Commit Graph
25 Commits
Author SHA1 Message Date
wuwiandClaude Opus 5 c629ae1108 The ladder has names, the bodies play tennis, and the stats screen splits
THE SPRITES. The match opponent borrowed the turned CPU's art — a body drawn
to SHAMBLE at the camera with its racket hanging at its side, which is what
was playing tennis points against you. It has its own family now, 'r', drawn
off the LIVING opponent's poses: a ready stance, a shuffle pair and a real
forehand, at every wound stage, men's and women's — 20 frames, six batches.
'c' keeps its shamble untouched, because in the gore mode shambling is exactly
what the turned CPU should be doing. The pose comes from racketAI's own
`pose`, so the picture cannot drift from the behaviour, and a one-armed
opponent still plays tennis instead of reverting to a walk.

Two pipeline bugs found doing it, both fixed at the root in assets/:
- _fine.py keyed EVERY magenta pixel, not just the background, and the
  generator paints racket strings in the backdrop colour more often than not —
  so frame after frame installed a man holding an empty hoop. Background is now
  the region connected to the border; magenta left INSIDE a body is repainted
  pale grey rather than punched out.
- the flood fill silently did nothing, because Image.fromarray images are
  read-only and PIL's floodfill swallows the write error. .copy() plus a real
  error if it ever fills zero pixels.

THE LADDER (handoff slice 2). Rung N takes design N's name off the chapter
roster — the club's dead staff play you at tennis here and come for you in
gore, same joke twice — plus a personality that is DIALS, not new mechanics:
pace, width, flub and speed scalings multiplying numbers racketAI already
reads. A rung is a data row. Name plate on the walk-on, and the kill files
under the rung rather than under the generic body.

THE STATS SCREEN follows the mode split: BODY COUNT / THE LADDER / THE RECORD
behind a mode strip, each with its own three figures, its own roster heading
and its own footer. The weapon shelf and the roster hide in the modes that
have neither, rather than printing a line about something the mode cannot do.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-12 09:34:26 +02:00
wuwiandClaude Opus 5 c89d4a3ff9 Three modes, picked up front — and CLASSIC TENNIS is one of them
The setup screen picks WHAT before WHO and WHERE. Three rows out of a table,
in the court row's own markup:

CLASSIC TENNIS is not the opener with the turn switched off and left there —
it is the mode the other two are built on, so it gets real match scoring: six
games with a two-game lead is a set, best of TUNE.classicSets is the match,
the board shows the sets column (hidden until now outside splatter) and the
bar under it says which set this is. The CPU stops rubber-banding and flubs
less: aiFlubLoss exists to get a new player PAST the opener, and a mode whose
whole promise is a real match cannot be won by an opponent that falls apart
the moment he goes ahead. No tiebreak — 6-6 plays on to 8-6. Marked ponytail.

That needed a second ENDING, the one with no corpse in it: G.done, the same
summary and gated tap as the death screen, its own words (GAME, SET, MATCH. /
BEATEN.) and the man still standing. The three endings now share one block
rather than three copies of it.

Caught by the first classic test: stats banked only the FIRST classic run of a
session. `banked` was cleared by the next KILL, and a classic match has no
kills in it at all — every later match was swallowed by the double-bank guard.
beginRun() is the honest reset and restartRun calls it.

ZOMBIE TENNIS from the menu is one line; the back room keeps its door.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-12 09:27:49 +02:00
wuwiandClaude Fable 5 8307a05f79 The wind-up is a drawn bow, not a crouch: her pull re-rolled off his arch
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-10 21:55:15 +02:00
wuwiandClaude Fable 5 70642a0a3d Her serve is his serve: the women's pull and smash redrawn off the men's poses
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-10 21:51:44 +02:00
wuwiandClaude Opus 5 d57433ed2b A charge that passes, two strides that actually stride, a door in the corner
THE LEGS. Measured as lower-third silhouette difference between the two stride
frames: the groundskeeper, whose walk has always been right, is 0.80. The seller
was 0.017 — the same legs twice, which is why he hopped along on one of them.
Both sheets regenerated with the stride as the entire subject (one foot planted
ahead, the other trailing, and they SWAP): seller 0.42, champion 0.67.

Three things the champion's re-rolls proved, all of them the same lesson —
THE REFERENCE IS WHAT IT COPIES. Anchored on his own one-legged frame it drew
that pose again. Given a working walk from another boss alongside him "for the
legs only" it blended the two and returned a slim side-on walker, then a
pot-bellied man in cream. One character in the reference, one character out —
and pick the keeper by EYE, because the metric happily crowned the side view.

THE CHARGE. It rushed, then withdrew a fraction of what it covered, so it ended
the fight parked on top of you: dodge or die every two seconds with no window to
hit it, and nothing but a hitscan laser quick enough to use the window there
was — Oliver, "they come too close, they seem unbeatable". A rush now RETREATS
to its line afterwards, and to keep it from being toothless the other way (from
the band it ran out of clock 8 m short) the rush is TIMED rather than paced: it
covers whatever ground the retreat left in bossChargeT, so every charge arrives
and every charge has the same readable run-up. Measured over 30 s: five rushes,
each one reaching you, 13% of the fight in your face instead of all of it.

And the back room moved off the whole splash onto an invisible box in the TOP-
LEFT CORNER. Five taps in the middle of the screen — which is where your thumb
goes on the way to PLAY MATCH — now do nothing.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-09 16:56:05 +02:00
wuwiandClaude Opus 5 04ee0174ce Three more chapters, and at game 100 the champion returns everything
The roster ran out at chapter 6 and then repeated itself; game 70 got the
groundskeeper again, bigger. bossArt() now walks nine designs, one per chapter,
and hands out THE CHAMPION on every tenth — the floor(ch/10) term takes his
chapters back out of the count so chapter 11 opens the second lap on the
groundskeeper rather than skipping him.

  70 THE STRINGER — leather apron, bandoliers of gut string, racket frames on
     his back. He takes your lane and puts two dead-straight ones on it.
  80 THE TOURNAMENT DIRECTOR — blazer, lanyard, radio. `adds` is new: he calls
     stewards onto the court while you fight him, which is the one thing a boss
     fight could not do before, since the stage is cleared for it.
  90 THE STRAWBERRY SELLER — tray of cream, apron soaked red, ladle. A tank
     that sprays four at once and then comes for you.
 100 THE CHAMPION — torn whites, a laurel of strapping tape, the trophy still
     in one fist. `rally`: anything under splatter quality comes straight back
     at your head, so he is the one body you have to out-HIT rather than
     out-shoot. `phases` lays three rows over his own as his health falls — he
     holds the baseline and rallies, then runs the line drilling volleys, then
     drops to a charge — and each turn is an event: cry, shake, the stand up.

Thirty-six frames through assets/_regen.py, the mascot's three-batch recipe
(2 stride, 3 wounds, 4 throws). The trap that cost the re-rolls: a throw batch
references its own wound frames, so a wounds batch that fails leaves the throw
sheet drawn against the SEED — two of the four came back half groundskeeper.
Wounds first, verify, then throws.

And the physio, who Oliver reported "does basically nothing but move towards
the net": he kept 4.2 of every 6.3 m he charged, so the fight was always over
before he arrived. `withdraw` is his own number now (0.2) and he charges half
again as fast — measured, he is on top of you in 11 s instead of never — and he
drills three balls a cycle on the way in.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-09 16:08:57 +02:00
wuwiandClaude Opus 5 f3b0b791d6 Trade the tutorial for a screen that counts the dead
The menus were placeholders next to the art. Three screens now: a title over
an empty, dimmed, blood-stained court; a MATCH SETUP screen where each court
wears meters read straight off its own bounce numbers; and BODY COUNT, which
needed the game to start measuring anything at all.

stats.js keeps one capped array of per-run records — all time, last match and
seven days are three filters over it rather than three counters that can drift
apart. Kills file under the body AND the weapon: killZombie only ever knew an
index, so every damage loop stamps the cause on its way past.

The tutorial is gone. Marvin explained what the in-game modals already teach,
and his stage is where the stats live now.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-04 16:01:59 +02:00
wuwiandClaude Opus 5 14a1e5d261 Let the tour be a choice, and give her a body of her own
The court screen picks WHO as well as WHERE now: two tiles above the court
rows, men's or women's singles, remembered like the court is. No new stage —
three rows and a pair of buttons already fill a phone, so the tiles go side by
side and the tap count from splash to play does not change.

Everything downstream is one line: drawChar already built every frame name off
a single prefix, so SK() appends '_f' when the women's tour is picked and falls
straight through to the men's frame for anything without a twin. The horde, the
officials and the ball boys are shared — they are staff, not the draw — but the
turned CPU is not: a male corpse opposite a female player reads as a bug.

Her frames came back as a different woman in every batch — blonde in one,
auburn in the next, greyscale line art in a third — because each was anchored on
the MAN whose pose it was. "newart" repaints the character and "state" is welded
to the corpse palette, so neither could say "the same living woman, a new pose".
That mode now exists, and every batch anchors on her own settled frame.

The death is drawn to frame 3 and recoloured after it. The generator will not
draw a dead woman in any wording worth using; frames 4 and 5 survive that
because by then she is flat and then a heap of cloth, so they are the men's
drawing with the blue shorts painted into her white (see assets/_die_f.py). The
collapse still falls 224/159/117/103/43 straight through the handoff.

Her first bounce frames reached to the shoulder, which is a catching pose, not
patting a ball — redrawn low rather than bending BOUNCE_IDLE to fit a wrong
drawing, so both tours share one apex and the ball meets her palm.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-04 12:22:21 +02:00
wuwiandClaude Opus 5 25f915f236 Fill the rack yourself, and roll barrels out that fill it
The rack had five hardcoded slots where the index WAS the weapon, spelled out in
five places: SLOTS, slotStock, WDESC, drawRack's three parallel arrays,
deliverTin's w+1, and bare wsel === 1|2|3 / G.weapon === 4 tests across five
files. config.WEAPONS is the one table now, G.rack holds up to four {id, n} in
the order you GATHERED them, and slot 0 stays BALL. Everything reads through
slotId/slotStock/slotEntry, so nothing else knows how the rack is stored.

A fifth weapon is always allowed, per Oliver: it rides slot 0 as G.temp until
spent, then slot 0 goes back to the infinite ball. A barrel arms on the spot and
is spent quickly, so refusing it would mean a barrel you shot did nothing. And a
spent weapon LEAVES its slot -- with gathered slots, an exhausted weapon holding
one is a quarter of the rack you can never pick up into. (The old rack kept its
empties dimmed, which was right when a slot meant "BOMB goes here".)

Four new weapons, and they are all the ONE existing pellet loop. firePellet(w)
stamps the WEAPONS row onto the round -- r, dmg, hp, pierce, boom, ignite, col,
speed, life -- so the beacon cannon, flamethrower, laser and rocket needed no new
array and no new update; the break after the first body was the only thing making
a pellet single-target. All four go through the same isBoss branch, which is why
none can silently no-op on a boss the way three of five once did. Measured:
gun/beacon/laser/rocket reach past 16 m, the flamer is a ~6 m cone that ignites.

G.mgT stays the mode timer for all of them, so the eighteen !(G.mgT > 0) guards
across five files did not have to change. kind:'burst' auto-fires at its own rate
for len seconds; kind:'shot' holds the same braced stance and fires one per tap.

The barrels reuse the ball machine's shape: a rolling, shootable non-body. All
three of the registrations that fail silently are done -- blocksClear (loot must
not gate the hand-clear), the contact guard (furniture cannot eat you), and
hitR/GORE_MUL/zombieH. It scores nothing.

The pink had to become procedural. The chroma key deletes every pixel where red
and blue both beat green by 40, so a magenta drum and a magenta laser pistol both
came back as hollow outlines -- 19% and 15% solid against 50-56% for the icons in
other colours. The drum is grey steel with hazard chevrons and every bit of its
pink is the halo drawBarrel paints; the laser went electric blue. Both are solid
now (92% and 58%), and the rule is written down in HANDOFF.

tinTriples 3 -> 10 as asked, and the four dead TUNE ammo constants are gone --
nothing read them once the table landed, which is a panel value you can tune all
day for no effect.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-03 12:09:28 +02:00
wuwiandClaude Opus 5 4cda6bde76 Make the bosses move, and put six of them and three new bodies on court
A chapter boss had no AI at all: it matched no branch in the variant chain and
fell through to the crowd's aimless wobble, so "the boss AI owns its x" was a
comment describing code that did not exist. Movement is now data on the BOSS_ART
row -- pace, shadow, surge, charge, bounce -- and bossAI is the one place it
happens. Every behaviour field is optional, so a row carrying only art behaves
exactly as a boss did before.

Three earlier drafts of those styles failed the same way: written as "walk toward
the player's x", which in splatter means arrive in four seconds and stand still,
because the player is rooted in pretoss for nearly all of a boss fight. Every
style now moves under its own power and only biases toward him. Measured over a
simulated minute each: 50-136 m travelled, none static.

Three new designs -- THE HEAD COACH (a 5-shot drill 0.14s apart), THE PHYSIO
(charges, and withdraws less than it charges, so it reaches you at 38s and that
is the fight's clock), THE SPONSOR MASCOT (gap 0, so the whole wall of five
leaves in ONE frame and is dodged rather than parried). Harder to kill: 16 -> 20
hp, 9 -> 10 per chapter, plus per-design multipliers.

Three new bodies: the ball boy (3 hp, 2 skins, from game 3), the bouncer (6/3,
game 8) and the roller man (9/4, game 15), each with a 4-frame walk and a drawn
two-frame lurch for every wound stage.

Three wound rules became one. The brute had a hardcoded stage array, everything
else a single skin behind 'abd'.includes(...), and the boss a fraction of hpMax.
The boss's rule reproduces the other two exactly -- verified: the brute still
draws z_gw/gw2/gw3/gw4 at hp 4/3/2/1 -- and keeps working when hp is not
one-per-skin, which all three new bodies need. So a multi-hit body is now a row
in config.ZWOUND and no code. bleed() reads the same call, which also gave the
steward the trickle his wound skin had always implied.

Fixes a real crash on the way past: killPlayer empties shots[] while the shots
loop is mid-iteration, so every remaining index read undefined and the frame
threw. The mascot's five-at-once volley makes it easy to hit; the shipped 3-shot
volley could always have hit it.

_regen.py gains two style blocks and a check tier. One constant used to say
"keep every colour exactly as the reference" -- right for a remaster, and it
fights every word of the subject otherwise. newart is for a new character, state
for the same character wounded or mid-throw; using newart for the wound sheets
licensed a repaint and got one, five came back with living tan skin. And the
detail gate ratchets against the file it replaces, so check: any exists for
re-rolling already-fine art to fix something the gate cannot see, such as colour.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-03 11:45:35 +02:00
wuwiandClaude Opus 5 9a65a50cc4 Put a menu in front of the game, with Marvin to explain it
The overlay is a four-stage machine now — splash -> menu -> {courts, tutorial}
— swapped by data-stage while the backdrop and card frame stay mounted, so the
live court never flashes through between screens.

Court tiles SELECT only. Tapping one used to start the match on the spot, which
gave you no way to compare the three and no way back out; START GAME and BACK
are their own buttons now. Headlines are 15px against the 11px body, so a screen
reads as a screen rather than as a list.

The tutorial is a data table: a Marvin pose, an optional picture already in
assets/, and his lines. Seven pages covering tennis, the turn, the slingshot,
the rack and the duel. Marvin is four new frames off x_boymop1 — waving,
pointing, shrugging, and clutching his mop in terror.

The theme no longer starts at boot. A title screen that plays at you before you
have touched it is rude, and the autoplay policy would have held it silent until
that first tap anyway.

Death returns to the menu instead of the title. The reload stays — it is the
honest full reset — and a sessionStorage flag is what picks the stage on the way
back in.

Machine-gun rounds are tennis balls, so they are drawn as balls and take the
perspective. A fixed 4x4 fillRect was exactly as big at the far baseline as at
your feet, which read as square confetti pinned to the screen.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-01 13:31:00 +02:00
wuwiandClaude Opus 5 af30db2ff3 Make the regen pipeline check the kit, and fix the swing and toss
Every roll drifts the palette and nothing measured it: a white headband on six
frames, pale grey shorts on the toss twice, brick-red shirts and brown shoes on
the swing all sailed past --tries. check: "same"/"loose" skips colour_match, and
colour_match is a global mean/sd fit far too weak to pull brick-red back to red
— a nearest-colour palette lock is worse still, it drags the duller reds into
the racket's browns.

So _regen.py measures three numbers and a batch opts in with palette_ref:
redness (r minus mean(g,b) over saturated warm pixels — brightness alone cannot
tell brick-red from red), shorts brightness (charcoal 61 vs the drift's 83), and
the near-white fraction that is the shoes and socks (brown drops it to 0.9%,
pale shorts push it to 7.9%, correct frames sit at 2.8%). Frames known to be
right cluster tightly on all three; every drifted frame fell outside on at least
one. It rejected five bad rolls in a row, then passed a good one.

The swing also kept re-inheriting its own drift: ref_sheet is built from
[lead] + the sprites being replaced, so it was showing the generator the very
brick-red frame it was about to overwrite. Copying a canonical frame over the
targets first breaks the loop — it passed on the next roll.

Swing is now a real backswing and follow-through (silhouettes differ by 1.0,
racket low behind vs up over the shoulder), both at full standing height, and
the toss and smash wear charcoal shorts again.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-01 11:51:27 +02:00
wuwiandClaude Opus 5 494bab1b69 Stop the opponent shrinking, skating and sprinting on the spot
The "smaller when swinging or tossing" was an anchor bug, not art. _fine.py
scales a whole sheet so the --anchor frame is 224 px, and drawChar draws every
sprite at img.height/SPRITE_H — so anchoring opponent_play on the TOSS, with
arm and ball above the head, made 224 px cover the raised arm and shrank every
body on that sheet. o_swing1 was 162 px against a 224 px standing pose. Each
opponent batch now leads with a standing `ref` frame, which _fine.py anchors on
and _regen.py discards. Correctly anchored the toss is 278 px and the man is
full size; the swing is 221.

The receiver no longer slides 0.12 m side to side while waiting on a serve —
sliding a sprite sideways reads as skating, and the split-step swap to the run
frames (removed earlier) had already been the other half of that.

The idle bounce ball had one hardcoded offset for both men. They reach to
opposite sides of the screen — the player is drawn from behind, the opponent
from the front — so the opponent's ball sat out by his racket. dx and apex are
per-man now, and o_bounce/o_bounce2 were redrawn with a patting hand to put it
under.

Also: the opponent wears a RED headband, and a prompt of mine that said "white"
had quietly repainted it on six frames.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-01 11:37:16 +02:00
wuwiandClaude Opus 5 cd1c7a0cd8 Encode the splatter bed too, and give the opponent his racket back
zombie-mode: 5.9 MB of 24-bit WAV down to 287 KB. Its master is 982597 frames
at 48 kHz, so loopEnd is the un-round 20.47077 — the decoder hands back
20.4787, and those 7.9 ms of AAC padding would tick once a loop. Nothing in
assets/audio/ is a multi-megabyte WAV any more.

o_run1/o_run2 had no racket in either hand. The cause was the batch prompt:
opponent_run never said "racket", and its reference sheet was built from the
racket-less frames it was replacing, so there was nothing to copy one from. It
is a ref_only batch off o_idle1 now — same man, front-facing, racket in his
right hand — with the subject spelling out that he still carries it mid-stride.
The stride reads as well as the old one did.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-01 10:55:18 +02:00
wuwiandClaude Opus 5 6378ff2a1b Cut the serve down to three poses
Oliver, after playing the four-stage version on the phone: idle, then the racket
dropping on the pull, then the drive on release — "that's all, forget all the
others". At thumb speed the middle stages are never read, so they are deleted
rather than kept around: p_pull is the wind-up, p_smash is the drive, and both
come out of the photo-referenced sheet, so the whole serve is one drawing style.

The dead batches and the arm_left guard go with them. assets/_pose_ref_serve.png
is kept as the recipe: his photo sequence over our own sprites, which is what
turned a fifteen-generation prose argument into one generation.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-01 01:09:57 +02:00
wuwiandClaude Opus 5 bcff17812f Draw the whole serve right-handed, and let the pull wind it up
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>
2026-08-01 00:49:28 +02:00
wuwiandClaude Opus 5 231cd8650a Keep the racket in one hand through the wind-up
Oliver, off the file browser: "the racket changes the hand in 3 and 4". It did —
the generator drew frames 1-2 right-handed and 3-4 left-handed. Both mirrored into
line with the rest of the serve (a back-view figure mirrors for free), and the
batch prompt now names the side, since the generator will not hold a prop in one
hand across a sheet unless told to.

The convention the rest of the art already uses: racket on the LEFT-HAND SIDE OF
THE IMAGE, free arm on the RIGHT — the side the game drops the bounced ball and
tosses the served one. p_smash keeps the racket on the right: that is the frame
where it has come over the top to meet the ball it is hitting.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-07-31 23:54:27 +02:00
wuwiandClaude Opus 5 b1f8ea3240 Wind the serve up with the pull, and stop the frames flickering
Four new frames (p_pull1..4) turn the slingshot drag into the serve's wind-up:
racket above the head, behind the head, behind the back, fully coiled, picked off
pullFrac — the same 0..1 that sets the shot's power — so the gesture and the man
are one movement and the release snaps to the smash.

The two bounce frames are one drawing now. p_bounce2 is p_bounce with the free
arm sheared up 12px and nothing else touched, so the swap cannot flicker, and it
follows the ball instead of its rising phase; BOUNCE_IDLE was re-measured off the
sprite so the ball tops out under the palm. p_toss had the tossed ball drawn into
it — cut, canvas height kept, because the game scales him off img.height.

The runner: hip centres sat -2.0/+7.1/-6.0/-0.1 px off the sprite centre, a 13px
lateral jump at 12 frames a second, and Oliver's diagnosis was right that all four
frames leaned the same way and lifted the same leg. Frames 3 and 4 mirrored, all
four padded to one width with the hip on the centre line.

assets/_derive.py holds the three derivations, since "the same drawing with one
small difference" is the one thing the generator cannot draw.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-07-31 23:51:30 +02:00
wuwiandClaude Opus 5 86c08bf4b1 Serve at full size, and bounce the ball with the free hand
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>
2026-07-31 23:05:18 +02:00
wuwiandClaude Opus 5 e4c59e2c26 Turn the player around, point the runner at you, match the wounds
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>
2026-07-31 22:46:19 +02:00
wuwiandClaude Opus 5 67a410e707 Show the generator what to copy, not what to replace
The reference sheet is what it imitates, so building that sheet out of the very
sprites I was trying to change is why the front-facing player came back
front-facing and the side-on runner came back side-on. A batch can now name
`ref_only` — the frames it looks at — separately from the frames it replaces:
the back view is drawn from the one genuine back-view frame, the charging runner
from a front-facing zombie, and each brute wound pair from its own A frame so the
injury cannot wander between the two.

Also stopped colour-matching a REPOSE. Fitting a differently-posed frame onto the
old one's colour statistics is what greyed out the serve shorts; when the pose
changes the generator's own palette is the better answer.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-07-31 22:36:13 +02:00
wuwiandClaude Opus 5 01498eddad Turn the bodies around, calm the racket zombie, break up the pack
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>
2026-07-31 22:24:11 +02:00
wuwiandClaude Opus 5 7edd623372 Finish the roster: brute wounds, the chair spectator, the last boy frames
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>
2026-07-31 21:57:26 +02:00
wuwiandClaude Opus 5 79ff783033 Redraw the racket zombie's wounds, the umpire and the ball boys
Four more batches: the racket zombie's two wound stages with their stride twins,
the umpire and the ball boy's sprint, his mop-carry walk and his mopping cycle.
Detail roughly doubles on all of them.

Also stripped the last dozen key-colour pixels off p_die5's rim — edge pixels
only, because a racket's strings are legitimately pink and a blanket filter
would eat them.

The brute's wound stages and the chair spectator are re-running as smaller
sheets: four figures carrying a dragged pole or a held-up chair either merge
into one frame or run off the canvas whatever margin the prompt demands, so
they go two at a time.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-07-31 21:52:34 +02:00
wuwiandClaude Opus 5 0c499b60b5 Automate the redraw, and run the first eight batches through it
assets/_regen.py plus a batch file: build a reference sheet from the sprites in
the repo, ask for a HIGH-resolution redraw, slice with _fine.py, colour-match
each frame onto the one it replaces, install. The point of the whole thing is the
style block — the old prompts specified coarse art and got it.

It refuses to install a bad sheet. Wrong frame count, any figure touching a
canvas edge (that is what clipped z_f1 in the first place), or a redraw that is
not measurably finer than what it replaces, and the batch is left alone with a
reason printed. Re-running a batch is the fix; three of the first eleven needed
it. The bar is 1.25x inner-edge density rather than 1.5x, because a sheet that
already has blood on it starts high and a genuinely finer wounded body still
scores a smaller gain.

Done so far: both shamblers and their wound skins, the brute's walk and its two
sets of wound stages, the steward and his wound skins, the turned CPU.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-07-31 21:43:58 +02:00