- The gore bed is "Dystopian Survival", made loopable: the last ten
seconds cross-faded into the first ten, 203.5 s, as MP3 at 128k (the
decoder strips the encoder's delay, so the seam has no gap). High-pass
at 40 Hz instead of 800, level matched to the menu theme.
- The prologue no longer drops into gore for a moment: after the turn,
act I's card and cup take over directly.
- RESET STORY under the build stamp (two taps; test only). It resets
the story, league, cups and title, keeps the level, and pushes at once
so the mirror cannot hand the old act back.
- The story screens have sound: a whoosh and a boom for the act card,
applause and the rack's own click as each weapon lands, applause and
a pock per arcade door on the act's end.
- Chapters are six games: mid-boss after three, the horde after four,
the act boss after six.
v384, staging only.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
- From the third attempt at a checkpoint, the death screen offers TRY
AGAIN · WITH HELP, at most two tiers, said openly. In the cup the help
is fresher legs and a longer swing; in gore, one more heart and a
slower director and horde. Every checkpoint passed resets the offer.
- The arcade shows only what the story has opened. Training and Classic
open after act I, the Climb after II, Splatter Gore after III, and
hosting a friend after IV (joining stays free). Locked doors are shown
greyed with the act that opens them.
- The non-story endings point at the story instead of the cup.
- Store switches for the free tier (act I's card points at the full
game) and a premium arcade, both off.
- The prologue's HUD no longer overlaps the kill pips.
PROJECT.md logs phases 1-4. One new test. v382, staging only.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Three animated screens in the storyboard's look, built in the page over
a paused world:
- The act title card: the act's court pans in behind ACT n, its league,
its court and its goal; it closes itself after three seconds or on a
tap.
- The cup's ceremony: YOU CLEARED THE COURT, the rounds and the run's
xp, then the act's weapons drop into a rack one by one ("…and gained
these for the hordes to come"), and the chapter preview with the
mid-boss named and game 10 still "???" until the transformation.
- The act card: what the act cost (bodies, bosses, deaths), what it
opened in the arcade, and the next act's court; CONTINUE goes straight
on, THE CLUBHOUSE goes home.
The checkpoint keeps its in-game banner. Headless, every screen falls
back to the plain card it replaced. v381, staging only.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
At match point of an act's cup final the beaten finalist does not fall.
The ceremony lands (the loot, still a plain card), then the applause is
cut, the camera closes in, and on the turn he bursts and the act's boss
stands where he stood, growing into the frame with his name and
"GAME 10". He runs out of the picture to the left while the stands empty
onto the court, and game 1 of the chapter begins without a cut: the
crowd that came down is its first wave. The interlude holds serving,
spawns and the boss's AI through the scene.
The prologue is one game of tennis against a living opponent with the
old transformation exactly as written; when it hands over, act I's cup
takes the court. Two new tests. v380, staging only.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The front door now continues the story. An act is its league cup, whose
final is the boss's own body (acts II and IV play their band out of
ladder order for that), then a ten-game gore chapter on the act's court.
The chapter has no duel at all, takes the act's weapon stock into the
rack, meets a mid-boss after game 5 (the checkpoint: restock and full
blood) and the act boss after game 10, then the act card. Death is not
permadeath: it counts the attempt, banks nothing on the boards, and
TRY AGAIN restarts from the checkpoint the profile holds. Barrels hold
what the act has earned. The chapter plays the arcade's games
base+1..base+10 so every director curve keeps its slope.
Profiles from before the story start it from the top (league, cups and
champion reset; level kept). The server mirror stores the act and
checkpoint and only ever moves them forward.
Plain cards stand in for the screens (phase 3) and the transformation
(phase 2). Six new tests.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Oliver wants to hand over a log of why he missed balls. It existed behind
a scoreboard tap but was gated on G.mode === 'tennis', so the Climb, the
cup and training (which run as 'splatter') logged nothing. It now writes
in every rally mode: hits with shot, tap age and any quality cap, misses
with the new let-it-bounce reason, and a WON/LOST line naming why each
point went. Tapping the open log copies all 200 entries with a header.
Its first catch: the gold ring went gold at a distance, which is too
early for the slow balls steps 1-3 brought in. It is now timed off the
ball's real path to his reach (against where his run is taking him):
gold means touch now. ringTime 0 restores the old ring. v365.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Two netplay-only finds from Oliver's two-phone session.
THE FRIEND'S STRIKE was silent: every other opponent is simulated locally
and cracks through gameplay's shared return path, but the friend's swing
runs on their phone alone and arrives as a 'shot' message that wrote the
ball and nothing else. netApplyShot now plays the same sample at the same
volume, pitched off the pace that was actually sent (strikeRate, read after
the ball is written). Both netplay modes, not just the death match.
THE REMATCH: the summary's only netplay door was THE CLUBHOUSE, so playing
the same friend again meant two trips through the lobby and a fresh code.
The relay cannot re-pair, so the rematch is the socket that is still open —
one 'again' frame and both phones reset the run under the decisions the room
already carries (same side, same mode, same court, host serves). netAgain
keeps G.net across restartRun(true) and replays netFresh, netStart's own
tail split out so pairing and rematch cannot drift into two courts. Applied,
never echoed; a 2 s window swallows the second frame when both tap at once;
a dead line refuses and falls through to the clubhouse.
Also: the dev server runs with SPLAT_AUTH= (server.py always said local dev
should), which the shared password had been 401-ing. audio.sfxTest is a new
test seam in netTest's shape. 146 tests.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
A chimney of rising embers on a trophy read as a fire. Three points ON the
shield now, dark for most of a long cycle and flaring for a fraction of it,
with delays and durations that share no common multiple — so a glint lands
somewhere on the row every couple of seconds and never in the same rhythm.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
They were running the whole time (0.85 opacity, measured) — they were just
flying ACROSS the artwork, where a 3px gold speck disappears into a pixel
shield. They lift off the top edge into the dark above it now, seven per badge
on a shorter delay window: spread over 2.6s the shield stood empty half the
time, which is what "ich sehe kein glimmen" was looking at.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Oliver wanted to rank the level a league was taken at. The challenge held: xp
comes only from playing, so a board that rewards a low level rewards not
playing — it would pay you to avoid the three rooms the season leans on. It
also inverts every other number in the game, freezes after five entries, and
makes the player who played more look worse.
So the league ranks and the level decides between everyone who got equally far,
where "lower is better" reads naturally. BOARDS.u carries subLow; server
rank_key is the other half, and the same key decides whether a submission beats
the row already standing. The level is written once at the promotion — before
the league moves, because it is the level that WON the cup — mirrored like the
rest of the profile, and inscribed under the shield it belongs to. Earned
shields smoulder while they are on screen: five CSS embers each, no loop.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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>
wuwiandClaude Opus 5.5