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 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 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>
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>
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>
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>
- Stand at the baseline: in splatter the player is pinned to the baseline
(a turret, side-to-side only) — the duel is exempt so it keeps free depth.
- Zombie 1:1 duel now plays like real tennis: no free-aim flick, no drag
reticle; lane aim + the toss-then-hit serve (gate on !G.interlude in
doHit/hitServe/keyPressed/canAimServe).
- Rapid serves: the two-stage reticle serve now fires mid-rally too — a ball
still in flight is banished to a ballistic clone so the next serve launches
at once. Serve as fast as you can drag-release.
- Wounded skins for multi-hit foes: brute (arm off) and racket boss (arm off,
then headless) swap by remaining hp, with a graceful fallback to the healthy
sprite. The headless boss is drawn a head shorter so the shoulders line up.
- Dynamic gore: the blood is NOT painted in — open wounds gush live particles
every frame (arm stumps + a neck geyser on the headless boss), absurdly, and
bounded so it self-regulates.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
wuwiandClaude Opus 5
