopped and working than
when walking past, so the stain dies under him instead of fading as he drifts by.
boyMaxJobs caps the round so a kill streak can't employ him forever.
Applause: the clip is 4.16s and always plays in full, but every cheer() passed a
shorter beat, so the stand sat down while it was still audible. Floored at the
clip length. New, much bolder clap frame — the re-roll came back brighter and
bluer, which would have flashed the whole stand, so it is colour-matched to frame
one per channel on mean and sd before quantising.
Net and umpire were both wrong since forever: netW was the singles-stick width
(10.06) against a court drawn to the doubles lines, so the net stopped 0.46m
short each side; the chair's near legs stood 0.45m inside the sideline. Both now
sit exactly on the doubles line.
26-game soak clean, no stalls. Serve returns 134/150 = 89.3% +/-2.5% with the
wider net (the bar is inside one sigma), 30 human-tapped points = 50 hits /
0 whiffs.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Every animation in this round gets real frames. The procedural squash-and-sway
on the wounded brute read as fake on sight, and that gait is where the comedy
lives.
- Each brute wound stage now has its own 2-frame lurch (z_gw/z_gwb, z_gw2/z_gw2b,
...). The generator gave every B frame a dragged pole that only stage 1
actually carries, so it would have blinked in and out each step — stripped by
keeping the largest blob, and where the pole touched the body, by cutting on
column density (a torso is dense, a dragged pole is a thin diagonal).
- Frames step off DISTANCE COVERED, never elapsed time — boy.dist for ball boys,
z/bruteStride for brutes. A time-driven cycle moonwalks the moment speed and
frame rate disagree, which is exactly what "he slides faster than the animation
suggests" was. Change a speed now and the legs keep up on their own.
- One boy, one slot. sendBoy no longer replaces a boy already on court: that was
the appearing and disappearing, since every kill teleported him back to the
wing mid-stride. New mess is appended to his round instead. He now walks for
10.5s a crossing, and there is a lot of mopping to do.
- The applauding crowd is a real two-frame animation (seated / arms up), swapped
per column on its own phase. The old "smooth wave" still shifted each column by
a FRACTIONAL dy, and nearest-neighbour resampling at a fractional y re-snaps a
column's pixel rows every frame — that boiling beside the HUD is what read as
the scoreboard flickering. The board art is 99.9% opaque; nothing was ever
showing through it. With the crowd calm the frame delta is now 0.0%.
Benchmarks: 136/150 serve returns (90.7% ±2.4%, the 11/12 bar is inside one
sigma), 30 human-tapped points = 50 hits / 0 whiffs.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
- Fire never spread in play. The flame ball's full pierce wiped its own lane, so
the bodies that would have caught were already gone. It now ignites everything
it FLIES PAST (TUNE.burnBallR), with a wider ignition and spread radius. One
flame serve into a scattered 10-wave kills 9, nine burning at once.
- Wounded brutes slid along like decals: every wound stage is a single frame and
the brute now spends most of its life wounded. They get a procedural lumber
instead of eight more sprites — translate + squash, no rotation, so the pixels
stay on the grid, and the amplitudes scale with the projection or the whole
thing goes sub-pixel at range.
- The "scoreboard flicker" was the crowd: the cheer bounce was per-column
Math.random() every frame, i.e. TV static, showing through the scoreboard art's
transparent ornate edges. Now a smooth per-column sine on idleT.
- Ball boys: mopping is the default in splatter mode now, and the boy is half
again as tall — at 1.2m he read as a distant speck. The running fetch-boy
survives for tennis, where there is nothing on the grass but a ball.
- Changeover 7s -> 5s, with the mop crossing timed to fill it.
- Save-to-homescreen: a bloody tennis ball, wired up as apple-touch-icon +
favicon + webmanifest. The Dockerfile now ships the manifest and gives it its
own MIME type via an exact-match location (a bare `types {}` block would have
replaced nginx's whole map and broken .js and .png with it).
Benchmarks re-run: CPU returns 67/72 serves (93.1%, above the 11/12 bar — a
20/24 sample in between was flub noise), 30 human-tapped points = 50 hits /
0 whiffs.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The three foundations first, since everything else leans on them:
- G.modal is the only thing that stops the world. update() early-returns on it
so no zombie steps, no ball flight, no spawn timers run while a popup is on
screen — you can read it without being eaten. Dismissal swallows the gesture;
the pointerdown dismisser is registered only on pointer:fine, because on touch
pointerdown beats touchstart and a shared handler cleared the modal and then
served with the same thumb.
- UI in config.js is the accent palette. The arcade primaries were shouting over
the artwork; the gore reds deliberately stay loud.
- Every canvas font string now goes through F(). Bare `monospace` resolved to
Courier — a slab serif — which was the "generic serif" bug, not taste.
Then: weapons are only ever WON. deliverTin() has exactly one caller now
(resolveInterlude('P')); the old game schedule calls the DUEL instead, fired off
proceedAfterClear() where the court is guaranteed empty. Four popups (splatter
tutorial with a generated illustration, first duel, weapon received, horde),
wCap 9 with the tin amounts tunable, a 5-hp brute that comes apart over four
wound skins, fire that ignites the neighbours and chains outward, a three-stage
death where you become the biggest gore mound on the court, and a 7s changeover
with a ball boy who finally has a mop.
New art: assets/logo.png, x_howto, z_gw2-4, x_boymop1-4, plus assets/_key.py for
standalone art (chroma-key + crop, no frame splitting, no forced sprite height).
Benchmarks re-run and holding: CPU returns 23/24 serves, 30 human-tapped points
= 50 hits / 0 whiffs, 26 simulated games with no exceptions.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Feedback batch from a phone playtest:
- Winning a game no longer auto-sweeps the court. The survivors stay and must
be killed by hand (no new spawns, no scoring during the mop-up); only once the
court is clear does play advance to the changeover / next game / set. Replaces
sweepCourt() with a G.clearing gate + proceedAfterClear(). "CLEAR THE COURT".
- Classic shamblers (a/b) now soak one splat-quality wound before they drop
(shamblerHp=2) — swapping to new z_aw/z_bw wound skins that bleed the thin
dynamic trickle plus a small impact pop. Only the runner stays one-shot glass;
brute/boss unchanged. Ball, pellets and triple side-balls all respect hp.
- Winning a SET shows a centered milestone card (a real pause) before the horde;
one reusable drawCard() now backs both it and the reworded sudden-death card.
- Player is no longer pinned to the baseline: free to advance up-court on
keyboard (bounded at the net); touch keeps the baseline (drag is the serve-aim)
and the horde/GUN burst re-brace there.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Serve:
- Reverts the single-tap auto-serve. Firing a ball still needs the two-stage
toss+fire gesture — but a tap mid-rally now RE-ARMS the toss (throws a new
ball up) with the previous ball flying on as a ballistic clone, so you can
toss the next serve without waiting for the last to leave play.
Blood:
- Wound bleed cut further: sparse (most frames emit nothing), thinner spread,
lower rise, short-lived, capped low — a fine trickle, not a spray.
- Repainted z_gw / z_cw1 with clean stumps and almost no painted blood (the
torso gash and shirt spatter are gone), so the dynamic trickle is the blood.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
wuwiandClaude Opus 5