Three mode tabs times three period tabs, and the same three boxes meant
something different in every one — Oliver had no idea what he was looking at,
which is the correct reaction to a screen with nine states. It is one screen
now: bodies felled, best gore run, deepest climb, runs. Never anything else.
MULTI-KILLS retired (a vanity number on no board) and DEATHS with it (every run
ends in one, so it was RUNS again). The period filter went too: LAST RUN is the
summary you just tapped away, and 7 DAYS is a fitness metric in a permadeath
game. The card stops repeating the ledger and keeps the CAREER instead —
league, cups won, best cup.
The world board drops CLASSIC: that mode is out of competition by its own
room's rule now, so ranking it contradicted the wall. A classic best no longer
opens the name prompt either — it would have had nowhere to go.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
It was the last place still breaking the wizard's own rule — a question screen
carries no memory of its own answer. Three names, three pip counts, nothing
else. `.last` has no users left, so the rule is gone from the stylesheet.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
LAST remembered what you played last time, which a gallery of six posters does
not need to do for you, and 18 RUNGS was a number about a mode on the screen
for choosing between modes. Both gone. The difficulty screen keeps its LAST —
there it is the only thing saying what you last set.
The dead sub-poster branch in buildSub went with them: nothing has fanned out
into sub-posters since the cup left the ZOMBIE TENNIS pocket.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Sixty words on the wall became a dozen. The handoff's own summary of the rule:
Jersey 15 NAMES (screen titles, rooms, cards), Bangers CALLS exactly once per
screen (the fixture, the primary button, a modal headline), Silkscreen INFORMS
(numbers, labels, chips) — and a sentence survives only where it carries a
decision. Everything else moved into a bar, a pip or the modal that opens with
the mode.
· Jersey 15 bundled subset (9 KB) and Bungee retired after one afternoon
· SPLASH: the plaque is one row, the goal line is gone (the fixture button
below said it already), the two doors carry a number each
· PICK A GAME: rooms are one word, posters are their names, the fixture is a
hero with the only second line — the whole wall fits one screen now
· MATCH SETUP: unnumbered blocks, the meters' legend once instead of a
description per court, no summary footer
· DIFFICULTY: three pips instead of three sentences
· TRAINING: the revanche is a full-width row, rungs are numbers, the list
ends on the league that opens the rest of the ladder
· VS: three paragraphs became YOU / HOST / JOIN
· MODALS: one rule per row (the sub was the lead again in other words), the
blood pool as pips on that same line, and the walk-on's two levels in ONE
face at ONE size — a comparison drawn at two sizes is a headline with a
footnote (Oliver)
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The scrim used to be a hard linear-gradient riding in the button's own
background stack. It is a masked backdrop-blur now: nothing at all at its top
edge, a surface by the time it reaches the words. The art stays art where the
art is, the caption gets something to sit on, and no box edge appears anywhere.
Measured on this machine it costs 0.2ms a frame — the backdrop is static while
the menu is.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The entrance is no longer a one-off on the boot: dealStage re-arms the class at
the funnel every stage change already passes, so the title screen flies its
plaque and buttons in whenever you arrive at it. The sub-menus join in — their
header, content and footer arrive one after the other instead of the panel
dropping in as one slab — and the poster wall deals its three rooms rather than
its list, since a moving child inside a moving parent starts at twice the
offset and reads as a stutter.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Two things the phone found. The splash's loading state was applied by main.js —
but this is a module script, so the browser paints the markup, placeholders and
all, before it runs: LEVEL 1 stood there and then snapped to the real values.
The busy class ships in index.html now and main.js only takes it off; the
keyboard hints hide with it.
And #intro is the one scroller the menus share, so a scroll earned deep in the
stats screen outlived it: going back put the splash up scrolled, with its
buttons off screen. go() resets it, at the funnel every stage change passes.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
"The draw" was tennis for the field of entrants, and nothing has been drawn
since the cup rounds went deterministic — Oliver had to ask what the button
meant, which settled it. Beside it, an unqualified PLAY AGAIN was an
instruction without a subject: both buttons read as "start something" and only
someone who remembered how the evening began could tell them apart. It carries
the mode now — GORE AGAIN, CLIMB AGAIN, CLASSIC AGAIN, TRAIN AGAIN.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Oliver: the group headings were "sehr klein". Each group is a section now with
its posters inside it — the announcement face one size under the screen title,
a rule closing the header, and an inset band down the left. The canonical room
wears the primary's colour, because it is the one that moves your career.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The tournament is the canonical path, so the game finally says so. The splash's
primary button names the next cup fixture and enters the draw; the poster wall
moved one tap down and deals three named rooms (the season, the training, out of
competition) with the cup at the top. Two profile fields remember every attempt
— rounds ever reached per league, and the body that put you out — so a lost cup
is a line on the board instead of a null event, and the training court offers
that body first, marked. The promotion names what waits in the new league.
Overlays consolidated in the same pass: three modal drawers became one box with
a masthead, hairline-separated rows and a real footer button (any tap still
dismisses), and the run-end summary wears the same box — headline, xp, mark, and
the fixture with ENTER THE DRAW beside PLAY AGAIN. The cup's own exit is a
ceremony now: OUT IN THE QUARTER-FINAL, your best standing beside it.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Four answers to one phone report:
- THE READ: repeat a lane and the opponent anticipates it; break the habit
and it is wrong-footed for that ball — scaled by rung, so surprise is the
weapon that opens the ladder past the HEAD COACH (TUNE block THE READ).
- The opponent walk-on is a real modal now (head, punchline, tap to dismiss)
in arcade, tournament and training — readable without a clock.
- THE TRAINING COURT: third card under ZOMBIE TENNIS, pick any rung, one
game at a time, the felled body walks straight back on, nothing banks,
bleeding out is a popup instead of a death. mode_train.png rolled in the
banner style.
- MOVEMENT READS: sprinting feet kick per-court dust and fast bodies leave
a two-ghost speed streak (trailMin gates both; feel verdict pending).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Oliver on the first shell build: *"I don't hear any of the games sounds.. daniel the umpire is
synthesized which is horrible and no music is playing on start"* — two independent causes.
- **Opaque fetch.** Capacitor serves the bundle through a custom WKURLSchemeHandler, and `fetch`
reports those responses as `status: 0, ok: false` with the whole body present and decoding
perfectly. All three loads in `audio.js` guarded with `if (!r.ok) throw`, so inside the app every
recorded sound failed at the door: the umpire fell through to the synthesized `say()`, no bed
started, no sample played. The synthesized sfx kept working, which made it read as a mixing bug
rather than a loader one. Fixed once, in the shared `bytes()` helper every audio fetch now routes
through — a status of 0 is the ABSENCE of an HTTP status, so trust it only when there is one and
a real 404 still falls back. Any future `!r.ok` on a bundle-relative fetch is this same bug.
- **The ring switch.** WKWebView's WebAudio runs in the SoloAmbient session, which the hardware
silent switch mutes outright — a silent game on a phone that lives on silent, with nothing on
screen to explain it. AppDelegate now sets AVAudioSession `.playback`, the games category.
Confirmed in the shell: the bed reaches PLAYING, the context is `running` with no gesture at all
(autoplay really is allowed in WKWebView, as LATER predicted), and `say()` never fires. On the web,
a genuinely missing file still falls back — checked both.
And the swipe flips: **right goes back**, the way iOS's own pop gesture goes (*"that's the iOS
way"*). Left now does nothing. Noted in PROJECT.md that on a platform gesture the platform's
convention beats the literal wording of the brief, and that is worth saying up front.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
A Capacitor iOS project (`npm run ios`), and the first three bullets of LATER item 2 built. The web
build is untouched and stays primary: every line here degrades to a no-op in a browser.
- HAPTICS ride the sound map, as the plan said they would: six call sites, all of them places an
sfx already fires — your racket contact, the serve strike, `killZombie` (the one funnel every
weapon routes through), `explode`, `hurtPlayer`, `killPlayer`, the weapon swap. The restraint
rule lives in `haptics.js`, not at the call sites: a minimum gap per kind, so a bomb that kills
twelve bodies is felt twice and the machine gun is a metronome rather than one long rumble.
Pinned by a test. Untested on hardware — the simulator has no Taptic Engine.
- The plugin is reached through the INJECTED bridge, `Capacitor.nativePromise('Haptics', ...)`.
`Capacitor.Plugins.Haptics` reads like the zero-dependency answer and is silently empty without
@capacitor/core's registerPlugin — it would have fallen through to the web path inside the app
and looked exactly like a phone with haptics switched off. No package JS ships.
- PORTRAIT is enforced where it can be: one orientation in Info.plist, so the app never rotates.
That retires landscape as a surface rather than fixing it (OPEN 6). The web half is best-effort —
`orientation` in both manifests and one guarded `screen.orientation.lock()`.
- SWIPE LEFT GOES BACK. The gesture finds the screen's one visible chevron and clicks it, so the
shape of the wizard stays in the handlers that already own it. Not passive on purpose: a swipe
inside a poster card also fires that card's click, and preventDefault is what stops the screen
answering forward in the frame the chevron walked it back.
- The app has no server behind it, so `config.API` and one branch in `net.js` point the shell at the
live host by name. Consequence: the app always talks to PROD, never staging.
`node test.js` green (105) over four seeds; builds, launches and reaches the native plugin on the
iOS 26.5 simulator; swipe-back walks the whole wizard in the browser pane.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
`python3 tools/capture.py` fills promo/clips/ with 1080x1920 h264/aac takes of
the moments the campaign plan (item 4) already named — transition, horde,
flamer, mopboy, death on the gore side, boss and match on the zombie-tennis
side. capture.py serves the repo with tools/clips.js injected, opens a
throwaway-profile Chrome and converts each POSTed webm with ffmpeg; clips.js
stages every scene through the real doors on window.T and drives it with the
reachability soak's own mediocre autopilot. Nothing is faked for the camera.
The game gains four names on window.T (start, intoSplatter, startHorde,
sendBoy) and nothing else: the frame is pinned by the canvas box rather than
the window, RES 4 comes from lowPower 0 plus device-scale-factor 3, and the
audio is tapped by making BaseAudioContext's `destination` a gain node — so
audio.js needs no master bus for a tool that ships to nobody. tools/ and
promo/clips/ are ignored by git and docker alike.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
A URL only opens the installed app on Android; on an iPhone it opened a second
copy of the game in Safari, with its own storage and none of the name picked in
the app. So the share sheet now sends "JOIN ME IN SPLATTER TENNIS — THE CODE IS
ABCD" and nothing else, and the button says SEND THE CODE.
The #net-ABCD door stays — it is exactly what a deep link will carry the day
this is a real app with universal links. Nothing sends it in the meantime.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
An Android phone opens the link in the installed app (the manifest's scope
covers the site, so its WebAPK claims these URLs). An iOS home-screen app can
claim nothing, so the link always opens in Safari — which keeps its own storage
and knows nothing about the name picked inside the app. Four letters in the same
message is the whole fix: a friend who has it installed types them instead.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Multiplayer setup moves out of a canvas modal and a prompt() dialog into one
menu screen: your name, the two ways to host, and the friend's code. The socket
opens from the menu and the game stays parked behind the overlay until the room
fills — netHooks.paired takes the court one line before netStart writes to it —
so the room code can carry a real SHARE button and a wrong code is a typo you
fix rather than a CONNECTION LOST card over a match that never began.
The name is the world board's name (stats.saveName), crosses on the existing
look message, and the scoreboard finally names the person instead of CPU.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Oliver, on the picker: the gender tiles "themselves have the player but front
facing and that does not react to the kit and skin — so that's double somehow
and wastes space", the screen "is pretty crowded now", and the women's wash was
"a little too subtle on the white — could be more".
THE TILES ARE GONE. They were a second drawing of the same man, facing the wrong
way and deaf to every colour on the screen, and they cost the height that pushed
the court list under the fold. Who-you-are is two words now, and the live player
— which does react — stands beside every control that changes him, so a tap and
its result are a thumb apart. Four stacked sections became one block; all four
courts and SERVE UP fit a phone without scrolling.
THE WASH goes 0.30/0.93 -> 0.55/0.86: dyed from across the court, folds intact.
Past about 0.70 it stops reading as tennis whites at all.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Three things off the back of the picker.
THE LIVE PLAYER on the setup screen is the real sprite through the real tint, not
a mock-up of the pick — so the menu cannot promise a colour the court will not
keep. It redraws on every tap of a tour, a kit or a skin.
THE WOMEN'S TOUR IS NO LONGER SAT OUT. Her set is drawn head to toe in whites, so
there was no hue to rotate — the answer is not a dye but a WASH: the pick laid
over her whites at a low saturation with the lightness kept, which is how you dye
a white kit in life and gives rose, powder blue, mint, lilac. Her hair and skin
fall out of it on lightness alone, which is exactly what a dye could not manage.
THE FRIEND ACROSS THE NET now wears what they picked on their own phone. Their
look crosses on pairing, and since the opponent art is red rather than blue the
kit rides its own hue arc — safe there for the one reason it would not be on the
player's own sheets: the opponent sprites carry no drawn blood. An older build
simply never sends it and the opponent draws as before; the match still plays.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Testers asked for some control over how their player looks. From behind — the
only way you ever see him — there are two things worth controlling, and neither
needs a single new asset: the kit and the skin are one hue-bucket pixel pass over
the sheets already loaded, cached per frame and built on first draw.
The buckets are measured, not guessed, and three neighbours had to be fenced off
one at a time: the shirt's warm HIGHLIGHTS (which spattered the man with mud on
every dark pick), the drawn BLOOD on the death frames (which turned the pool
brown — the worst bug this file could ship), and the women's HAIR, which is the
same hue as his shorts and cannot be told apart from it by any rule. Her set is
played in whites and has no kit to dye, so it is flagged out and the row says so
rather than silently doing nothing.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Splatter gore no longer makes you win a game of tennis first — the mode you
pick is the mode you get, with the man you came to play already turned. The
transition itself is untouched and still reachable; it just isn't a toll booth.
The menu theme could only ever be started, never brought back, so the first
run of a session silenced it for good while the court's ambience followed you
into the menu. Starting a bed now un-ducks it too.
Three world boards instead of one: kills, opponents felled, and games taken
off the CPU, each with its own name prompt and its own row per player.
...and the gore economy stops paying a barrel for every game won past game 16,
while the shamblers, the mix and the ball machines keep escalating past the
point they all used to stop.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Six new opponent families (head coach, stringer, strawberry seller, chair
umpire, spectator, roller man) through the famroll/zsheet route, placed by
hierarchy into an 18-rung ladder; the champion steps up behind them.
THE DRAW: picking the tournament now rolls its own bracket in front of you —
only the final was ever settled — and what lands is what walks on.
Netplay, off Oliver's cellular report: the mid-flight early-decide was missing
its !G.net gate, so the striker judged its own outbound flight and the two
scoreboards drifted a point apart into a court nobody could serve on. The
host's court now rides the room, its scoreboard rides the pretoss stream, and
a called ball rolls to its own halt instead of freezing where the call caught it.
Plus the night court, and somebody in the stand is taking pictures.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Three chips under VS A FRIEND — the host's pick rides the room and the
start message rebuilds both courts on pairing. In the death match your
opponent IS the zombie: their lost points tear its wound stages, their
won points draw your blood, and bleeding out crosses the wire as the
other phone's win. The same receiver-is-judge verdicts drive the match
machinery through resolveInterlude, so the fall, the mop beat and the
burst come along unmodified. New: gushProne — the game-winning body
bleeds out on the ground, from prone-height anchors, until it bursts.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
VS A FRIEND on the mode screen (host a code, join a code), a ~110-line
RFC6455 relay in server.py that holds no game state, and src/net.js: each
phone plays itself near-side and the opponent's court is this one rotated
half a turn about the net. The phone a ball flies toward makes every call
on it; the striker's copy is picture. Six tests pin the rule from both
seats. No reconnect yet — a dropped radio is a card and a reload.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The live bench session's verdict, in Oliver's words: "this looks better than
anything before." Six and eight real phases at speed read as flicker on a
far-court body — the zombies never had this problem because their walks are
FOUR well-chosen frames at a calm rate, and the fix was to stop out-drawing
them. Each opponent now runs a TWO-frame true leg-swap pair — his frames 1+2
of the grid roll, hers 7+8 of the face-transplant cycle, both picked live on
the bench with SPR swaps — at TUNE.runHz2 = 1.7 (the old hardcoded 4.5 for
short cycles was most of a stride per display frame; that is the strobe).
The tuning rig ships too: TUNE.runN (frame-count override, 0 = probe),
T.SPR for live frame swaps, and the bench's living slots — the next cadence
question gets answered by watching, not rolling. Twelve run sprites become
four; the SPR list says why. SPRV 124, main.js v248.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Oliver: "add a normal player male and female to the hidden bench and let it
run there." The fam walk (up/down) now runs two slots past ZFAMS — PLAYER
MALE and PLAYER FEMALE. In a living slot the racket zombie steps outside the
frame, G.hideO lifts (splatter set it when the match turned), and the real O
runs the walk stop's own back-and-forth at the classic CPU's speed class, so
the cadence on the bench is the cadence the game plays. SK() reads the slot
for the _f suffix, so both tours review without touching the picked tour.
The HUD swaps the wound readout for the tuning one: runHz and aiSpeed, the
dials a live session turns through T.TUNE. T also gains a keyPressed alias.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
"all tennis screens are missing the ability to exit the game and return to
the menu — right now I need to force close the app." A quiet x chip rides the
top-right corner of every run (the scoreboard owns the left; the desktop key
hint shifts inboard). Tapping it — or Escape on desktop — freezes the world
with the existing paused flag and asks LEAVE THE MATCH?: BACK TO THE MENU in
the menu's crimson, PLAY ON underneath. Quitting is the death path minus the
death — restartRun, refreshSplash, splash — and banks nothing: an abandoned
run never happened, statistically. Verified live both ways: PLAY ON resumes
the frozen rally, quitting lands on the splash with the chip retired.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Oliver named the wizard's wrongness precisely: a pre-highlighted card that
also navigates is "a checkbox and a button combined in one". The border said
"this is a setting", the tap said "this was an answer", and the screen left
before the setting-reading of it could cash out.
So the two roles live on different screens now. The question screens (PICK A
GAME, DIFFICULTY, the zombie pair) carry NO selection: every poster and chip
is full-bright and equal — the dimming went too, it read as disabled — and
tapping answers and advances. The remembered run survives only as a small
LAST tag in the card's corner: an indicator, not a selection. The final
screen keeps its acid borders honestly, because SERVE UP is a real confirm —
the rule is "a border means SERVE UP will use this; a bright poster means
tap me to answer". Question screens rebuild on entry so LAST follows what
was actually played, and the first card clears the header by the margin the
old h3 rows used to give (Oliver's padding note).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
"the mode setup is really overwhelming now" — three posters plus a sub-row
plus player tiles plus court meters was a wall. Discussed, Oliver picked the
wizard with tap-advance over next-buttons and the accordion: PICK A GAME
(three posters, now 148px tall — alone on a screen they get to be posters),
then the mode's own second step only when it has one (classic: DIFFICULTY
chips stacked tall; zombie tennis: ARCADE and THE TOURNAMENT as full posters;
gore skips straight through), then MATCH SETUP holding player + court +
SERVE UP with the mode riding the summary footer.
Tapping selects AND advances — one decision per screen is the wizard's whole
promise, and a NEXT under a single row of choices is a second tap for nothing.
Back walks the chain the way it came (who-and-where returns to the second
step only when the mode has one). Every step comes up pre-selected from last
time, so a returning player is three taps from serving. Three new stages on
the intro's existing data-stage switcher; splash Enter goes to 'mode' now.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Oliver's restructure: mode first, then what the mode asks — classic deals
EASY / MEDIUM / HARD chips, ZOMBIE TENNIS deals two sub-mode posters (ARCADE,
the exhibition ladder as was, and THE TOURNAMENT), and SPLATTER GORE stands
alone as the third top card. config.MENU is the grouping, MODES stays the four
run modes, and pickedMode stays the run-mode id — start(), stats and the
summary never learn the menu got taller. The sub-row sits inset under the
posters; sub-cards are the poster at 2/3 height centred on their scene.
DIFFICULTY is the one real gameplay addition: config.DIFFS scales the three
dials the classic CPU already reads (flub, quality cap, aiSpeed), MEDIUM
pinned by test to the shipped classicFlub/classicQualityMax so the middle chip
IS yesterday's game. Rides on G.diff next to G.classic, so restarts keep it.
AND THE FEEL SPLIT OLIVER REPORTED IS REAL: "in classic tennis I tend to miss
balls way more often" — the match's three contact helpers (matchReach 1.35,
the matchAssist floor, the short-ball chase) were all G.match-gated, so
classic played with a 35% smaller racket and no rescue on the dying drop
shot. rallyFeel() = match || classic now carries all three; gore's opener
keeps the old prologue feel on purpose.
The ARCADE poster took two rolls: the first came back a flat sticker line-up
("very constructed, not artsy"), the second anchors on the zombie poster
itself as a MOOD reference — one challenger lit at the net, the queue receding
into purple haze. Rolls in _refcheck/modebtn. The cup's stats mapping also
joins MODE_MATCH (it banks through endRun as MATCH and read back as GORE).
SPRV 117, main.js v233, 66 tests.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Oliver's design call for the setup screen: the mode buttons should POP — a
bright full-bleed background symbolising each game mode, the description
written over it. Four scenes rolled through the _famroll OpenRouter route,
each anchored on its mode's own sprite for style, no text baked in:
CLASSIC a sunny sports-poster serve under a blue summer sky
ZOMBIE the turned opponent at an acid-green floodlit night net
CUP the champion's silhouette looming over the gold trophy
GORE the horde pouring over the net into a blood-red sunset
Installed as mode_*.png at a third of the 2K roll, quantised to 128 colours
(2.1 MB of menu art became 265 KB; pixel art quantises for free). The button
is the banner now: art + scrim gradient as one background stack, caption
bottom-left with a text shadow, and the unpicked modes sit desaturated and
dimmed so the chosen one is the thing that glows — the menu's own "one bright
thing means selected" rule, applied to pictures. The sprite-tile row and its
`tile` field are gone from MODES; raw 2K rolls kept in _refcheck/modebtn for
re-cuts. SPRV 114 -> 115, main.js v229. Verified in the browser: draw, select,
summary line, no console errors.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The fourth mode: four rounds up the dead hierarchy (CUP_ROUNDS), each round
drawing a rung from its band, the champion always the final. It rides the
match machinery whole — cupDraw feeds the drawn rung through d.opp so every
ladder dial scales untouched; the body's pool spans the round (need-scaled
pool and divisor, so wounds carry between games); cupGameWon holds the same
body mid-round, kills it on the round, and past the final cupWon banks a
NOT-dead match run under CHAMPION OF THE DEAD CLUB. Blood carries; round one
is a single game; deathmatch stays as the arcade run. Full-run state test.
Sidequests: the ghost trail is pace-qualified (TUNE.trailSpeed) so both
tennis modes streak — pow>0.8 was only ever reached by the gore slingshot;
opponent sprites draw ~18% brighter via a load-time baked copy
(render.brighten, TUNE.oppBright) with no PNG touched; the cup scoreboard
line names the round instead of lying with deathmatch arithmetic; the rack
and the apron demo no longer draw under a trophy screen.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
All of it found from the sprite bench, and most of it was the same mistake
twice: a correction applied on top of art that already handled it.
THE HEADLESS BODY SHRANK. "Every headless mode shrinks the whole opponent a
little" — measured, 34.0 px healthy / 33.8 arm off / 27.8 headless on all EIGHT
families, a flat -18%, and the FEET shrank 16-19% with it. A body that loses its
head does not get smaller feet. drawZombie carried `if (st === 2) h = 1.52` to
take a head off the top, and a headless sprite is still a FULL-HEIGHT frame,
because the generator draws a gushing neck stump whose blood plume fills the
space the head occupied: 18.3% of z_rw2's frame sits above its shoulders against
10.7% above z_rw1's head. So the art had taken the head off, the per-frame PNG
scaling had handled the height, and the override took it off a third time.
Wrong on the fallback skins too (z_cw2 is a SHORTER png, which the scaling
handles): its body drew at 1.30 m against the healthy 1.78 m. Gone. The HP bar
and the aim mark read config.zombieH directly, so they had been floating above a
shrunken body for as long as it existed; they re-align for free.
THE WOUNDED BODIES WALKED BACKWARDS, and this is not bench-only — racketAI and
updateBench both set face as the sign of x movement, so a match did it too. The
racket is what measures it, Oliver's own test: "if this racket is facing to the
right I would assume that he also walks to the right." Its string bed keys out
to an enclosed hole (or is painted pale on the master), so the hoop locates
itself. The healthy stride is drawn racket-RIGHT (+0.38..+0.42) and every wound
stride racket-LEFT (-0.39..-0.45): THE WOUNDED BODY IS DRAWN FACING THE OTHER
WAY, on the master and therefore in the reference and therefore in all seven
families. One flip rule cannot serve both rows — fixing the healthy walk
inverted the wound walk, which is the second thing he saw. The flip is derived
from the frame name now, and only for the WALK frames (w1/w1b/w2/w2b), because
they are the only ones whose orientation tracks travel: the wound forehand
measures racket-right like the healthy one, and a serve or a fall puts the
racket overhead where it says nothing about direction. Checked against 18 frame
names including the tour-suffixed ones.
AND _famref.py PINS THOSE SIDES. That branch is only correct while the art stays
this way, and this is the THIRD art inconsistency this session that reached the
court because nothing measured it. A re-roll that mirrors a row now fails the
reference build pointing at drawZombie's artFacesRight, instead of shipping.
A DEAD WRITE, found on the way: racketAI set rz.facing, and zombies render off
zb.face. `facing` is the PLAYER's field and uses the OPPOSITE convention (a char
flips on facing < 0, a body on face > 0), so the match opponent's turn was never
driven by its chase at all — it fell through to the generic sticky-face line.
THE PRONE FRAME LAY ON ITS RACKET. "The player basically levitates over the
ground held by his racket." Every frame is bottom-aligned on the ground point,
and in the fall3 art the lowest ink is the racket hoop thrown out beside the
body — z_shw1fall3 is 249x85 with the body's underside at y67 and rows 68-84
racket, so the torso floated a fifth of the frame up. TUNE.proneSink drops it by
that fraction, putting the body line where fall2 leaves its knees. The shadow
made it worse and is suppressed for the whole beat: the contact ellipse is sized
off DRAWN WIDTH, and a prone frame is three times wider than a standing one, so
the widest darkest shadow in the game was painted under the one body not
standing on it.
THE FALL CARRIES THE RUN. "When the opponent runs to the ball from left to right
and then falls, the player must still move to the right while falling." The
velocity is INHERITED (racketAI and updateBench both record zb.vx), so a body
that went down standing still does not slide and one caught at a sprint slides
furthest. It was exponential decay first, which put 93% of the travel in the
first two frames — "the visible slide should also extend to the 3rd and 4th
frame" — and no retuning fixes that: stretch a wall-clock decay far enough to
move the prone body and it creeps for the whole floor hold. So the slide is a
DISTANCE BUDGET shared across the frames (TUNE.fallSlideMix), eased out within
each so it still decelerates. x is set absolutely from the start, so the total
cannot drift with frame rate. 0.05 / 0.22 / 0.35 / 0.11 m — the landing skids
and the rise drags itself the last of the way.
THE BENCH GOT A FALL BUTTON to tune all of this, and it plays the REAL beat:
same FALL table, same tickMatchFall, because a bench that re-implemented the
timing would be refining a second copy of it. matchReady() is skipped while the
bench owns the court (it runs setupPoint and re-places the body — a match doing
match things inside an art test), the walk stop stops walking during a fall, and
startFall reads the table LIVE via fallLen() so tuning the numbers cannot leave
the 'over' beat expiring mid-collapse.
FALL is 0.06 / 0.25 / 2.0 / 0.45 after a session in the bench. fall1 and fall2
are deliberately the same pace (0.87 and 0.88 m/s of slide at a 1.54 m/s entry)
so the collapse reads as one movement decelerating into the ground; the 0.07 s
fall2 it replaced gave each drawn frame ~4 display frames and read as a cut.
THE LENS, portrait camZ 48 -> 49. The three camera numbers are not independent:
holding the near player's drawn size fixed means camF = s_player * (camZ - zMax),
holding the court's on-screen depth fixed means camY = depth / (s_player -
camF/camZ), so 49 gives 795 and 11.23 and horizon re-derives to 43. Far opponent
33.1 -> 33.8 px, player unchanged, court band within a pixel. One metre is
deliberate: at camZ 55 the umpire is already clipped off the right edge and by 70
the court reads top-down, and it narrows the player's lateral room because
xVisible clamps him to what fits. A figScale experiment that scaled every body
1.2x got further (far body 40.6 px) but is NOT in here — it needs the vertical
contact constants to scale with it (ball-vs-body is gated on ball.y < 1.9, which
sits just above the tallest chest at 1.856 m, so the roller man would have gone
invulnerable) and Oliver reverted it pending a real playtest.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
THE MENU BUG, and it explains three reports at once. cStart's handler was
`addEventListener('click', start)` — and addEventListener hands a listener the
MouseEvent as its first argument, so `start(modeId = pickedMode)` never saw its
default: modeId was an EVENT OBJECT. `G.classic = modeId === 'classic'` was
therefore always false and the zombie branch never fired. Picking CLASSIC or
ZOMBIE TENNIS on the setup screen did nothing at all; SERVE UP always started
the gore mode. A default parameter only applies to `undefined`, and a click
handler always passes something. `() => start()`.
That is also why "in normal tennis i dont see the ball circles and the serve
hint bar": there was no normal tennis to be in. Both are drawn unconditionally
in render() and the tennis struggle hints are already mode-gated correctly.
Verified through the real menu after the fix: CLASSIC gives mode=tennis with
no bodies on court, ZOMBIE gives match=true against the SHAMBLER in its own
body. Every other bare handler in the codebase takes no parameters — checked.
THE MOP BOY had the same class of bug one layer down. sendBoy was called and
mopWorthIt() refused: it tests `d.z >= COURT.netZ - 2`, the NEAR half, because
in the gore mode everything dies on the near court. A match's blood is all on
the FAR side, where the body stands and bleeds through four wound stages, so
the boy could never qualify. The near-side bias stays; the match is the
exception.
DANIEL was being dropped, not missing. Two causes, both mine: the asides were
queued at 0.7-1.5 s and matchPoint fires the score call at 0.4 s with a clip
over a second long — voice() drops anything that would start while he is still
talking (one man, one microphone). And asideEvery is 55 s, a whole match game.
Delays moved past the score call; matchAsideEvery is 15 s, which fits a mode
whose events are a limb and your blood rather than a wave of bodies.
THE FALL: quicker down, longer on the floor (0.09/0.11/2.0/0.30). And it was
genuinely SHRUNKEN — the generator draws fall rows smaller than standing rows
(the brute's buckle came back 190 px against a 224 px stance) and _zsheet's one
global scale preserved that faithfully, so the body shrank the moment it
started to fall. A fall row is anchored on its own buckle now, which must draw
at standing height. All seven generated families re-cut: 224/153/98/181 against
the hand-made racket family's 224/154/85/179 — the convergence is the check.
THE FLICK: 0.42 made going out impossible, which fixed the 8-in-10 bug and
overshot it ("too easy. i must be able to play out"). 0.62 puts risk back where
it belongs — ~15% out at quality 0, 5% at 0.75, and never on a perfect flick.
The test now asserts that shape: bounded, monotonically falling, zero at 1.
59 tests green.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
THE MISSING ART, generated by the whole-sheet restyle method: bouncing the ball
at the baseline, the toss with the ball leaving the fingertips, the strike at
full stretch — and the fall, which slice 4 has been waiting for: buckling, down
on the knees, flat on the court face down, then dragging itself back up. One
zombie is now complete as a tennis player rather than as a body that shuffles.
(Healthy only so far; the wound variants are the next sheet.)
THE SPRITE BENCH, in the back room. No ball, no scoring, no AI — one opponent
on an empty court, walking, at the size and speed it is actually played at,
because that is the only place a walk cycle can be judged. A sheet that looks
fine at 224 px on a contact sheet is a different animal at 30 px crossing a
lawn, and every sprite argument this project has had was really about that gap.
It steps through every state including the ones the game cannot reach yet, so
the serve and the fall could be looked at the day they were drawn instead of
the day they get wired up. It prints the FILENAME it is drawing and the hp the
wound stage was read from — the two numbers that separate "the art is wrong"
from "the wiring picked the wrong art" — and it says HEALTHY ONLY where a wound
variant does not exist rather than implying one does. The stride steps off
ground covered, like the real thing: a bench animating on a clock would flatter
exactly the sprites that foot-slide in play.
It owns the court like every other mode and every start* refuses while it runs.
FOUND BY IT, ten seconds in: `start()` applies the mode the setup screen picked,
so a remembered ZOMBIE TENNIS was taking the court before the back room could —
every back-room entry (weapons, bosses, drill, match, bench) had been silently
refusing since the mode select landed this morning. The back room passes null.
And a third calibration lesson: POSE MOVES A GLOBAL COLOUR STATISTIC. A body
face down shows a fraction of the shirt it shows standing, so `redness` fell 14
points across the fall sheet without a colour changing. The measure that
survives a pose change is the shorts HUE — mid-tone neutrals, present in every
frame in the same proportion — which is why it is the one that caught the drift
Oliver actually saw.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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>
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>
wuwiandClaude Fable 5