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>
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 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 pulse was drawStatic being told a height instead of reading one. _slice.py
common-scales a sheet, so a crouched frame is genuinely shorter — 211 px against
its neighbours' 224 — and forcing every frame to the same on-screen height
stretched it back up, so the body swelled and shrank once per stride. Worst on
the brute because it is the biggest and slowest. The rule already existed for the
wound stages; it now applies to every frame, once, which also settles the
shamblers and the steward (their cycles vary by up to 9%).
A chapter boss now dies in its own beat instead of under the card announcing it:
the world drops to a third speed for 1.2 s, the screen kicks, a shockwave ring
blows out through 90 extra particles and six stains, and the CHAPTER DOWN card
holds off until the pieces have landed — about 1.4 s, measured.
Cards can hold off in general now (`wait`). First cut only delayed the card's
countdown while still drawing it, which is worse than no delay: caught it in a
screenshot before it shipped.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Game 30 is both a set and the third chapter boss. pendingHorde is a LATCH: the
set arms it and the next 'over' beat to expire cashes it — and with the boss
outranking the set at that clear, the next beat to expire was the chapter card.
The wave arrived on top of the boss.
The latch is now left alone while a boss fight or a duel is running, so the beat
after the fight cashes it: the set still gets its horde, just not on top of the
thing that outranked it. Verified both halves — ten seconds of boss fight with
the latch armed and no spawn, then the wave arriving once the boss is down.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The run ended on the second wave every time: the gun fired 6 flat rounds a
second, hit one body each, and every shambler soaked one — while hordeGrow
made each wave longer and denser. Doubled the rate and scaled it with the
wave (14/s at one set banked, 21/s at four), gave a round 0.5m of extra
reach, a wider cone, and enough damage to drop a shambler outright. Raised
the spawn rate to match, so surviving a wave still leaves a standing crowd
on your half — that pressure is the point of it.
Also: he no longer carries a second racket at his hip while holding one
forward (the run frames are the racket-less art), the umpire stopped talking
over himself and saying "remain seated" twice, and a timed freeze now shows
what it is counting down to instead of reading as dead controls.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The portrait canvas is adaptive now. A fixed 270x480 is 9:16 while a modern
iPhone is taller, so width bound the fit and ~150 CSS px of screen went unused
at the bottom. Height is derived from the device aspect, and TUNE.horizon rides
with it — proj() places the court in absolute pixels, so leaving horizon fixed
just grew a dead green band between the court and the rack instead of moving
the court down. RES 3 to 4 for the extra pixels: an iPhone gives ~1125 device
px across and we were rendering 810. That is the first knob to turn back down
if the phone stutters.
The swish cooldown scales with how swarmed you are — 1.00s at one body, 0.47 at
four, 0.22 from fourteen. Oliver died on every game-20 horde because the wave
grows with hordeGrow while the panic button stayed a flat second; he chose
scaling the melee over shrinking the horde. The first version measured the
crowd after meleeSwipe had already killed it, so it counted survivors and
barely moved.
Winning a duel while wounded lost the weapon popup entirely: showModal never
clobbers an open modal, so the heal modal opened first and the tin's was
dropped. One popup carries both now.
And the mop boy stays off the court unless a stain actually passes the test
mopRound uses to pick a target. He was walking on, finding nothing reachable,
and walking straight off again.
Tennis untouched: 50 hits / 0 whiffs. 45-game soak clean, all four chapters.
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>
Steps 1-3 of the late-game depth plan, after Oliver's 50+ game playtest.
"Sometimes the racket zombie doesn't seem harmable" was real, not a feeling.
Three of the five rack slots did nothing at all to him and said nothing about
it: TRIPLE side balls skipped him, GUN and horde pellets skipped him, fire
couldn't ignite him. BOMB meanwhile deleted him outright ignoring his hp. All
of it now routes through one wound() with a TUNE.dmg* table, so damage is
proportional to the body and a future 20 hp boss needs no new code. Fractional
damage banks on zb.chip so whole points only come off hp — the wound skins
switch on hp thresholds. His contact radius goes to 0.7 m, because part of
"unharmable" was just missing him. Melee still skips him and that's correct:
he's on the far side of the net and melee can't span it.
The HP bar is gone. It was the only floating UI on a body, it was on screen
for nearly the whole run, and nobody knew what it meant — while the wound
skins already say the same thing in the language every other multi-hit enemy
uses. A one-per-run modal explains what he is instead. Skins and bleed anchors
now read a fraction of hpMax, since his hp scales with the run.
And the plateau: every difficulty dial bottomed out by about game 12, so games
12-50 were arithmetically identical. Body cap, spawn gap, shamble speed,
variant mix, boss hp and horde size all keep climbing now, calibrated to track
the old curve through game 12 rather than replace it. One deliberate exception:
shamble speed was time-based and maxed during game 2, so the early game is
genuinely gentler now — zSpeedPerGame if that reads flabby.
HANDOFF carries the full spec for steps 4 and 5 (ranged attacks with player
damage, then chapter bosses) including the decisions we settled, so the next
session can pick it up cold.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
m.in (0..1 over TUNE.modalIn, 0.34 s) is the entrance clock, ticked inside
update()'s modal early-return — the one thing that animates while the world
is frozen. Icon and title fly in from the right trailing two ghost copies as
a speed streak, the body lines cascade in from the left one after another,
everything on easeOutBack so it overshoots and settles rather than
decelerating politely into place. The dim washes in over the first third. A
descending noise sweep on arrival (swish is parameterised now — same six
lines of Web Audio, opposite reading) and a low pock as it lands.
Every x is rounded: a fractional x on a nearest-neighbour scaled image
re-snaps its pixel columns, which is the boiling that once read as HUD
flicker.
Dismissal is gated on the entrance: while m.in < 1 dismissModal swallows the
gesture but doesn't clear the modal, so a tap already in the air when a popup
appears can't skip it — and swallowing rather than returning false is what
keeps that tap from falling through into a serve.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Oliver vetoed the free movement between points on sight: he never walks
freely during play, so being able to only between points reads as the game
breaking, not as a fix. Reverted to 'rally' only, and the rule is written into
the settled-feel list so it doesn't get re-invented.
The frozen changeover is answered his other way instead — the dead wait too.
`held` in updateZombies stops their advance, their steering and the eat check
for the breather; they still bleed and burn, they just stand there, because
the umpire called time and it is still a tennis match. The path where this
actually bit: losing a duel scheduled on a changeover beat spawns five fresh
shamblers and THEN starts five seconds you have no agency in.
The stuck pose was never about movement — 'run' is the one pose expirePose
doesn't expire, and runT stops advancing outside the block, so a beat that
began mid-stride welded him to a single frame. Reset it and it's fixed for
every phase.
And he could walk off the screen in ordinary play, not just during the beat I
had added: P_BOUNDS.x is 6.5 m, portrait shows about ±4 m at the baseline.
The xVis clamp already existed but only applied during auto-fire; it now
always applies, floored at the sideline so every legal ball stays catchable.
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 draw meter is a fixed bar across the bottom, ~90% of the width and 10px
tall, with the kill notch on it. It was a 26x4 stub floating on the apron by
the player's feet, which is nothing under a thumb at arm's length. The serve
hint is suppressed while pulling since they share the slot. pullFull 95 -> 130:
at 95 every pull maxed out by accident, so the meter never meant anything.
- The aim magnet took the nearest body ALONG the lane, so a close shambler a
little off-axis stole shots clearly aimed past it. It now picks the best
ALIGNED body, with TUNE.aimTie of slack in which a nearer one still wins — a
straight-ahead lane still eats the nearest body first, which is the settled
feel. aimTie: 1 restores the old behaviour exactly, for A/B.
- Bomb radius 2.5 -> 4.2 (2 kills -> 5 in a scattered ten-wave), a 120-particle
eruption, a ring of thrown stains and a full-size pile. The blinding white
frame is now a brief warm bloom — it was hiding the very gore it announced.
- Rack tiles 22 -> 30 tall, and the touch band is padded above and runs to the
screen edge below. At 22 logical px they were ~30 CSS px on a phone, well under
the ~44 a thumb expects; now ~62.
26-game soak clean with heavy bomb use, arrays stay bounded. Serve returns
136/150 = 90.7% +/-2.4%, 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>
The chevrons were stepped along the SCREEN line at a fixed size, so they read as
a flat sticker over a 3D court. They now step through world space and take their
size from their own projection scale — near ones roughly twice the far ones —
and they fade IN toward the target so the eye is walked up the lane instead of
being handed a uniform stripe. The arrowhead scales with the target's own depth
too. (proj is a true projective map, so the screen direction stays constant
along the line; only size and alpha needed to vary.)
Hard shots now fly hard: serve pace is weighted onto quality (19 base + 22×q,
so 21 -> 41 m/s) instead of 21 -> 28. Two things had to give way for it.
Serve topspin was a fixed 1 + 0.35q, which meant a fast flat ball could not
both clear the tape and land on a target, so the net-loft loop throttled every
smash back to walking pace — measured 21.8 m/s whether you drew 60px or 95px.
TUNE.serveSpin 1.3 lets it leave flat and DIVE, which is what a smash is.
And the loft loop's margin was doHit's quality cushion, which taxed exactly the
shots meant to hurt. It's now sized to the real error it exists to cover: the
sim samples the net plane once a frame, so a diving ball can test below the tape
when the closed form clears it. Margin = descent rate × the dt clamp. A flat
drive pays almost nothing, a lob pays what it must.
Measured, target 20m out: 24.7 / 32.2 / 41 m/s for weak / mid / full draw. At
the net it's 9.6 / 11.2 / 11.6 — still the slow floaty lob, as it should be.
Ball-vs-shambler contact gets a crude sweep (radius + half a frame's travel),
because a 41 m/s ball steps 0.7m per frame at 60fps and 1.6m at main.js's dt
clamp, both wider than a shambler. Verified the full smash connects at both.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Three things from the phone test.
The drag meant two different things depending on invisible state: aiming from
pretoss, but walking the player around while the last ball was still in the
air. That "mode between the hits" read as a bug, so it's gone — canAimServe now
covers every phase of splatter, and firing over a live ball is allowed again
(the old one flies on as a ballistic clone). That was the mid-rally re-toss
that used to be the spam vector, and it's safe now because the brake moved into
the pull: a rhythm of lazy 30px pulls fires 100 shots in 30s and kills NOTHING
(the court fills up instead), while 85 committed full pulls kill 11.
hitServe never had doHit's net-clearance loop, so every shot at a shambler
hugging the tape died in the net — not balance, a missing loop. Both paths now
trade pace for arc until the ball is genuinely over, and the ceiling goes 8 ->
12 tries because a target right behind the net needs a near-vertical drop
(measured: clears the tape by 0.20m and connects). The trade is real: the loft
arrives slower and the walk-lead was computed for the original pace, so a lob
is honestly the less reliable shot.
And the camera now rises and leans back a little while the slingshot is drawn.
That steeper look is what makes the gap between the net and the bodies behind
it readable — the shot that used to be blind. Eased once per frame before
anything projects, since one sheared frame would be visible.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The ball economy made it harder in the wrong way: waiting for a ballboy is
friction, not difficulty, and walking with the finger was one gesture too many
for anyone to discover. Both are out — a spent ball hands you a fresh one
again, and the thumb only ever does the slingshot.
The brake moves into the gesture instead. The pull's LENGTH is now the shot's
power and nothing else: under TUNE.zSplatQ it merely staggers, at full draw
it's quality 1.0 with the PERFECT flash and hitstop. A lazy rhythm of short
pulls can't kill anything, so tempo stops being a strategy.
The pull's DIRECTION is a ray, not a landing point, which is the ergonomic fix
for having to drag off the bottom of the phone: distance to the target no
longer costs drag length. The first shambler standing in the lane eats the
ball, whether it's 5 or 21 metres away, and the cone widens with range so
distant lanes stay pickable. Full power now sits at 95px of travel.
Also gone: the free predictive auto-lock on a directionless aim (zombieTarget
returns null with no direction, and a bare hold no longer fires at all). Melee
goes back to cleaving the cluster — it's the panic button — with the 1s
cooldown left in as the brake. The reticle reads power throughout: cool blue
only staggers, hot red kills, the drawn band grows behind you, and the pull
clicks the moment it crosses the kill threshold.
Verified by simulated touch gestures: 10px cancels, 35px = 0.31 (stagger),
60px = 0.60, 95px = 1.00; the same 60px pull reaches shamblers at 5m, 21m and
diagonally; 22 serves in 30s, so the pace is back.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The slingshot serve didn't fix the gameplay because four things were free at
once: pure-hold auto-target with predictive lead, a hardcoded 0.62 serve
quality, infinite ammo with an instant mid-rally re-toss, and a melee swish on
every single tap that cleaved the whole cluster. Perfecting the pretoss/toss
rhythm beat the game; no skill required.
The ball is scarce now. A spent ball LIES where it died (G.loose, ringed on
court) and there is no serve until it's back in your hand: walk it down
(instant, and the only reason to leave the baseline), let a boy scoop it, wait
out TUNE.looseMax, or watch a shambler swallow it — the one real punishment.
Fire rate is a positioning decision instead of a thumb-tempo one.
Also: the far backstop rebounds a ball with pace left, still lethal on the way
home and volleyable (trySwing lets P re-hit their own ball in splatter); melee
drops to nearest-one-only on a 1s cooldown; and the mid-rally re-toss is gone.
With no ball in hand the thumb-drag steers your legs instead of the reticle —
without that, walking your ball down is impossible on touch.
TUNE.looseMax is the fire-rate knob. Measured: ~4s per serve standing still,
~0.4s if you go and get it. 600 taps in 10s now yield exactly one serve.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The touch serve drag now inverts: pull toward yourself to launch up-court.
The first pull past the deadzone starts the real toss animation (serveToss),
dragServe fires straight from the toss phase without banishing its own fresh
toss, and a held aim keeps the toss airborne instead of dropping. Render shows
an Angry-Birds dotted trajectory racket->target (red = zombie locked). Two-stage
tap serve, mid-rally re-toss/banish, and keyboard serve+arrow-aim unchanged.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <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>
- Bleed dialed way down — thin, steady trickles (a fine spurt from the neck
stump) instead of the gushing cloud; tighter spread, shorter-lived, capped low.
- Rapid serve is easier to reach: a plain tap MID-RALLY now fires at the
auto-target too (not only flick/drag/hold), so you can pump the screen while
the last ball's still up. Pretoss keeps its toss ritual; the duel stays tennis.
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>
Tins now accumulate on a courtside rack (cap 3) instead of replacing each other; a PLAIN slot banks specials for later, and GUN is a charge you pop for an auto-fire burst. Tap the rack or press 1-5 to choose what your serve throws. A fresh delivery auto-equips but never overrides a deliberate PLAIN, and the 1:1 sudden-death duel forces plain balls.
HUD gets real art: generated pixel-art weapon icons, an ornate Wimbledon scoreboard PNG backing the live text (no more code-drawn boxes on top), and a bundled Silkscreen pixel font replacing the system serif. Rack tiles get padding, count-over-label alignment, and an infinity marker on the ball.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Wire the new assets/audio/*.wav samples over the synth SFX:
- Ball hits: per-side tennis-player / tennis-opponent on serve & return,
now with a stadium reverb tail (same convolver as umpire/aww).
- Crowd: tennis-applaus on your points/games (louder on big moments);
tennis-aww when the opponent scores or you're eaten (reverb tail).
- Ambient bed: tennis-ambient-loop from first tap, 500Hz lowcut, low vol.
- Zombie music: zombie-mode loop when splatter kicks in (800Hz lowcut),
fades out for the 1:1 sudden-death duel and back in after.
- Headshots: random headshot-1/-2 on every zombie kill (killZombie).
audio.js: sfx() one-shot player w/ rate+reverb opts, loopBed() beds with
duck/fade, aww() wrapper, hotter reverb send on the umpire voice.
Also: normal opponent aiFlub 0.09 -> 0.14 (a little easier to beat).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
1 kill = 1 point made a tennis game trivially short (4 kills). Gate
player scoring behind TUNE.killsPerPoint (default 3) — K kills bank one
point, the rest just splatter. Opponent breaches stay 1-for-1, so the
asymmetry is where the pressure comes from. Live-tunable in the T panel;
set to 1 to restore the old behavior.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
THE FREEZE (root cause found): the game-winning kill fires INSIDE the zombie
update loop — killZombie -> splatPoint -> gameOver -> sweepCourt guts the
zombies array mid-iteration, the loop reads zombies[i] === undefined, throws,
and the un-rescheduled RAF chain dies: a permanent hard freeze. Crowded courts
(later games, brutes) make the mid-loop game-winner likelier — hence 'freezes
around game 3 when the fat zombies arrive'. Fixed at the root (null guards in
every loop whose body can cascade into a sweep: zombie walk loop, meleeSwipe,
explode, pellet + extras inner loops) AND made frame() reschedule RAF FIRST so
no single bad frame can ever kill the loop again.
Aim awareness: the reticle now appears the moment the thumb lands (mag 0 =
auto-target the most advanced zombie, red lock immediately). A pure HOLD
(>250ms, no drag) releases into the auto-target serve; dragging aims as
before; the serve prompt switches to 'RELEASE TO SERVE / RELEASE FIRES THE
BOMB - DRAG BACK TO CANCEL' while aiming.
Duel presentation: the interlude now opens with a 2.4s intro beat — serving
blocked, centered card (SUDDEN DEATH / ONE POINT - THE LINES ARE LIVE / WIN
IT FOR THE NEXT TIN), and the palette lerps back to the TENNIS colors for
the duration of the duel (duelLerp, 0.8s each way) — order visibly restored,
then the rot returns.
Machine-gun steering: absolute now — the finger x IS the player x, zero lag
(was sign-quantized velocity). Clamped to what the camera can see
((W/2-14)/proj-scale — portrait's world bounds are wider than its viewport),
keyboard steering clamped the same during auto-fire.
Verified: the exact pre-fix crash scenario (game-winning kill mid-loop,
9 zombies + brute) survives and sweeps clean; intro blocks taps then the
duel plays; hold-release fired at the auto-lock and won a tin end-to-end;
screenshot shows tennis-green court + centered card + GAME 2; MG jumps
P.x to the finger in one frame, clamped; tennis 12/12; no console errors.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Flick-to-aim was aim-by-faith — you learned where you aimed after the ball
was gone. Now, at a serveable pretoss, touching and dragging shows a LIVE
reticle (same mapping: direction + length = landing point); release serves
there. The magnet is finally visible: within zSnap the ring turns red and
rides the locked zombie (plus a marker over its head) — you see the lock
BEFORE you commit the tin.
- Context locked at touchstart: a movement drag started mid-rally never
morphs into a serve when the ball dies (sub-300ms releases still count
as the rapid flick re-serve — the Phase 1 cadence survives)
- Drag back home = cancel: no serve, the tin stays in stock
- Aimed (drag) serves commit specials at fixed 0.62 quality; the tap-toss
ritual keeps the PERFECT-timing power ceiling and the stock — placement
vs power is now a real choice
- Rally / horde / machine gun untouched: drag steers, flick swings
- Serve prompt: 'TAP TO SERVE - HOLD + DRAG TO AIM' / 'AIMED SERVES FIRE
THE BOMB - TAP KEEPS IT'
Verified with synthetic touch sequences: drag arms the reticle without
serving and it tracks the thumb; release serves at the marker with the bomb
committed; cancel keeps the tin; rally-started drags never morph; locked
reticle renders red on the zombie (screenshot); tennis 12/12; no console
errors.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Oliver's six complaints, addressed:
1. Opponent never came — a racket zombie now spawns on EVERY game you win
(if none alive); endHorde no longer double-spawns
2. No wave-cleared feeling — sweepCourt: at game end the surviving wave
collapses, every game gets a real beat (gameBeatT 1.6 / changeover 4.5),
and 'GAME N' announces the next wave when play re-arms
3. Serve-posture lockup during machine gun — root cause: any 'over' beat
expiring into setupPoint() -> pretoss during auto-fire (no movement outside
rally, no serving during horde/GUN). The over-expiry now returns auto-fire
modes to 'rally', never the serve loop
4. Forced bomb spending — specials commit ONLY on deliberate serves: flick
(or arrow-aimed keyboard serve) fires the tin, plain tap keeps it; serve
prompt teaches it ('FLICK FIRES THE BOMB - TAP KEEPS IT')
5. Auto-aim — free-aim: the flick vector maps to a landing point (length =
depth, up to 22m), zombies within zSnap 1.4 magnet the shot, otherwise the
ball lands exactly where flicked; taps keep the old auto-target assist;
flicks now also work at the toss apex
6. Zombies walking through you — option (a): touch is honest. eatenR 0.9
(brute +0.2) matches the visual sprite overlap
Phase 13 — SUDDEN DEATH interlude: court clear + un-dueled racket zombie +
about to serve -> 'Quiet, please. Play will resume.' / 'Sudden death.' One
point under REAL tennis rules (line calls live, the boss plays every ball,
spawns paused). Win (line call, double bounce, or regicide by any weapon) =
the next tin delivered on the spot; lose (out, or its return passes you) =
a game on their scoreboard + an instant 5-shambler surge. One duel per
opponent. New lines: play_resume.m4a, sudden_death.m4a.
Verified in browser: horde 'over' beat -> rally (lockup dead); game win ->
sweep + boss + beat -> SUDDEN DEATH chains naturally; duel lose path (GAME.
THEM., surge 5, scoreboard), no re-duel, fresh-boss duel, bomb regicide ->
tin on the spot; tap serve keeps stock, real touch-flick consumes + lands
at the flicked point, magnet snaps when near; eaten at 0.85m; tennis 11/12;
no console errors. PLAN.md/HANDOFF updated: plan v2 complete.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Deliveries cycle BOMB -> TRIPLE -> FIRE -> GUN (G.deliveries indexes the
ladder); one tin at a time, a fresh delivery replaces unspent stock. All
weapons stay one-thumb: the serve auto-consumes, zero new inputs.
- Triple serve (x3): one real serve fans two ballistic clones +-6deg (extras[]
in zombies.js — NOT the reverted rapid-fire: each fan costs a proper serve).
Side balls respect variant rules (wound brutes, clank off chairs, pass the boss)
- Flame ball (x3): kills on ANY contact regardless of pow, chair ignored,
full pierce (splatter pace tax undone), ember trail, white-hot render
- Machine gun (8s): horde auto-fire as a pickup — no serving, drag steers,
no assist, spawner keeps running, ammo bar drains on the HUD, then the
serve loop resumes
- HUD pips per type (black/yellow/orange) at the bomb slot; flash names the
tin ('NEW BALLS: FIRE')
Verified: ladder cycles across 5 deliveries; triple spawns 2 extras and the
fan kills flanked targets; pow-0.1 flame ball clears shambler+shield+brute in
one pass with TRIPLE KILL chaining; GUN tin arms at changeover, blocks taps,
streams pellets (kill in 5 frames), expires back to pretoss; tennis 11/12;
no weapon-flag leaks into tennis; no console errors.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
- Deliveries are scheduled by the rules of tennis: game ballChangeFirst (3),
then every ballChangeEvery (4) games; the tin lands at the NEXT changeover
(a due tin survives hordes and even-game endings until a changeover comes)
- Fresh tin = bombMax (3) bombs; boy run + 'new balls, please' + NEW BALLS flash
- Shame rule: zombies took a game since the last delivery -> NO NEW BALLS,
slate wiped either way
- killMeter/bombEvery deleted from state/config/zombies
Verified: delivery at game 3 (bombs 3); due-but-even games hold the tin until
the next changeover; NO NEW BALLS withholds and clears shame; bomb serve still
arms and detonates; killMeter gone; no console errors.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
- Camera shake (G.shake, decays over 0.35s; HUD stays steady via transform reset)
- One white flash frame (G.boomFlash overlay)
- Scorch crater: near-black stain the boys mop 10x slower — the lawn scars
- Hitstop 0.1 -> 0.18
- Umpire loses composure: 'Order. Order, please.' (new order.m4a), rate-limited
so bomb chains don't spam him
Verified: explode kills cluster of 4 (MASSACRE x4 chains), shake/flash set and
decay clean, 2nd bomb order-call suppressed, 1s of mopping erases blood (0.9->0)
but not the crater (1->0.84); screenshot mid-shake; no console errors.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
- Spawn director: gap and court cap scale with games finished (runGames);
game 1 is three lonely shamblers, late runs approach zSpawnMin/zMaxCap
- Changeover after odd games: 4.5s forced breather, no spawns, no serving
(melee still works), boys mop, umpire calls 'Time.' (new time.m4a)
- 6 games = a set; set end launches the horde (replaces the splatGames>=2 trigger)
- Zombies taking a game sets shameGame (phase 9 withholds the delivery)
- Eaten = the run is over: GAME, SET, MASSACRE summary with games/sets survived
and best run (localStorage); HUD shows sets in splatter (SETS·GAMES PTS)
- spentBall() helper so dead-ball paths can't clobber a changeover's beat
- T surface: splatPoint + explode exposed for verify scripts
Verified: game-1 cap 3 held 25s; changeover blocks taps+spawns then resumes;
6 games -> set+horde -> racket zombie; runGames=6 tempo ~6 spawns/10s;
eaten writes best; tennis regression 11/12 CPU returns; no console errors.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Survive a horde and a racket zombie takes up residence on the far court
(variant 'r', one per horde survived) — the tennis rally skill lives on
inside zombie mode. It reuses the turned-CPU z_c sprite (already holds a
racket) and a slimmed copy of the tennis AI: holds station deep, chases a
ball laterally at TUNE.racketSpeed (2.8), and returns your SOFT shots
(pow < zSplatQ) as live lastHit:'O' balls with quality capped at
racketQMax (0.55) and racketFlub (0.2) whiffs. trySwing gained an
optional quality-cap arg (defaulted, so tennis is untouched).
It's a mini-boss with TUNE.racketHp (3): only splat-quality balls hurt it
(-1 hp, staggers the ball; the killing blow runs the full splatter). Soft
balls pass through for it to rally; melee and pellets don't touch it. Its
return that gets past your baseline is a point for THEM; you can rally it
back with the existing player hit. A red HP bar floats over its head.
Verified via window.T: endHorde spawns exactly one (hp 3, z 3.5); three
splat hits kill it (2→1→dead); a pow-0.3 ball is returned toward you; an
'O' ball past your baseline scores for THEM; melee spares the boss but
cleaves the shambler beside it; tennis still 12/11/12 and a normal
shambler is still one-shot; renders with its HP bar; no console errors.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Oliver's feedback on the feel pass:
1. Rapid-fire serving was way too easy. Reverted splatter serving to the
proper model: a tap does the toss ritual (apex timing = quality), a
flick is a quick aimed serve. Dropped the multi-ball barrage and
removed the extraBalls plumbing (array, update, render, hooks). Melee
swish and zombie homing stay. If multi-ball is wanted back, it should
require a proper serve per ball.
2. The player was stuck in the serve/swing pose when a horde started
(the triggering shot's pose lingered) — startHorde now clears it.
3. A horde re-triggered immediately: machine-gun kills scored points, so
games were won mid-horde and the next kill after it ended won another
game → instant new horde. A horde is now survival: it doesn't score
(splatPoint skipped while G.horde), so it can't chain. After a horde
you must win a full game again to summon the next.
Verified via window.T: a tap tosses (not an instant serve) and the full
toss→serve→rally completes; melee still kills adjacent shamblers; pose is
idle/-1 at horde start; no scoring during a horde and the next kill after
scores 15 without restarting it; tennis 11/12, bomb consume, homing all
still green; no console errors.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
From Oliver's feedback round:
- Racket melee: any swish (tap) in splatter cleaves shamblers within
TUNE.meleeRange (1.7m) — a close-range survival tool. Works during a
horde too (tap = swish only, still no serve). The racket-zombie boss
(Phase 6, not built) is immune by design.
- Zombies home in on you: on YOUR half (z > netZ) they now drift toward
P.x instead of walking a straight lane; far half stays an aimless
shamble.
- Multi-ball / rapid fire: splatter is now a shooter — every tap/flick
fires immediately (dropped the toss ritual there), and serving while a
ball still flies stashes the old one into a new extraBalls array so it
keeps arcing and killing (cap 6). Refactored the kill into a shared
killZombie() with no ball coupling, used by ball hits, pellets, melee,
and extra balls.
- Machine-gun mode clarity: confirmed free-walk (drag/arrows move you,
auto-assist off) and tap-doesn't-serve during a horde; added a
code-drawn "rambo" racket held forward with a muzzle flash over the
player, and a splatter-specific serve prompt.
REVIEW on your phone — two opinionated calls, both easy to revert:
1. Dropped the toss in splatter (tap = instant quick-serve, pow 0.62).
Rapid fire, but no apex-timing quality/pierce. Want the toss back as
an option?
2. MG posture is a code-drawn forward racket, not a real body sprite —
good enough, or worth a proper p_mg sprite later?
Also: each rapid serve still auto-consumes a stocked bomb, so bombs
deplete fast now — flag if that feels wrong.
Verified via window.T: melee kills a 1.0m zombie and spares a 4.5m one;
a near-half zombie drifts x 3→1.9 toward you; firing twice leaves 1
stashed ball + a fresh serve (barrage screenshot); extra balls kill and
pierce; free-walk during a horde (x 0→2.7); horde-tap melees without
serving; tennis toss-serve and Phase-4 bomb consume still work; no
console errors.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Winning your 2nd splatter game (G.splatGames) — or triple-tapping the
umpire in splatter (forceZombies now calls startHorde) — launches a 12s
horde (TUNE.hordeLen). During a horde: the match ball is gone and taps do
nothing; the racket auto-fires pellets straight up-court at TUNE.mgRate
(6/s, ±4° spread, 26 m/s, flat, 1.2s life) and the thumb DRAG steers you
(auto-assist disabled). Zombies pour in at TUNE.hordeRate (2.5/s) from the
far baseline and the sides, ignoring zMax; the speed ramp still applies.
Pellets live in a new zombies.js `pellets` array, kill on contact (always
splatter-quality). splatter() gains a fanfare flag — pellet kills make
gore/piles/points but skip the multi-kill streak so a horde doesn't spam
MASSACRE. splatPoint() gains a quiet flag: during a horde the umpire only
calls a score every >2s (game-win lines always speak); the HUD score keeps
ticking. Horde ends → setupPoint() resumes serving, voice('quiet_dark');
leftover zombies stay for you to mop up. Eaten stays lethal during hordes
(a zombie reaching you ends it and clears the swarm). Pellets render as
2×2 yellow tracers with a ground shadow; serve prompt suppressed while
G.horde. window.T exposes pellets + forceZombies.
NOTE for Oliver: per spec every game won after the 2nd triggers a horde,
and games won by the machine gun mid-horde count too, so play gets very
horde-heavy after game 2 — flag if you want a cooldown or a knob.
Verified via window.T: cheat + 2nd-game both launch the horde (1st does
not); ~29 spawns over exactly 12s; pellets stream (7 in flight) and clear
a lane, building piles/gore; 4 points scored but the umpire speaks once
(rate-limited); horde ends cleanly back to pretoss; eaten still fires
mid-horde; regression ladder green — tennis 11/12, Phase 1 flick-serve,
Phase 2 DOUBLE→TRIPLE, Phase 4 MASSACRE ×4; no console errors.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Ball boys deliver a bomb ball every TUNE.bombEvery (8) splatter kills, up
to TUNE.bombMax (3) in stock (G.bombs / G.killMeter in state). The next
serve auto-consumes one (hitServe, splatter-only) — no extra input, keeping
one-handed play. A bomb detonates on first zombie contact (regardless of
pace) or, if it misses everyone, on its first bounce: explode() splatters
everything within TUNE.bombRadius (2.5m), each kill feeding ball.kills so
the Phase-2 fanfare escalates naturally, and leaves a crater — big stain,
size-3 pile, 40 particles, 0.1s hitstop, boom(). New synth boom() in
audio.js. Bomb ball renders black with a flickering orange fuse; the HUD
shows stocked bombs as black/orange pips by the YOU line. Both explode
sites set phase='over' so the serve loop doesn't stall on the killed ball.
Alternative delivery ideas Oliver floated but not built: umpire throws it,
or court pickup.
Verified via window.T: 8th kill earns a bomb (meter resets); a serve
consumes one and renders #111 black + orange fuse; a pow-0 bomb amid 4
clustered zombies kills all 4 with 'MASSACRE ×4', boom, hitstop 0.1,
crater stain (r1.4) + size-4 pile; a bomb that misses still craters on
first bounce; bombs never leak into tennis (mode guard); 3 HUD pips; no
console errors.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
A single shot that splatters ≥2 zombies now escalates: DOUBLE KILL /
TRIPLE KILL / MASSACRE ×N flash, louder crowd, and a new umpire line
(double_kill / triple_kill / unbelievable m4a, recorded say -v Daniel).
ball.kills tracks the streak, reset on every fresh shot (doHit + hitServe).
zombies.js imports cheer (now exported from gameplay). The splatter pace
cut is now TUNE.zPierce (0.75, was hardcoded 0.5) so a hot ball plows
through a lined-up lane instead of stalling on the first kill.
Verified via window.T: a low ball down a one-side lane kills 3→TRIPLE and
5→MASSACRE ×5 with escalating flash, streak resets on the next serve, the
three new lines serve 200 and match the existing m4a format, no crash when
the ball dies mid-streak, no console errors.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Input during the 'over' beat is no longer swallowed: a tap/flick while
G.phase==='over' (splatter only) resets inline and falls through to the
serve logic, so the finger is the only cadence limit. Spent balls
(lastHit 'X' after a stagger bounce) and hopeless balls (out of the
z/x bounds) are retired immediately instead of lingering until they roll
out. New TUNE.splatterOverT (0.1) replaces the hardcoded 0.25 over-timer.
The out-of-bounds z-bounds gate on travel direction so a quick-serve born
behind the baseline (P.z up to 26, heading vz<0 to the far court) isn't
killed on frame one.
Verified via window.T: flick/tap during 'over' serves same frame; spent
ball dies the frame it bounces; serve->serve latency 0 frames with
immediate flicks; tennis 'over' unchanged (2.2s pause, tap ignored);
tennis CPU still returns 11/12 serves; no console errors.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Field data (miss log) showed the dominant unfair miss: the assist parks
you on the landing spot, the ball spends the whole swing window below
minY rising off the bounce at your feet, and becomes hittable one frame
after the window closes. Root fix: the below-ankles rejection now only
applies to a DROPPING ball — rising post-bounce balls can be scooped at
any height (a half-volley). Feet-bounce taps go from ~0 to 19/30 winning
frames; 30 simulated real points now log 50 hits, 0 whiffs.
Also: swing-log snapshots record the same swing-timer value trySwing
tests (removes the one-frame misclassification behind 'unclassified'),
and tapping the scoreboard toggles an on-screen dump of the last 9 log
entries so live situations can be screenshotted from the phone.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Whiffed swings sample the ball's approach each frame and classify the
miss at swing expiry: tap too early (with ms), tap too late, ball line
wide, too high/low, out of reach. Balls that die on your side without
a swing log as PASSED with closest-approach data. Ring buffer of 50 at
T.G.missLog; the latest miss reason flashes on the HUD for 3.5s
(TUNE.missHud to disable). CPU serve-return benchmark still 11/12.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
splatT now ticks while in splatter mode and scales spawn speed by
1 + min(1.5, splatT/70). A zombie within 0.7m of the player ends the
run: gore burst, 'game, set, massacre', dark EATEN. overlay with final
games and a tap-to-restart (gated 0.7s so death-spam doesn't skip it).
Zombies keep shambling on the end screen but no longer score. Also
verified the two prior unverified items: quick-serve cadence (0.25s
between balls, flick = instant aimed serve) and flick aiming across
the net (far/near lane selection works as designed). HANDOFF updated.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
wuwiandClaude Opus 5