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>
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>
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>
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>
- Spawn mix (pickVariant): roster grows one type per set — runner from set 1
game 3+ (12% slot, at most one alive, shriek on spawn = the fairness contract),
brute from set 2 (15%), shield from set 3 (15%); classics fill the rest
- Runner ('f'): 3.2x shamble speed, faster leg cycle; new shriek() synth in audio
- Brute ('g'): hp 2 vs splat-quality balls AND pellets, 0.55x speed, 0.75m target,
pushback-immune, 0.9m eaten radius, dies to double gore + size-2 pile, towers
at 1.5x height
- Shield ('s'): blocks front balls with the chair (clank, ball spent), the block
drops the chair for shieldDown 1.5s — any splat-quality ball kills in the
window (z_s3 staggered pose renders); chair recovers after; always dies to
bombs, melee, pellets
- TUNE: runnerSpeed 3.2, bruteHp 2, shieldDown 1.5
Verified in browser: per-variant stats; brute soft-ball immunity, 2-hit kill,
2-pellet kill, size-2 pile; shield block->window kill->chair recovery->blocks
again; melee kills f/s but not the racket boss; tier-2 spawn mix over 1500
spawns = 14/15/8/63%; all five sprites render with correct scale+occlusion;
tennis regression 11/12; no console errors.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <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>
Win your first game and the applause cuts off mid-clap. The palette drains,
the umpire lowers his voice ('Quiet... please'), your opponent turns — torn
red polo, dragging his racket — and shamblers come over the billboard wall.
The scoreboard rewrites CPU to THEM. 'Play.'
- zombies.js: shamblers walk your way; quality shots splatter them (gore
decal + particle burst + wet synth splat), weak sitters only stagger them
back; one crossing your baseline is a point for THEM
- tennis scoring machinery keeps running untouched: fifteen, thirty, deuce,
and 'Game, set... massacre' on a game win, all in recorded umpire English
- ball boys mop the gore they pass (their destiny fulfilled)
- transition: palette lerp, scripted spawns incl. the turned opponent,
new recorded lines (quiet_dark, remain_seated, play, new_balls)
- moan ambience, drained splatter palette, all zombie params in TUNE
Verified: transition triggers on first game win, splat/stagger/baseline
scoring all correct, dead-ball flow feeds fresh serves, tennis mode
regression clean (6/6 returns, 6/6 points resolved).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
game.js (830 lines) -> 9 modules, native ES modules so still zero build step:
dom canvas handles (imports nothing; keeps cycles harmless)
config TUNE (live-tunable) + structural constants
state all mutable game state (G) + setupPoint/sendBoy
audio sfx synthesis, recorded umpire voice, reverb, speech fallback
input keyboard + touch, exports axes and takeFlickAim()
gameplay ballistics, swings, serve, rules, AI, update loop
render camera, viewport, sprites, crowd, all drawing
panel T tuning UI
main boot, loop, intro, window.T test hooks
Deduped into named constants: bounce tempo (was in 3 places), contact
height band, intercept zone depth, home positions, player bounds, toss
params, shot depths, pose hold time, sprite scale, actor heights. Also
extracted drawShadow/drawBall/expirePose from repeated code.
One intentional import cycle (input <-> gameplay), safe: both sides only
call functions at runtime, never during module evaluation.
Regression-verified in browser sims: point cycle, CPU returns 11/12,
assist contract 8/8, corner-winner gradient intact (0/12 perfect corners
returned, 10/12 center balls returned).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>