Oliver: "daniel announcing is maximum annoying" / "don't let the rush in
position just let them coming from the back in steady speed.. try to space
them not too close" / "when one combination is done just let the new one in..
in a continuous stream that increases in speed and difficulty" / "the rounds
can stay, they should be continuous".
The round survives as the unit. Every seam around it is deleted: no walk-on
to a mark, no announcement beat, no between-rounds pause, no deal. Bodies
walk in from the far baseline forever and a round is drawn from whoever is on
court — finish one and the next is drawn in the same frame, off the same
rolling population. The bodies you were ignoring a second ago are the ones
being called now.
- Daniel is gone from this mode. Each colour has a pitch; a round announces
itself as a four-note figure in half a second (blip()). drillTones 0 mutes
it. The recordings stay in assets.
- PLACEMENTS is deleted with the marks — nothing rushes anywhere and nothing
stops, so there are no shapes to place.
- A DRILL BODY HOLDS ITS LANE. updateZombies homes bodies onto the player's x
past the net, so they arrived spread and bunched into a knot right in front
of you; spawn spacing cannot survive that. Their lane is the puzzle here.
- One ramp on TIME SURVIVED drives speed, spawn gap and round length. Speed
is stamped per body at spawn, so the ramp reads as newcomers outpacing the
ones already walking, not the court accelerating under you.
- The empty-court watchdog is gone and nothing replaced it: with a stream
there is no state to be stuck in. One line covers every case.
27 tests, rewritten around the stream.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
"the drill mode immediately goes into some horrible audio loop" — on a phone,
never on desktop, and that is the tell. Three of the four defects can only
happen on a phone, and every one of them is a rule voice() had followed for
months that my new function quietly broke.
- A SUSPENDED AudioContext HAS A FROZEN CLOCK. Scheduling four clips at
currentTime +0/+0.9/+1.7/+2.4 while the context is suspended puts all of
them in the past by the time it starts, so they fire on one instant through
a 1.3s reverb tail. Resume first, re-read the clock after the decode.
- A second call layered instead of replacing. voiceSeq SET voiceUntil and
never checked it. It stops the outstanding list now.
- ...and cancelling a list has to give back the time it booked, or the
replacement queues behind a list that will never play. Measured at 6.6s of
silence before the call the player is waiting on.
- The amplifier was in drill.js: the empty-court net redealt on the spot,
making the repair rate the frame rate — and every deal calls the umpire. It
goes through the ordinary between-rounds beat now.
Verified by tagging each decoded buffer with its source file and counting
start() calls: one drill_call, three colours, spaced, zero overlapping voice
lines. The earlier "clean" reading counted fetches, which proves nothing —
VOICE[] caches, so a repeat play never fetches again.
27 tests; the new one empties the court every frame for six seconds and
asserts at most one umpire call per beat.
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>
The gun, beacon, flamer and rocket fell silent the moment they cleared the court:
firing and steering were both gated on phase 'rally', and every beat raised by the
kill that empties the court (a point, a won game, the mop-up) parks the phase in
'over'. A burst is its own control mode for its whole len, like a horde — its own
clock is the only thing that ends it. Not fixed by forcing the phase back to rally:
a parked 'over' beat that never expires is how pendingHorde gets stranded.
The countdown moved off the tile's bottom edge (the rounded frame, and the bottom of
the screen) into the tile: the armed slot's well drains as a gold wash, clipped to
its own rounded path, under the icon and labels.
16 tests.
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