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>
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>