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>
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>
The right edge is where iOS keeps Control Center, and it is exactly where the
horde's absolute finger-steering parks your thumb. When the system takes that
gesture it delivers neither touchend nor touchcancel: `stick` survives forever,
so every later touchstart falls through to the extra-finger branch (swish, and
only swish) while touchmove ignores the new finger's id. steerPX stays frozen at
0.97 and the player is pinned to the screen edge, melee firing, for the rest of
the run. Any new touch event proves the old finger is gone if it is not in
e.touches — drop the stick then. Verified against the bug: pinned at x=6.11
before, steers to -5.20 after, and a genuine second finger still only swishes.
And wCap 9 -> 99, which is no cap in practice: game 70 wants a bigger stack, not
a rationed one. The barrel weapons move from "paid out only once all four tins
are full" (a branch an uncapped rack would never reach again) to rungs of the
same ladder, so a late duel still hands out a rocket instead of a fifth bomb.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Oliver, watching a sliced ball circle a shambler it had only wounded: "an
orbiting tennis ball midair, nobody knows what is going on." He is right,
and not only about that shot. Every ball in this game flies a parabola you
can read, so the one that thinks reads as broken even on the shots where it
works. The hook was the wrong primitive, not a hook with two bugs in it.
So there is no hook. At the instant of a kill the ball is struck again —
ONE velocity out of solveShot, the same solver the serve uses, aimed at the
next body's chest — and from the next frame it is an ordinary ball under
ordinary gravity. It cannot orbit, cannot hover and cannot outlive its shot,
because after the strike nothing about the slice is still running.
That also deletes the wound bug rather than fixing it. Six sites spend the
ball (lastHit = 'X') and not one of them cleared the hook, so a ball that
merely WOUNDED its target was left steering at 30% pace toward a point that
body had already walked off — the loop he saw. With no persistent state
there is nothing to clear: a ball spent on a body it failed to kill just
drops, like every other spent ball.
The hop draws its own band, white, so a chain leaves the same chalk streak
every other shot leaves. sliceTurn and sliceHookT are gone with the steering
that needed them; sliceArc stays, no longer as a turn-radius limit but to
keep a carom from doubling back down-court, which reads as a stray
deflection rather than as a cut.
Net 24 lines lighter than the thing it replaces.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
A slice hooking onto a body two metres to the side flew a closed loop around
it forever: 285 frames of the same circuit, never arriving, never falling.
A constant turn rate has a constant turn radius (v/w = 2 m), and anything
inside that circle cannot be reached however long the ball steers — while
the hook pins vy at 0, so nothing else ends it either. A crowd is nothing
but close bodies, which made the one place this weapon should shine the one
place it hung.
The rate is no longer a constant. An arc leaving along the current heading
and passing through a body at distance d, bearing a, has radius d/(2 sin a),
so the ball needs 2 v sin(a) / d — solved every frame, because the body is
walking while the ball travels. sliceTurn stays as the FLOOR, which is what
it was always really for: how wide the curl looks when there is room.
Turning faster than needed is safe, the aim being re-solved each frame.
Two things the maths cannot cover, so they are ruled out instead: a body
behind the ball, which no tangent arc reaches at any rate (sliceArc), and a
target that walks out of reach mid-hook (sliceHookT, a hard 0.7 s licence to
steer). An endless orbit is now impossible by construction rather than by
the geometry happening to work out.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Slice is not a tin and not a rack slot. It is what a perfect serve DOES —
the toss ritual's 45 ms window, or a pull that stops inside perfectBand.
Every other weapon is handed to you; this one is a technique, and it hands
the plain ball a real route to the DOUBLE/TRIPLE KILL ladder that until now
only a bomb or a lucky line-up could reach. Banking your specials stops
meaning playing worse in the meantime.
Only a kill hooks, so a wound ends the chain and no brute, steward or boss
ever extends one. It is a crowd skill shot, which is the half of the arsenal
the tins do not cover.
The pull had to learn a third state to say this. Quality SATURATES at
pullFull, so an overpull and a perfect pull drew an identical band: the game
was asking you to hit a window it never showed you. The band now goes chalk
white inside it and the mark on the target grows a second ring — the fill
says where the ball lands, the ring says it will not stop there.
The chain path is deliberately NOT previewed. It is a scallop laid over the
exact patch of court you need to read, it solves the shot before you take
it, and the bodies walk — any chain drawn at pull time is a lie by the time
the ball arrives, which is the one thing the band exists not to be.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The band work from f352612 rides along; everything else is this round's list.
- proj returns a NEGATIVE scale behind the camera, so four ellipse call sites
could be handed negative radii — ctx.ellipse throws on those, and the throw
killed the rest of the frame (no HUD, no rack, no band). All four now skip
points behind the camera.
- a burst tin is no longer a commitment: tapping another slot aborts it, spends
it and hands back the serve loop. Lives in selectWeapon, so the rack tap and
the 1-0 keys both get it. A horde still locks the rack — that is the one place
your finger is already spoken for. Spending splices the rack, so the tap
resolves to a weapon id and re-finds it rather than trusting the index.
- beacon 1.6 -> 2.4 rounds/s: a lob cannon you could not leave AND could not
feel working was two problems.
- FIRE. Flamer throws fat embers instead of a one-pixel thread; burning bodies
get nine tongues over a heat bloom plus smoke; the fire ball gets a halo and a
real tail; an ash death gets twice the motes at twice the life over a ground
bloom and a column. The flamer had no sfx case at all and was using the gun's
dry tick — it has its own roar now.
- chapter bosses carry an HP bar over their head. The no-HP-bar rule stands for
everything else and the comment says why a boss is the exception.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Every transient message — milestone card, RESUMING clock, one-line flash — now
centres its ink on CARD_MID and only one is ever up. Three shared pieces do all
of it: inkSpan measures, plate() sizes the fill to what it holds, slideDraw
swipes it in from the left and off to the right with a four-ghost smear sampled
back along its own easing curve.
- weapon card is icon + name + count, one centred row, no prose
- plain cards centre as a block instead of hanging off the band's top edge
- the clock left the net for the band; it takes over when a card or flash clears
- band moved up 20px into the flash's old row, which it can now that they never
draw together
- hold times +0.8s: the swipe eats ~0.55s that the old numbers didn't budget for
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
- opaque canvas: the compositor stops alpha-blending 2.5Mpx at 60Hz
- settled modals and the death summary idle at 20-24 fps; play untouched
- TUNE.lowPower caps RES at 3 (-44% pixels/frame), flippable live
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
- opening CPU beatable in a game or two (softer cap, more whiffs, rubber band)
- modals are for calm courts only; live-court news is a card now
- the transition howto is gone: a ghost hand teaches the pull, the toss,
the apex and the swing, each on the exact struggle it answers
- a shot barrel keeps your weapon and glows its slot instead
- switching weapons clicks, the live tile is unmistakable
- barrels come faster the deeper the run goes
- the umpire triple-tap cheat is deleted
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
EATEN_GRAB (write-only marker), ball.firstLand (written five places, read
nowhere), zombies' unused VOLLEY import, three scoreboard palette fields
from the pre-PNG board, the x_tin.png nothing references, and a dozen
export keywords on functions no module ever imported.
Kept on purpose: o_run3/o_run4.png — the SPR list excludes them so both
tours run on two frames (the women's set has no 3/4 twins), per the comment
at the preload list.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The hang: I could not reproduce it or pin it on one latch, so this is two
things. A root-cause fix — iOS does not guarantee a touchend when you switch
apps mid-drag, and the held G.aim it leaves behind blocks the uncaught-toss
retoss forever — and a watchdog for whatever else is out there. The watchdog
does not time how long you have been blocked, because a horde blocks you for
fifteen honest seconds; it watches whether the clock that should release you is
moving, and logs the frozen state before letting go.
The duel: past about game 20 all four tins sit at wCap and a won duel handed
over literally nothing. It falls through to the barrel weapons now.
The prize also stops borrowing the praise channel — arriving in the same slot
as PERFECT made it read as another compliment. It gets a card with its own icon.
The turn into zombie mode was unwatchable because the zoom started ON it, and
the curve render applies is zero at t=0, so the camera only arrived half a
second after he had changed. It peaks on the turn now, and the swap lands on a
hitstop, a flash and a burst so it reads as an event rather than a glitch.
Laser down from 0.55 to 0.22 — zap() sums four voices, so its vol was never one
voice's level.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The transition turns your opponent into a zombie with variant 'c', and the
roster table had no row for it — so the stats screen fell back to the raw key
and the shambler sprite, and the list appeared to hold two shamblers. He is
THE OPPONENT now, and he is not the racket zombie, who keeps coming back.
Type across the menus was sized on a desktop and read tiny on a real phone:
tabs, opponent names, counts and labels all go up a step, and the roster
sprites go from 34x46 to 48x62.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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>
Four things Oliver caught on the phone.
The screen title is the ANNOUNCEMENT face now. A menu heading is a thing that
shouts, the same register the canvas gives SET and CHAPTER — it was wearing the
HUD font, which is the voice for scores and key hints. Bangers carries its own
weight, so it takes size and air instead of Silkscreen's letter-spacing, plus
the padding under it he asked for.
Her toss and smash were shrinking the whole woman. The slice anchors frame 0 to
224 px, and frame 0 was the toss — whose arm is straight up, so the BODY got
squeezed to make room for it. This is the trap already written down for the
raised racket; it just moved to a different sheet. Re-sliced the retained sheet
at the men's toss height (250) instead, so toss/smash/pull come out 250/293/191
against his 250/320/213 and her body matches her own idle again. No re-roll.
The pre-serve ball did not follow the MIRROR. drawChar flips the whole sprite
when a server faces left, so dodging during the bounce swapped his hands over
and left the ball hanging out by the racket — one `* sv.facing` on the offset.
It was wrong in the men's world the whole time, it just took a second body
standing next to it before anyone saw it.
And she reaches further out and higher than he does, so BOUNCE_IDLE's pair is
overridable per tour now (0.46/0.78 against his 0.36/0.68). Measured off the
drawn hand by eye, which is the only way those two numbers have ever been set.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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>
The band made PERFECT earnable, which was the fix — but you learn a band, and
then the HUD is talking on every other serve again whatever the word says. So
the praise goes behind a shared cooldown (TUNE.praiseEvery, 14s), the same model
the umpire's asides have used all along for exactly this problem. Eight
band-perfect serves back to back now yield one word. The bright click in the pull
is the reliable feedback for a good draw; the word was only ever garnish, and
garnish on every plate is just food.
And the free-floating slot drops 24 -> 18. It shares that slot with CLEAR THE
COURT, DOUBLE KILL, RETURNED and GAME N — half of which are a footnote to
something you already watched happen. Sharing the loud FACE with the milestone
cards is right; sharing their SIZE made every footnote read as a milestone.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
PERFECT fired on almost every serve, and it was not a threshold that had drifted
— it was the wrong test entirely. pullFrac CLAMPS at pullFull, so pullQuality is
exactly 1.0 for any pull of 130 px or more, and 130 px is an ordinary comfortable
thumb drag. "quality > 0.999" therefore meant "you pulled far enough", which is
not an achievement and is why it read as noise.
So hitServe takes `perfect` as its own argument now. The toss ritual keeps
earning it the honest way, on the 45 ms perfectMs window. The slingshot earns it
by STOPPING in a band at the top of the draw (pullFull..pullFull*perfectBand,
130-166 px) — a target you can miss, rather than a ceiling you cannot. The pull
already clicks when it crosses the splatter threshold; it clicks brighter when it
enters the band and goes silent when you pull past, so the window is learnable by
feel instead of being invisible skill.
And the word rotates: PERFECT, TEXTBOOK, IMMACULATE, OH LOVELY, UNPLAYABLE, SHOT
OF THE DAY. Cycled rather than random — the same word twice running is what makes
one read as a stuck HUD element rather than as praise. The umpire has still never
acknowledged the massacre, so a clean shot gets the line it would get at Wimbledon.
Also: the card band grew 72 -> 80 px, because the second sub line ended 4 px off
the bottom edge and looked like it had fallen out. And the quiet face floats as
much as the loud one does, so it gets the same 1 px shadow — the control hints,
the gesture-demo labels, the card subs, the modal body and prompt, the death
summary lines. The scoreboard and the rack keep theirs off: both already sit on
dark panels, and a shadow under 6 px type on a flat fill only smears it.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
He died at every chapter boss because he could not move, and there were two
independent reasons for it. The movement block is 'rally'-only — a settled feel
decision the six boss AI styles were written around — and a boss is fought from
'pretoss'. On top of that canAimServe() is true through a boss fight, so his one
finger was already spent on the slingshot: there was no gesture left over that
could have meant "move".
So it is a SIDESTEP, not a walk. One committed step on a cooldown, carrying
invulnerability that beats both damage channels — the chip damage in hurtPlayer
and the instant-death contact test. The rule about walking stands untouched.
The gesture is picked by WHICH WAY the drag leaves the deadzone, decided once and
never revisited for that touch: down-ish is the pull the game already teaches,
sideways is the step. No timing window, no invisible mode, so "one gesture means
one thing" still holds. The finger-steer modes are untouched — stick.aimable is
false in a horde, so the drag is the absolute steer it always was. The apron demo
now alternates PULL DOWN and SWIPE TO DODGE, and Marvin has a page for it.
The rest of the playtest list:
- Bangers is bundled beside Silkscreen, and the register IS the category. The
quiet face keeps the HUD, the rack, the control hints and RESUMING IN; the loud
one takes SET, CHAPTER, EPIC!, PERFECT and every free-floating flash. Floating
text gets one shared y and a drop shadow, so it survives crowd, clay and blood.
- Modals queue instead of being dropped. That was why the trainer and the weapon
had to be crammed into one card after a won duel; the heal gets its own popup
with the x_cross tin over it — a sprite loaded since that merge and drawn by
nothing.
- weaponModal's first-sight gate moved inside the function. The barrels gated
themselves and the tin ladder did not, so four weapons re-explained themselves
every three games while a barrel weapon explained itself once.
- Ten rack slots. Past five it grows a second row upward rather than shrinking
ten tiles under the thumb target; slots 0-4 stay welded to the bottom edge.
- The boss win holds for its own 3.6s and says EPIC!, with no GAME n NEXT line —
the bar under the scoreboard already prints that permanently. That bar went
from 6px to 7px, which is the smallest type in the game becoming words.
- The turn punches the camera in on him and the ground shakes harder at each beat.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Oliver's tuned numbers become the defaults: beamY 0.95, beamLen 23, beamW0 0.08,
beamW1 3.1, beamOriginLift 0.44, beamBorder 0.18.
Three knobs earned their keep on the way there.
beamLen is the DRAWN length now, not only the kill range. The drawn length was
solved every frame so the far end landed on the middle of the ad strip, which
made this a control that visibly did nothing. One meaning beats one clever
behaviour -- and it pairs with beamY, since a lower plane meets the ads sooner.
beamOriginLift replaces beamOriginY: the apex is a lift ABOVE the plane rather
than an absolute height, so lowering beamY brings the near end down with it
instead of leaving it hanging at chest height with the beam sloping away.
beamBorder exposes the edge width, which was hardcoded.
And the playground is back, deliberately NOT paused. The first version froze the
world so the picture would hold still, and then nothing redrew, so every value
changed did nothing -- a still frame you cannot change is worth nothing. The
bodies are held still individually and spawning is off instead.
Also: a boolean living in TUNE has to be tested with >= 0.5. The panel steps
every key by 0.02, so one nudge set beamBand to 0.02 -- still truthy -- and the
renderer switched variants under him mid-tune.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
TUNE.beamBand flips between the two looks live from the T panel. 1, the new
default, draws the laser the way the BALL's aim trajectory is drawn: a path down
the lane whose width comes from each point's own projection scale, so it narrows
into the distance like everything else on the court, with a shadow on the lawn to
pin it there. 0 is the solid widening cone.
The cone was a true projection, which is why it was not obviously wrong to me --
but it GROWS in world width, so on screen it opens out while the court recedes,
and the eye reads that as a shape stuck to the screen rather than a plane lying
in the world.
The kill follows whichever look is on, in both fireBeam and drawBeamCuts.
Otherwise the comparison would be a lie: a narrow band that deletes a cone-wide
crowd tells you nothing about how the narrow band plays. Measured down one lane,
the cone takes 9 of 9 and the band 5 of 9.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The blinking was drawZombie validating its frame count against the LAST frame
only: a set with (say) z_h2 missing but z_h4 present kept N = 4, the walk cycle
stepped onto a name that had never loaded, and drawStatic silently drew nothing.
The body vanished for that frame of the cycle and came back on the next one,
forever. One cached 404 -- this project's oldest trap -- is enough to cause it.
It holds frame one now: a body that stops animating is a bug you can see, one
that flickers in and out reads as the game breaking. SPRV bumped to flush
whatever his phone has cached.
And no ctx.filter anywhere. The cut line was briefly the sprite redrawn clipped
to a band and flattened by a canvas filter, which put it exactly on the
silhouette -- and on the iPhone the line did not draw at all. Unsupported or
leaking past its restore, a rendering feature that fails silently on the target
device is not worth a pixel of polish. It is a plain bar again, brighter, and it
crosses the odd gap between the legs, which is the trade.
The cone gets the reference's look: a horizontal gradient across the width with a
near-white core down the centre line falling to blue at the edges, plus the depth
falloff along its length, plus stroked outer edges. Canvas has no 2D gradient, so
it is filled in eight slices each carrying its own across-gradient -- enough that
the seams vanish, which is what the old nested wedges got wrong.
Test mode: barrels gone (the rack already holds everything they would give you)
and the crowd raised to 16 bodies at a spawn every 0.9s, so it does not run dry
between kills.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The beam is a real plane now, holding TUNE.beamY (1.15 m) all the way out instead
of sloping to the ground. That one change is what makes the rest possible: sloping,
it lay flat on the grass across the whole far half, so there was nothing to cut
exactly where the crowd stands.
One flat translucent triangle, apex at the player's CHEST, opening out down the
court with the alpha falling away. It was four nested wedges composited 'lighter'
and that layering WAS the banding -- additive light blowing out to white where the
layers overlapped. Flat alpha also means a body under the plane is tinted rather
than brightened, which is what lets the cut read at all.
Bodies are sliced by it: the part above the plane is redrawn clipped so it sits on
top, the part below stays tinted underneath, and it happens while AIMING as well as
on the shot. Measured, the plane takes a shambler at 64% of its height, a brute at
43% and the roller man at 36% -- bigger bodies visibly take it lower.
The cut line follows the SPRITE rather than a rectangle. A fillRect spanned the
body's bounding width, so it crossed the gaps between the legs and under a held-out
arm and read as a bar lying behind him; the line is the sprite itself, redrawn
clipped to a thin band and flattened to one colour by ctx.filter. It thins with
distance on s squared, because this camera's scale only spans about 1.5x across the
court and a linear falloff was invisible.
Aiming a filter at a specific colour turned out to be a measurement, not a guess:
brightness(0) invert(1) goes to WHITE, and sepia adds almost no chroma to white, so
the first chain rendered a grey. Leaving a mid grey for sepia to tint lands on
(32,154,255) against the laser icon's (29,153,232). The probe fills a rect and reads
the pixel back.
The pass is bounded to the eight nearest bodies above 14 px, because it draws each
one twice more through a filter and runs every frame you are aiming. 0.27 ms/frame
with 20 bodies on desktop, against a 16.7 ms budget.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
A burnt body does not burst. Fire kills by cooking, so there is nothing left to
spray: a body that dies alight -- flamethrower or flame ball -- leaves dark grey
ash instead of blood. Same decal, mound and particles, recoloured and smaller,
with a puff of smoke and a dull thud instead of the wet splat and the headshot
crack. The flame BALL has to mark itself, because that kill lands before the body
ever catches.
The flamethrower is a lighter, not a gun: no impact damage at all, it pierces,
and it only IGNITES -- the burn does the killing, so a lit crowd walks a few
steps and goes down together. 26 m of reach against a 22.8 m court, so it
crosses to the far baseline. The guard matters: hp -= 0 fell straight through to
killZombie, which made the cone delete the crowd on contact.
Every burst weapon had no progress bar and the cause was the spend. Arming spent
the tin at once, so the rack entry vanished -- and the bar draws on the slot
holding G.gunId, which no longer existed. The tin is spent when the burst ENDS
now, so icon, count and bar are all there while it runs, and every path that
ends a burst routes through endBurst or it would hand out free ammo.
Auto-fire movement again: the previous fix read moving as mx||mz||assist, and
finger-steering zeroes mx/mz, so sliding left and right still counted as standing
still. And the oval on his back was the mg racket -- its head projected almost
exactly onto the sprite; offset by facing it reads as held out beside him.
The laser's far edge is pinned in SCREEN space to the middle of the ad strip
rather than running out to beamLen on the ground, which landed on their top line.
beamLen goes back to being the kill range instead of a number tuned to one camera.
Beacon thumps, rocket swooshes.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The auto-fire jog was one guard. gameplay skipped the pose update in mgSteer mode,
so the pose stuck on 'idle' -- and render covered for it by faking a run cycle off
G.idleT, which animated whether he was moving or not. That fake is what read as
"this hectic run animation... odd all the time". The pose follows MOVEMENT in every
mode now and the fake is deleted, so auto-fire, the horde and the melee racket all
use the ordinary run animation and standing still is standing still. The comment
that justified the fake -- two rackets when idle -- was solving a smaller problem
than it caused; at sprite scale the overlap does not read.
The laser, second pass, all of it "it must read as light he fired":
- it draws AFTER the net and every body. It was drawn before the far-side pass,
so the net and the crowd painted over it, which is exactly why it looked like
it was lying on the floor and sitting under the net.
- beamLen 26 -> 34: at 26 it stopped just past the far baseline and read as cut
off in mid-court. It carries into the courtside ads now.
- beamW0 0.35 -> 0.06, a POINT at the strings. At 0.35 it left the racket as a
0.7 m bar hanging in mid-air instead of something emitted from it.
- it DELETES ordinary bodies, hp irrelevant. A plane of light that left a roller
man standing made it a worse ball, not a weapon. A boss is the exception and
takes dmgBeam 8 -- severe, survivable.
- four nested wedges composited 'lighter' (violet bloom, blue, cyan, white core),
each fading along its length. One quad with a gradient was a coloured shape.
Rocket: speed 17 -> 38, and a real jet plume laid tight ON the flight line rather
than scattered sparks, which looked like a firework.
Beacon: a finer one-pixel thread and a much brighter ball, so the BALL is the
bright thing and the trail only says where it has been.
And the bug in the middle of that: firePellet stamps a whitelist of fields onto
the round, and jet/trailR went onto the WEAPONS rows without being added to the
list -- so the rocket flew with no plume and nothing errored. Any new pellet field
has to be added in both places.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
A test mode for trying the new content without playing twenty games to reach it.
Three taps on the scoreboard toggles it, three more turns it off, and a single
tap is still the miss-log overlay. Same shape as the umpire triple-tap cheat it
sits next to.
It OVERRIDES the difficulty director rather than editing it, so the wave is the
same whether you opened it in game 1 or game 40 and the run keeps running
underneath: 8 bodies, a fixed 1.15 m/s shamble, a spawn every 1.6 s, and
pickVariant pretending to be at game 20 so every body type can turn up. All four
barrel weapons sit on the rack and are topped back up each frame, because
committing a burst spends the whole tin and a sandbox that runs dry is not one.
A barrel rolls out every 14 s so the pickup itself is testable too.
The third tap must NOT toggle logShow: taps one and two already toggled it twice
and it is back where it started, so toggling again left the miss-log overlay
switched on behind you every single time.
Also records the trap that cost a debugging round getting here: index.html loads
main.js?v=N, and fetching 'main.js' does not bust that URL -- so main.js stayed
stale through a reload while every other module was fresh, and the tap handler
appeared to do nothing.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Oliver's playtest of the barrel weapons. Four notes, all four real defects.
"The bigger guys were way too easy to kill at the beginning." A bug, and an old
one. The ball-vs-body chain handled boss, g/m, s, f and a/b, and everything NOT
named in it fell through to "splat-quality kills outright" -- so the STEWARD has
died to one serve since the day he shipped with stewardHp 5 and a comment calling
it a brute's worth of hp, and the three new bodies inherited that the moment they
existed. Pellets and melee always read hp; only the ball skipped it. One generic
hpMax > 1 branch now, and measured after: shambler 2, steward 5, brute 5, ball
boy 3, bouncer 5, roller man 7 -- each exactly its hp.
"I have seen all of them by round 10." The new three move 3/8/15 -> 5/12/20. The
original four keep their gates: that curve was already tuned through game 12.
"The laser fired only when I tapped, that was confusing." The whole tap-per-round
kind is gone. A barrel weapon is now either the normal ball gesture made
spectacular or something that fires itself -- nothing waits for a tap.
- laser is a serve, and the RAY is the weapon: no ball anywhere in it. The
preview IS the wedge, it leaves the RACKET rather than lying on the grass, the
release erases the plane along its own path behind a bright front, and the
edges are hairlines instead of the heaviest lines on the court.
- beacon and rocket are LOBBED bursts -- `arc` turns a flat pellet into a thrown
one, solved onto the nearest body ahead, and landing is itself a hit so a
rocket that misses still goes off where it lands. The beacon changes colour
every ball and drags that colour behind it.
- flamer got "way more pronounced": 30 rounds/s, a ~10 m cone, embers.
"I got the laser almost every time." A flat 1-in-4 over four items does not feel
uniform. BARREL_WEAPONS carries weight and a `from` gate now, never repeats twice
running, and the beacon is what you meet first. Measured: laser 16-28%, rocket
unlocked at game 12 so it is genuinely a late find.
And the barrel keeps its pink halo -- that was always procedural, painted by
drawBarrel, and never went near the chroma key. Three rings and a pool on the
lawn now, because one flat disc read as a smudge.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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>
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>
The switch and the losing branch are gone — a fired band is a short streak
behind the ball, full stop. TUNE.shotTail, WAKE and the tailMode branching all
removed; the aiming band is untouched as ever.
THE IDLE DEMO NO LONGER POINTS UP. It grew chevrons up-court as the pull grew,
because the shot going the opposite way to the thumb was meant to be the
lesson — but an up arrow on screen is an instruction to swipe up, and swiping
up is the one gesture this game does not have. The only direction drawn now is
the one you actually make: the dotted track, the thumb sliding down it, and a
down arrowhead at the end, clear of where the thumb lands at full draw.
And it says so in words. The mime alone was too abstract to read as "drag your
thumb down", so PULL DOWN sits under the arrow in the pixel font.
Which makes the text slot below it redundant while the demo runs, so it shuts
up rather than printing the same instruction twice 40 px apart. The wording
everywhere else moves BACK -> DOWN too: "back" is the ambiguous word that could
be read as up-court, which is exactly the confusion here.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
shotTail 0 -> 1. The panel is keyboard-only ('T'), so on a phone the default
IS the setting — noted next to the knob so the next person doesn't assume it
can be flipped in play.
Verified on the default build: the drawn slice runs from z 21.4 back at the
racket side to z 18.84, which is the ball to the centimetre — entirely behind
it, ending on it. Nothing ahead. 600 frames clean.
Keeping the losing branch until a real playtest confirms the pick.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The laser look came from carrying the AIMING picture unchanged into the flight.
While you pull, a bright saturated line spanning you to the target is exactly
right — it is the information you are deciding on. Once fired it is spent, and
a projectile drawing its own future in a continuous saturated line from itself
to what it is about to hit is the visual definition of a targeting beam. No
real ball shows where it is going.
So a fired band now desaturates toward dust, collapses, and shrinks to a short
streak. TUNE.shotTail picks which side of the ball that streak sits on:
0 a WAKE ahead of it, dissolving — your erase idea, beam cut down to a wisp
1 a TAIL behind it, nothing ahead at all — conventional projectile language
The shadow follows the same slice, because "nothing ahead" has to include the
ground or it still gives the future away. The target mark fades with it: a mark
still burning on the shambler is the other half of the laser.
Both leave the aiming band untouched.
Built the collapse squared first and it was wrong — both variants were gone by
a third of the flight, which is not "less like a laser", it is no streak at all,
and the strobing at release is what this trail exists to prevent. Linear now.
The SHORT SLICE is what kills the beam; the fade only has to make sure nothing
is still burning when the ball lands.
Flip it live on the phone: T panel, shotTail, type 0 or 1.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
PACE 1.3x -> 1.2x on all four numbers: 19.2 / 14.4 rally, 22.8 / 26.4 serve.
The strength-to-velocity relationship you suspected was already there is: a
splatter serve runs 26 m/s at the minimum pull, 36 at the kill threshold and
49.2 at a full draw. The draw very nearly DOUBLES the pace (1.89x), because
serveQualitySpeed carries more of the pair than serveSpeed does. Nothing to
change unless you want it steeper, and that is the one knob.
THE RACKET-ALWAYS-UP LOOK WAS A LATCH, not the art. hitServe sets pose 'serve'
with poseT 0; that only expires after POSE_TIME (0.38 s); and p_pull, the
wind-up frame, is only ever selected from pose 'idle'. So firing faster than
0.38 s reset the timer before it could expire, he never returned to idle, the
pull frame was never drawn once, and he stayed welded into p_smash — arm
extended overhead with balls appearing out of the strings. Exactly the late
game, because that is where the fast successions are.
serveToss now clears a stale 'serve' pose: a new wind-up ends the last shot's
follow-through. At ~4.6 shots/sec the cycle is now pull x5 frames, smash x8,
pull x5 — a real swing. Slow fire still plays the whole ritual: bounce, pull,
smash, idle, bounce.
Caveat: past roughly 8 shots/sec each pose gets 1-2 frames and will read as a
flicker rather than a swing. There is no fix for that short of drawn
follow-through frames; the poses are stills.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
baseShotSpeed 16 -> 20.8, qualityShotSpeed 12 -> 15.6, serveSpeed 19 -> 24.7,
serveQualitySpeed 22 -> 28.6. All exactly 1.3x, so nothing about the relative
feel moves: rally and serve, tennis and splatter, his ball and the CPU's, which
share baseShotSpeed.
Swept the full-pull serve down the court: 53.3 m/s against the old 41 at every
range, flight times ~23% shorter (30% more pace is 23% less time in the air).
One exception, and it is geometry rather than tuning: a shambler standing right
on the tape is loft-limited. That shot has to come almost straight down, so the
net-clearance loop trades the extra pace straight back and it ends up only ~14%
quicker. Nothing to fix unless it reads as sluggish next to everything else, in
which case serveSpin is the knob — a harder dip buys pace over the tape.
Tennis serves 8/8 into the box at the new pace; 900 frames clean.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
THE BALL WAS SOLVED TO THE GROUND. solveShot's terminal height was a hardcoded
0.08 — ball-on-the-grass — so a splatter serve came down past the shambler and
registered at the ankles however the mark was drawn. It now takes an arrival
height, and a lane shot aims at the body: zombieH x Z_CHEST, scaled off the
same height table render draws with, so a brute is struck on the brute rather
than at the height a shambler's chest happens to be. Measured at the frame the
wound registers: shambler 1.11 m of 1.8, brute 1.64 m of 2.7, and an empty lane
still lands on the grass. The aim mark reads the same `ty`, so mark, arc end
and impact are now one point instead of three guesses.
AND A BUG FOUND ON THE WAY. The net-clearing loop ran for shots that never
reach the net. A shambler on your own side sits short of the tape, so `tN` is
still positive — the net is ahead in the direction of travel, the ball simply
lands first — the height test there is far below the tape, and the loop spent
all twelve cuts. Every same-side shot left the racket at 28% of nominal pace as
a slow loop. That is exactly the shot that needs to be fast: those are the ones
about to eat you. Guarded on the shot actually crossing the net, in serveArc
and in doHit's copy. Flight time to a body at z=16 drops 0.71 s -> 0.20 s.
THIS ONE IS A FEEL CHANGE YOU DID NOT ASK FOR — near shots are now fast and
flat where they used to loop. Say if you want the lob back.
Tennis and the duel still serve into the box, far-side shots still clear the
tape, 900 frames of splatter render clean.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Four things from the phone.
THE BAND NO LONGER BLINKS OUT. Cutting it at the instant of release made a
fast rally strobe — band, gone, band, gone. hitServe now records the arc it
actually fired (error included, so the ball tracks what it is consuming to
within a centimetre) and the ball eats it from behind as it flies. The aim
resolves into the shot instead of vanishing. It ends early when the ball does,
because a shambler swallowing the shot is a cut you want.
THE TARGET MARK SITS ON THE BODY. A ring on the grass pointed at the one part
of a shambler the shot has nothing to do with — the ball strikes anywhere under
1.9 m and the wound lands on the torso. So the mark rides at chest height when
there is a body to hit and lies flat only when the lane is empty. Filled and
washed out in the band's own colour instead of a hard 2px ring, which stops it
reading as a decal stuck to the lawn.
x_howto REDRAWN for the current gesture: thumb dragging back to a print, the
shot leaving as a curved band onto the shambler's chest, shadow dots beneath.
The old one still taught a straight arrow.
MACH_H 1.15 -> 1.55. Waist high read as a prop you could ignore.
Verified on a cache-busted build (the pane was serving a stale config.js, so
the first pass measured nothing): preview velocity and gravity still identical
to the fired ball, same flight time in the trail, unravel smooth to the hit.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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>
Three courts, picked on a second start-screen stage: CENTRE COURT (grass),
TERRE ROUGE (clay) and THE SLAB (hard). A court is a row in config.COURTS and
four PNGs — render() never learns their names.
Each row carries two palettes, because every court still rots: what "drained"
means on orange clay is not what it means on green lawn. Mow stripes became a
flag rather than a colour — recolouring the lawn and leaving the bands on still
read as grass. Bounce is two numbers copied into TUNE on selection, so the three
bounce sites in gameplay.js and the T panel stay untouched: grass skids low and
fast, clay sits up and drags, hard is the old baseline.
Per-court crowd sheets and ad strips. Each court's clap frame is generated from
its OWN seated sheet, not from x_crowd2 — pairing one court's crowd with
another's applause cross-fades between two different crowds.
The picker is a second panel in the existing #intro overlay, rows built from the
table. Last pick is remembered and comes up pre-highlighted; 1..N or Enter on a
keyboard.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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>
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>
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>
It was furniture in the most literal sense: bolted to one spot, three hits from
scrap, and when it died it bled and a ball boy came out to mop it.
- It trundles to a new spot every seven seconds or so, and CANNOT fire while it
rolls. That is honest (a rolling cart cannot aim) and it is the window you use
to close on it — but it also means it stops being a landmark you can ignore.
- Six hits, not three, and it wears them: dented at two thirds, split open and
sparking at one third, smoking where it stands once it is that far gone.
- It comes apart as MACHINERY. No blood decal, no gore mound, no mop boy — a
flash, sparks, torn metal and a column of dark smoke over a scorch mark. Smoke
is a new particle flavour that rises and spreads instead of falling.
Damaged sheets keep the healthy cart's footprint: the generator drew the smoke
plume into the sprite, which would have shrunk the cart as it took damage, so
the plume is cropped off and the smoke is drawn procedurally where it can move.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
A wound skin was a single still, so anything hurt froze on one frame and slid
across the court. Every skin has its …b twin now — the stride swapped, stepped
off the same clock as the healthy walk — for both shamblers, both racket-zombie
stages, and the steward, who had no wounded state at all.
The steward also died like a shambler at 3 hp, which made a bigger body read as
decoration. Five now, with a wound skin to show the second half of that. hpMax
is recorded on every body that has hp, so "hurt = show the wound" is one rule
instead of a per-variant constant to remember.
First pass at the wound frames was rejected on sight and deserved it: the
generator drew small figures with fine pixels on a GRADIENT background, and a
nearest-neighbour downscale to sprite height shredded the outlines. Regenerated
two at a time, drawn large, chunky pixels, flat background, hard black outline —
then fitted per channel onto each frame's own healthy twin.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
A new ordinary body between the shambler and the brute: a stadium security
steward in a hi-vis vest, 2.15 m, three hp, a touch slower. Deliberately the
mildest thing in the advanced pool — no wound skins, no special rule to learn —
so he can unlock early (game 4) and thicken the ordinary crowd, which a mix of
two shamblers never did. A fifth of horde spawns come out as stewards too, so a
grown wave is not one body dying at one range.
Sheet generated against the existing shambler walk (assets/_sheet_dwalk.png),
sliced to a 4-frame cycle, so he shambles as smoothly as the crowd he walks in.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Viewport, again — the homescreen app was the case that broke it. Watching for a
signal cannot work there: launched standalone, iOS resolves the CSS viewport once
against a provisional box and never re-resolves it, so no resize, no layout
change, nothing for a ResizeObserver to observe. Only a rotation forced the issue.
So the CSS box is now a proposal: visualViewport says what is really visible and
the height gets pinned in px to match, re-read on every fit — plus a short settle
salvo after launch, since that launch announces nothing.
- The countdown skipped the transition, where overT is parked at 9999 to hold the
point flow. It read as RESUMING IN 9999 after the first game you ever win.
- Countdown moved off the HUD line into the open, at a readable size.
- A returned shot is a glancing blow now, not a mirror. Reversing the incoming
line sent every parry straight back up it — into the thrower — so a boss handed
you a free wound per volley. Contact across the racket face sets the angle:
dead centre still goes back at him, which is a placement you earn.
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>
wuwiandClaude Opus 5