Steps 1-3 of the late-game depth plan, after Oliver's 50+ game playtest.
"Sometimes the racket zombie doesn't seem harmable" was real, not a feeling.
Three of the five rack slots did nothing at all to him and said nothing about
it: TRIPLE side balls skipped him, GUN and horde pellets skipped him, fire
couldn't ignite him. BOMB meanwhile deleted him outright ignoring his hp. All
of it now routes through one wound() with a TUNE.dmg* table, so damage is
proportional to the body and a future 20 hp boss needs no new code. Fractional
damage banks on zb.chip so whole points only come off hp — the wound skins
switch on hp thresholds. His contact radius goes to 0.7 m, because part of
"unharmable" was just missing him. Melee still skips him and that's correct:
he's on the far side of the net and melee can't span it.
The HP bar is gone. It was the only floating UI on a body, it was on screen
for nearly the whole run, and nobody knew what it meant — while the wound
skins already say the same thing in the language every other multi-hit enemy
uses. A one-per-run modal explains what he is instead. Skins and bleed anchors
now read a fraction of hpMax, since his hp scales with the run.
And the plateau: every difficulty dial bottomed out by about game 12, so games
12-50 were arithmetically identical. Body cap, spawn gap, shamble speed,
variant mix, boss hp and horde size all keep climbing now, calibrated to track
the old curve through game 12 rather than replace it. One deliberate exception:
shamble speed was time-based and maxed during game 2, so the early game is
genuinely gentler now — zSpeedPerGame if that reads flabby.
HANDOFF carries the full spec for steps 4 and 5 (ranged attacks with player
damage, then chapter bosses) including the decisions we settled, so the next
session can pick it up cold.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
m.in (0..1 over TUNE.modalIn, 0.34 s) is the entrance clock, ticked inside
update()'s modal early-return — the one thing that animates while the world
is frozen. Icon and title fly in from the right trailing two ghost copies as
a speed streak, the body lines cascade in from the left one after another,
everything on easeOutBack so it overshoots and settles rather than
decelerating politely into place. The dim washes in over the first third. A
descending noise sweep on arrival (swish is parameterised now — same six
lines of Web Audio, opposite reading) and a low pock as it lands.
Every x is rounded: a fractional x on a nearest-neighbour scaled image
re-snaps its pixel columns, which is the boiling that once read as HUD
flicker.
Dismissal is gated on the entrance: while m.in < 1 dismissModal swallows the
gesture but doesn't clear the modal, so a tap already in the air when a popup
appears can't skip it — and swallowing rather than returning false is what
keeps that tap from falling through into a serve.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Oliver vetoed the free movement between points on sight: he never walks
freely during play, so being able to only between points reads as the game
breaking, not as a fix. Reverted to 'rally' only, and the rule is written into
the settled-feel list so it doesn't get re-invented.
The frozen changeover is answered his other way instead — the dead wait too.
`held` in updateZombies stops their advance, their steering and the eat check
for the breather; they still bleed and burn, they just stand there, because
the umpire called time and it is still a tennis match. The path where this
actually bit: losing a duel scheduled on a changeover beat spawns five fresh
shamblers and THEN starts five seconds you have no agency in.
The stuck pose was never about movement — 'run' is the one pose expirePose
doesn't expire, and runT stops advancing outside the block, so a beat that
began mid-stride welded him to a single frame. Reset it and it's fixed for
every phase.
And he could walk off the screen in ordinary play, not just during the beat I
had added: P_BOUNDS.x is 6.5 m, portrait shows about ±4 m at the baseline.
The xVis clamp already existed but only applied during auto-fire; it now
always applies, floored at the sideline so every legal ball stays catchable.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
All eight issues from Oliver's 35-game retest.
The freeze (1 and 6 — one root cause): the movement block, pose update
included, lived inside `if (G.phase === 'rally')`, so every 'over' beat and
every pretoss stranded the player mid-animation while the zombies walked on.
It now also runs whenever splatter is in any phase but 'toss' — 'toss' is the
aim, and the thumb is busy. Tennis keeps its old gating.
The rest:
- the mop boy is waved off the sudden-death duel and barred for its duration
- triple-serve clones inherit the serve's topspin gravity, so the wings stop
floating while the centre ball dives
- "Time." belongs to the changeover's own countdown, not to whatever beat
happened to expire while the breather ran
- the tutorial illustration is a finger pressing and pulling back now, not a
curved arrow that read as a scroll
- aiming holds the pretoss stance; the smash plays when the shot fires
- GAME N sits on the scoreboard permanently
HANDOFF records all eight as closed with what the fix was, plus two ways a
soak rig lies to you and why the CPU-return benchmark can't be reproduced
from the number alone.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Everything it specified shipped long ago, and the parts still worth knowing are
already folded into HANDOFF. Keeping a stale plan around only invites a future
session to treat it as live spec.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Rewrote HANDOFF.md around what a next session actually needs: what the game is,
how it flows, the invariants you have to know before touching anything, the
settled feel decisions, the regression net with its real numbers, the asset
pipeline with the generator's known failure modes, and the hard-won gotchas.
Five rounds of chronological "feedback round" sections are folded into that
structure — the history is in the git log and the memory file, not here.
Deleted POLISH-PLAN.md: all fourteen items shipped. PLAN.md is left in place but
marked historical at the top of HANDOFF.
Corrected two stale facts carried in the old handoff: RES is 3 (not 2, which
would have thrown off the umpire-cheat coordinates) and UMP_X is 6.05 (not 5.6).
Added an OPEN ISSUES section with Oliver's eight findings from the 35-game
retest, each with a diagnosis from reading the code rather than just the
symptom. Two of them (player frozen between games, sprite freeze after the
horde) look like one root cause: the movement and pose block sits inside
`if (G.phase === 'rally')`, so every 'over' beat freezes the player mid-frame
while the zombies walk on. The triple-serve lob is confirmed: the wing clones
integrate at flat gravity while the real serve carries up to 2.3x from topspin.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
- The crowd sat in the dark, worst of all in splatter mode where you spend the
game. Both crowd frames get an identical gamma lift (means 30/14/39 ->
42/22/56) and the rot tint drops 0.5 -> 0.26. The curve MUST stay identical
across the two frames or the clap swap flashes brightness; _sheet_crowd1.png
keeps the pre-lift original.
- The splatter hint led with the tap when pulling is the whole gesture. It now
reads PULL BACK TO AIM - RELEASE TO FIRE, and after 1.5s of sitting in the
serve stance untouched a ghost thumb slides back while chevrons grow up-court
on a loop. Pull back, shoot forward is an inverse relationship that a line of
text cannot carry on its own.
- The mop boy has three sheets instead of two: the push cycle now plays ONLY
while he is stopped and working, a new carry sheet walks him upright with the
mop shouldered, and the run sheet stays for the tennis-mode ball fetch. He was
mopping thin air the entire way to the stain.
Sheet note: frames 2 and 3 of the carry sheet merged (a mop handle bridging the
gap), so it is cut at the true column gaps plus the thinnest column inside the
merged pair, then common-scaled — same technique as the brute stride sheet.
26-game soak clean. Serve returns 133/150 = 88.7% +/-2.6%, 30 human-tapped
points = 50 hits / 0 whiffs.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
- The draw meter is a fixed bar across the bottom, ~90% of the width and 10px
tall, with the kill notch on it. It was a 26x4 stub floating on the apron by
the player's feet, which is nothing under a thumb at arm's length. The serve
hint is suppressed while pulling since they share the slot. pullFull 95 -> 130:
at 95 every pull maxed out by accident, so the meter never meant anything.
- The aim magnet took the nearest body ALONG the lane, so a close shambler a
little off-axis stole shots clearly aimed past it. It now picks the best
ALIGNED body, with TUNE.aimTie of slack in which a nearer one still wins — a
straight-ahead lane still eats the nearest body first, which is the settled
feel. aimTie: 1 restores the old behaviour exactly, for A/B.
- Bomb radius 2.5 -> 4.2 (2 kills -> 5 in a scattered ten-wave), a 120-particle
eruption, a ring of thrown stains and a full-size pile. The blinding white
frame is now a brief warm bloom — it was hiding the very gore it announced.
- Rack tiles 22 -> 30 tall, and the touch band is padded above and runs to the
screen edge below. At 22 logical px they were ~30 CSS px on a phone, well under
the ~44 a thumb expects; now ~62.
26-game soak clean with heavy bomb use, arrays stay bounded. Serve returns
136/150 = 90.7% +/-2.4%, 30 human-tapped points = 50 hits / 0 whiffs.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The freeze first: G.mgT only counted down inside `G.phase === 'rally'`, so
anything that moved the phase mid-burst — a scheduled duel calling setupPoint —
stranded it above zero forever. mgT > 0 is one of keyPressed's early returns, so
no tap could serve again, and the yellow shape over the player's head was
drawMgRacket's muzzle flash still being drawn. Fixed at the root (the clock ticks
in every phase, only the pellets are gated on rally) and semantically: starting a
duel cancels any burst, because the duel is tennis.
The mop boy now does an actual round: walk to the biggest nearby stain, stand on
it and push the mop while the cycle animates in place, scrub it out, move to the
next, then leave. Gore fades ~3.5x faster while he is stopped and working than
when walking past, so the stain dies under him instead of fading as he drifts by.
boyMaxJobs caps the round so a kill streak can't employ him forever.
Applause: the clip is 4.16s and always plays in full, but every cheer() passed a
shorter beat, so the stand sat down while it was still audible. Floored at the
clip length. New, much bolder clap frame — the re-roll came back brighter and
bluer, which would have flashed the whole stand, so it is colour-matched to frame
one per channel on mean and sd before quantising.
Net and umpire were both wrong since forever: netW was the singles-stick width
(10.06) against a court drawn to the doubles lines, so the net stopped 0.46m
short each side; the chair's near legs stood 0.45m inside the sideline. Both now
sit exactly on the doubles line.
26-game soak clean, no stalls. Serve returns 134/150 = 89.3% +/-2.5% with the
wider net (the bar is inside one sigma), 30 human-tapped points = 50 hits /
0 whiffs.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Every animation in this round gets real frames. The procedural squash-and-sway
on the wounded brute read as fake on sight, and that gait is where the comedy
lives.
- Each brute wound stage now has its own 2-frame lurch (z_gw/z_gwb, z_gw2/z_gw2b,
...). The generator gave every B frame a dragged pole that only stage 1
actually carries, so it would have blinked in and out each step — stripped by
keeping the largest blob, and where the pole touched the body, by cutting on
column density (a torso is dense, a dragged pole is a thin diagonal).
- Frames step off DISTANCE COVERED, never elapsed time — boy.dist for ball boys,
z/bruteStride for brutes. A time-driven cycle moonwalks the moment speed and
frame rate disagree, which is exactly what "he slides faster than the animation
suggests" was. Change a speed now and the legs keep up on their own.
- One boy, one slot. sendBoy no longer replaces a boy already on court: that was
the appearing and disappearing, since every kill teleported him back to the
wing mid-stride. New mess is appended to his round instead. He now walks for
10.5s a crossing, and there is a lot of mopping to do.
- The applauding crowd is a real two-frame animation (seated / arms up), swapped
per column on its own phase. The old "smooth wave" still shifted each column by
a FRACTIONAL dy, and nearest-neighbour resampling at a fractional y re-snaps a
column's pixel rows every frame — that boiling beside the HUD is what read as
the scoreboard flickering. The board art is 99.9% opaque; nothing was ever
showing through it. With the crowd calm the frame delta is now 0.0%.
Benchmarks: 136/150 serve returns (90.7% ±2.4%, the 11/12 bar is inside one
sigma), 30 human-tapped points = 50 hits / 0 whiffs.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
- Fire never spread in play. The flame ball's full pierce wiped its own lane, so
the bodies that would have caught were already gone. It now ignites everything
it FLIES PAST (TUNE.burnBallR), with a wider ignition and spread radius. One
flame serve into a scattered 10-wave kills 9, nine burning at once.
- Wounded brutes slid along like decals: every wound stage is a single frame and
the brute now spends most of its life wounded. They get a procedural lumber
instead of eight more sprites — translate + squash, no rotation, so the pixels
stay on the grid, and the amplitudes scale with the projection or the whole
thing goes sub-pixel at range.
- The "scoreboard flicker" was the crowd: the cheer bounce was per-column
Math.random() every frame, i.e. TV static, showing through the scoreboard art's
transparent ornate edges. Now a smooth per-column sine on idleT.
- Ball boys: mopping is the default in splatter mode now, and the boy is half
again as tall — at 1.2m he read as a distant speck. The running fetch-boy
survives for tennis, where there is nothing on the grass but a ball.
- Changeover 7s -> 5s, with the mop crossing timed to fill it.
- Save-to-homescreen: a bloody tennis ball, wired up as apple-touch-icon +
favicon + webmanifest. The Dockerfile now ships the manifest and gives it its
own MIME type via an exact-match location (a bare `types {}` block would have
replaced nginx's whole map and broken .js and .png with it).
Benchmarks re-run: CPU returns 67/72 serves (93.1%, above the 11/12 bar — a
20/24 sample in between was flub noise), 30 human-tapped points = 50 hits /
0 whiffs.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The three foundations first, since everything else leans on them:
- G.modal is the only thing that stops the world. update() early-returns on it
so no zombie steps, no ball flight, no spawn timers run while a popup is on
screen — you can read it without being eaten. Dismissal swallows the gesture;
the pointerdown dismisser is registered only on pointer:fine, because on touch
pointerdown beats touchstart and a shared handler cleared the modal and then
served with the same thumb.
- UI in config.js is the accent palette. The arcade primaries were shouting over
the artwork; the gore reds deliberately stay loud.
- Every canvas font string now goes through F(). Bare `monospace` resolved to
Courier — a slab serif — which was the "generic serif" bug, not taste.
Then: weapons are only ever WON. deliverTin() has exactly one caller now
(resolveInterlude('P')); the old game schedule calls the DUEL instead, fired off
proceedAfterClear() where the court is guaranteed empty. Four popups (splatter
tutorial with a generated illustration, first duel, weapon received, horde),
wCap 9 with the tin amounts tunable, a 5-hp brute that comes apart over four
wound skins, fire that ignites the neighbours and chains outward, a three-stage
death where you become the biggest gore mound on the court, and a 7s changeover
with a ball boy who finally has a mop.
New art: assets/logo.png, x_howto, z_gw2-4, x_boymop1-4, plus assets/_key.py for
standalone art (chroma-key + crop, no frame splitting, no forced sprite height).
Benchmarks re-run and holding: CPU returns 23/24 serves, 30 human-tapped points
= 50 hits / 0 whiffs, 26 simulated games with no exceptions.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Oliver's call: duels have to come round on their own so there is always a shot
at a weapon. So the game-count schedule isn't the bug — it's attached to the
wrong event. Item 5 now moves it from delivering tins to calling duels: same
cadence, same umpire-restores-order framing, but the weapon has to be earned.
Fires off proceedAfterClear(), which is the one moment the court is guaranteed
empty (the wave was just cleared by hand and nothing has respawned). Clearing
is already mandatory before play advances, so the schedule can't stall — a
wall-clock timer would need its own wait-for-a-safe-moment logic and could fire
mid-swarm. The existing opportunistic trigger stays as a bonus path.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Fourteen items from Oliver's phone-test list, written so a fresh session can
execute them. Every root cause was verified against the code rather than
guessed; the two "bugs" both turned out to be real and both have a named line:
wCap 3 caps the stock, and weapons leak in through a SECOND delivery path
(splatPoint's tinDue -> startChangeover) that has nothing to do with the duel.
The serif complaint is also a bug, not taste: only 4 of 15 canvas font strings
ask for Silkscreen, the rest say bare "monospace" and land on Courier.
Ordered so the three foundations come first — the modal system (five separate
popup requirements need the same input-gated pause, which does not exist yet),
the UI colour constants, and the font fix — since the later items draw through
all three.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Reads as something leaving your hand and receding rather than as a label on the
zombie, which is what the perspective shrink was already saying. The arrowhead
stays fully opaque, so the target is still unmistakably marked.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The chevrons were stepped along the SCREEN line at a fixed size, so they read as
a flat sticker over a 3D court. They now step through world space and take their
size from their own projection scale — near ones roughly twice the far ones —
and they fade IN toward the target so the eye is walked up the lane instead of
being handed a uniform stripe. The arrowhead scales with the target's own depth
too. (proj is a true projective map, so the screen direction stays constant
along the line; only size and alpha needed to vary.)
Hard shots now fly hard: serve pace is weighted onto quality (19 base + 22×q,
so 21 -> 41 m/s) instead of 21 -> 28. Two things had to give way for it.
Serve topspin was a fixed 1 + 0.35q, which meant a fast flat ball could not
both clear the tape and land on a target, so the net-loft loop throttled every
smash back to walking pace — measured 21.8 m/s whether you drew 60px or 95px.
TUNE.serveSpin 1.3 lets it leave flat and DIVE, which is what a smash is.
And the loft loop's margin was doHit's quality cushion, which taxed exactly the
shots meant to hurt. It's now sized to the real error it exists to cover: the
sim samples the net plane once a frame, so a diving ball can test below the tape
when the closed form clears it. Margin = descent rate × the dt clamp. A flat
drive pays almost nothing, a lob pays what it must.
Measured, target 20m out: 24.7 / 32.2 / 41 m/s for weak / mid / full draw. At
the net it's 9.6 / 11.2 / 11.6 — still the slow floaty lob, as it should be.
Ball-vs-shambler contact gets a crude sweep (radius + half a frame's travel),
because a 41 m/s ball steps 0.7m per frame at 60fps and 1.6m at main.js's dt
clamp, both wider than a shambler. Verified the full smash connects at both.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Camera dynamics off (aimCamY/aimCamZ 0) — the knobs stay, so either direction
is a value away in the T panel, but the default holds still now.
The aim graphics carry the read instead. A chevron trail runs down the lane and
plants an arrowhead on the target: the chevrons multiply and fatten as the draw
builds, so the trail reads as pressure rather than as a static dashed line, and
the direction is unmistakable now that the angle actually selects a lane.
The new part is the draw meter on the apron in front of your feet, because the
kill threshold was the one rule with no picture: you could hear the click and
see the colour flip, but never see the line COMING. Now a white notch marks it,
the fill runs cold below and hot past it, and a full draw flashes. Anchored at
the feet rather than over the head — up there it sat right in the lane with the
chevrons running through it — and clamped so advancing up-court can't push it
into the rack.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The aim camera now drops and pushes IN while you draw instead of lifting and
leaning back — you crouch into the shot. Both knobs just flip sign, so the old
behaviour is a sign change away in the T panel.
And the reason the pull's angle felt like it did nothing: aimCone 0.45 meant a
lane half-width of ±10 m at the far baseline, which is the entire court. Every
downward pull locked the same body, so the indicator's angle was decoration.
At 0.10 (±2.9 m out there, ±0.9 m at your feet) the angle picks a lane for
real — swept in 4° steps against three shamblers 18 m out, each one owns a
~12° window and past ±20° the ball flies into an empty lane. Thumb-sized, but
you have to point.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Three things from the phone test.
The drag meant two different things depending on invisible state: aiming from
pretoss, but walking the player around while the last ball was still in the
air. That "mode between the hits" read as a bug, so it's gone — canAimServe now
covers every phase of splatter, and firing over a live ball is allowed again
(the old one flies on as a ballistic clone). That was the mid-rally re-toss
that used to be the spam vector, and it's safe now because the brake moved into
the pull: a rhythm of lazy 30px pulls fires 100 shots in 30s and kills NOTHING
(the court fills up instead), while 85 committed full pulls kill 11.
hitServe never had doHit's net-clearance loop, so every shot at a shambler
hugging the tape died in the net — not balance, a missing loop. Both paths now
trade pace for arc until the ball is genuinely over, and the ceiling goes 8 ->
12 tries because a target right behind the net needs a near-vertical drop
(measured: clears the tape by 0.20m and connects). The trade is real: the loft
arrives slower and the walk-lead was computed for the original pace, so a lob
is honestly the less reliable shot.
And the camera now rises and leans back a little while the slingshot is drawn.
That steeper look is what makes the gap between the net and the bodies behind
it readable — the shot that used to be blind. Eased once per frame before
anything projects, since one sheared frame would be visible.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The ball economy made it harder in the wrong way: waiting for a ballboy is
friction, not difficulty, and walking with the finger was one gesture too many
for anyone to discover. Both are out — a spent ball hands you a fresh one
again, and the thumb only ever does the slingshot.
The brake moves into the gesture instead. The pull's LENGTH is now the shot's
power and nothing else: under TUNE.zSplatQ it merely staggers, at full draw
it's quality 1.0 with the PERFECT flash and hitstop. A lazy rhythm of short
pulls can't kill anything, so tempo stops being a strategy.
The pull's DIRECTION is a ray, not a landing point, which is the ergonomic fix
for having to drag off the bottom of the phone: distance to the target no
longer costs drag length. The first shambler standing in the lane eats the
ball, whether it's 5 or 21 metres away, and the cone widens with range so
distant lanes stay pickable. Full power now sits at 95px of travel.
Also gone: the free predictive auto-lock on a directionless aim (zombieTarget
returns null with no direction, and a bare hold no longer fires at all). Melee
goes back to cleaving the cluster — it's the panic button — with the 1s
cooldown left in as the brake. The reticle reads power throughout: cool blue
only staggers, hot red kills, the drawn band grows behind you, and the pull
clicks the moment it crosses the kill threshold.
Verified by simulated touch gestures: 10px cancels, 35px = 0.31 (stagger),
60px = 0.60, 95px = 1.00; the same 60px pull reaches shamblers at 5m, 21m and
diagonally; 22 serves in 30s, so the pace is back.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The slingshot serve didn't fix the gameplay because four things were free at
once: pure-hold auto-target with predictive lead, a hardcoded 0.62 serve
quality, infinite ammo with an instant mid-rally re-toss, and a melee swish on
every single tap that cleaved the whole cluster. Perfecting the pretoss/toss
rhythm beat the game; no skill required.
The ball is scarce now. A spent ball LIES where it died (G.loose, ringed on
court) and there is no serve until it's back in your hand: walk it down
(instant, and the only reason to leave the baseline), let a boy scoop it, wait
out TUNE.looseMax, or watch a shambler swallow it — the one real punishment.
Fire rate is a positioning decision instead of a thumb-tempo one.
Also: the far backstop rebounds a ball with pace left, still lethal on the way
home and volleyable (trySwing lets P re-hit their own ball in splatter); melee
drops to nearest-one-only on a 1s cooldown; and the mid-rally re-toss is gone.
With no ball in hand the thumb-drag steers your legs instead of the reticle —
without that, walking your ball down is impossible on touch.
TUNE.looseMax is the fire-rate knob. Measured: ~4s per serve standing still,
~0.4s if you go and get it. 600 taps in 10s now yield exactly one serve.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The touch serve drag now inverts: pull toward yourself to launch up-court.
The first pull past the deadzone starts the real toss animation (serveToss),
dragServe fires straight from the toss phase without banishing its own fresh
toss, and a held aim keeps the toss airborne instead of dropping. Render shows
an Angry-Birds dotted trajectory racket->target (red = zombie locked). Two-stage
tap serve, mid-rally re-toss/banish, and keyboard serve+arrow-aim unchanged.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Feedback batch from a phone playtest:
- Winning a game no longer auto-sweeps the court. The survivors stay and must
be killed by hand (no new spawns, no scoring during the mop-up); only once the
court is clear does play advance to the changeover / next game / set. Replaces
sweepCourt() with a G.clearing gate + proceedAfterClear(). "CLEAR THE COURT".
- Classic shamblers (a/b) now soak one splat-quality wound before they drop
(shamblerHp=2) — swapping to new z_aw/z_bw wound skins that bleed the thin
dynamic trickle plus a small impact pop. Only the runner stays one-shot glass;
brute/boss unchanged. Ball, pellets and triple side-balls all respect hp.
- Winning a SET shows a centered milestone card (a real pause) before the horde;
one reusable drawCard() now backs both it and the reworded sudden-death card.
- Player is no longer pinned to the baseline: free to advance up-court on
keyboard (bounded at the net); touch keeps the baseline (drag is the serve-aim)
and the horde/GUN burst re-brace there.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Serve:
- Reverts the single-tap auto-serve. Firing a ball still needs the two-stage
toss+fire gesture — but a tap mid-rally now RE-ARMS the toss (throws a new
ball up) with the previous ball flying on as a ballistic clone, so you can
toss the next serve without waiting for the last to leave play.
Blood:
- Wound bleed cut further: sparse (most frames emit nothing), thinner spread,
lower rise, short-lived, capped low — a fine trickle, not a spray.
- Repainted z_gw / z_cw1 with clean stumps and almost no painted blood (the
torso gash and shirt spatter are gone), so the dynamic trickle is the blood.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
- Bleed dialed way down — thin, steady trickles (a fine spurt from the neck
stump) instead of the gushing cloud; tighter spread, shorter-lived, capped low.
- Rapid serve is easier to reach: a plain tap MID-RALLY now fires at the
auto-target too (not only flick/drag/hold), so you can pump the screen while
the last ball's still up. Pretoss keeps its toss ritual; the duel stays tennis.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
- Stand at the baseline: in splatter the player is pinned to the baseline
(a turret, side-to-side only) — the duel is exempt so it keeps free depth.
- Zombie 1:1 duel now plays like real tennis: no free-aim flick, no drag
reticle; lane aim + the toss-then-hit serve (gate on !G.interlude in
doHit/hitServe/keyPressed/canAimServe).
- Rapid serves: the two-stage reticle serve now fires mid-rally too — a ball
still in flight is banished to a ballistic clone so the next serve launches
at once. Serve as fast as you can drag-release.
- Wounded skins for multi-hit foes: brute (arm off) and racket boss (arm off,
then headless) swap by remaining hp, with a graceful fallback to the healthy
sprite. The headless boss is drawn a head shorter so the shoulders line up.
- Dynamic gore: the blood is NOT painted in — open wounds gush live particles
every frame (arm stumps + a neck geyser on the headless boss), absurdly, and
bounded so it self-regulates.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The ad strip sat 12px above the far baseline, but the out-area lawn reaches z=-6, whose projected edge is ~15.5px above the baseline in portrait (camF is larger there) — so the lawn painted over the bottom of the boards. Pinning the strip's bottom to proj(0,0,-6).y clears them in both orientations.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Tins now accumulate on a courtside rack (cap 3) instead of replacing each other; a PLAIN slot banks specials for later, and GUN is a charge you pop for an auto-fire burst. Tap the rack or press 1-5 to choose what your serve throws. A fresh delivery auto-equips but never overrides a deliberate PLAIN, and the 1:1 sudden-death duel forces plain balls.
HUD gets real art: generated pixel-art weapon icons, an ornate Wimbledon scoreboard PNG backing the live text (no more code-drawn boxes on top), and a bundled Silkscreen pixel font replacing the system serif. Rack tiles get padding, count-over-label alignment, and an infinity marker on the ball.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
- Personal lane offset (homeOff ±0.8m) + a per-zombie shamble wobble so
on your half they fan around you instead of stacking into one column.
- Eaten check weights depth by 0.75 (z is foreshortened in the projection),
so a head-on shambler kills you when it LOOKS on top of you — fixes
"they touch me and I don't die." Lateral reach unchanged.
- Revert aiFlub 0.14 -> 0.09 (undo the CPU weakening).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Wire the new assets/audio/*.wav samples over the synth SFX:
- Ball hits: per-side tennis-player / tennis-opponent on serve & return,
now with a stadium reverb tail (same convolver as umpire/aww).
- Crowd: tennis-applaus on your points/games (louder on big moments);
tennis-aww when the opponent scores or you're eaten (reverb tail).
- Ambient bed: tennis-ambient-loop from first tap, 500Hz lowcut, low vol.
- Zombie music: zombie-mode loop when splatter kicks in (800Hz lowcut),
fades out for the 1:1 sudden-death duel and back in after.
- Headshots: random headshot-1/-2 on every zombie kill (killZombie).
audio.js: sfx() one-shot player w/ rate+reverb opts, loopBed() beds with
duck/fade, aww() wrapper, hotter reverb send on the umpire voice.
Also: normal opponent aiFlub 0.09 -> 0.14 (a little easier to beat).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Replace the rounded-panel version with a bevelled bottle-green box (light
top/left, dark bottom/right), a purple club spine, cream Georgia serif
names, and the live game sunk into a recessed slot — purple with gold
digits for the server. Sets/games stay quiet in divided columns; the
kills-to-next-point strip sits in a recessed well. Hard edges, no radius.
Designed in an offline harness, then ported; verified in tennis and
splatter modes. (Local const W/H were shadowing the module canvas W/H —
renamed to bW/bH.)
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Bottle-green board with a purple flash down the left, cream Georgia serif
names, a yellow ball marking the server, and the live game in a purple
points cell. Sets/games in divided columns; the kills-to-next-point strip
tucks into a darker well below. Verified in tennis and splatter modes.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
- start screen: SPLATTER TENNIS logo + slogan, controls kept
- scoreboard redrawn as a real broadcast board (server ball, name, sets,
games, highlighted points cell); weapon stock moved to a status strip
- kills-to-next-point pips (NEXT ○○○) so the K-kill gate is visible;
TUNE.killPips toggles it
- miss-debug HUD off by default (TUNE.missHud 0), dev-only now
- eaten screen crows "NEW BEST" when the run beats the stored high score
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
1 kill = 1 point made a tennis game trivially short (4 kills). Gate
player scoring behind TUNE.killsPerPoint (default 3) — K kills bank one
point, the rest just splatter. Opponent breaches stay 1-for-1, so the
asymmetry is where the pressure comes from. Live-tunable in the T panel;
set to 1 to restore the old behavior.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
PLAN.md: two-stage aiming, runner-glass, fps-60, and no-engine decisions added
to the don't-re-litigate list; PWA/App Store noted as a next-arc candidate.
HANDOFF.md: status covers the post-plan rounds; gotchas gain the synthetic-touch,
1/60-stepping, port-hold, and zombies[]-mutation lessons.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The knob stays (TUNE.fps in the T panel) for anyone who wants to trade
smoothness for battery; the pile cache and GC fixes keep their savings.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Runner counter (no new weapon needed — one you don't hold when it shrieks
can't save you): the sprinter is now a GLASS CANNON — any ball contact at
any quality bursts it (main ball and triple-serve side balls; melee and
pellets already killed it). The hold-to-aim auto-lock targets the most
advanced zombie = the charging runner, so touch-and-release is the panic
button. Plus runnerVMax 4.2: the late-game speed ramp is capped so runners
stay humanly reactable.
Battery (iPhone drain):
- TUNE.fps = 30 (T-panel tunable, 0/60 = uncapped): frame-skip cap in the
RAF loop — halves paint work on a 810x1440 canvas, the dominant cost.
dt clamp raised 0.033 -> 0.04 so 30fps doesn't run 1% slow-motion.
- Gore piles pre-rendered to per-pile cached canvases (rebuilt on growth /
orientation change): 1 drawImage per pile per frame instead of ~26
ellipse paths — late-game courts had ~800 path fills per frame.
- matchMedia('(pointer: coarse)') hoisted out of the render loop (was
allocating a MediaQueryList every pretoss frame).
Verified: weak (pow .05) ball kills a runner; max-ramp runner v = 4.2
exactly; piles render from cache (screenshot, pl.cv set); frame-cap
arithmetic yields clean every-other-tick at 60Hz RAF (RAF itself is paused
in this pane — logic deterministic); tennis serve benchmark 30/36 across
runs (flub-band; diff is provably tennis-neutral); no console errors.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
- Umpire chair moved courtside (UMP_X 5.6, was 7.1 — which projected to
x=272 on a 270px-wide portrait canvas: literally one pixel off-screen).
Tap-cheat coords follow the constant.
- Generated pixel-art night crowd (x_crowd.png) replaces the tier stripes +
random dots; drawn in 16 columns that bounce independently while the crowd
cheers. Old procedural crowd kept as the loading fallback.
- Generated courtside sponsor boards (x_ads.png): ACEADE, TOPSPIN & CO,
VOLLEX, NETTO GRIP, SLAMWICH — tiled at native aspect so lettering is
never half-cut at any viewport width. Replaces the 'SPLATTER OPEN' text.
- One rot tint over crowd + boards driven by the shared paletteT() (new
helper), so the stadium dims into splatter and brightens back for duels.
Verified: fresh origin; tennis + splatter screenshots (boards tile cleanly,
crowd reads, tint dims, umpire on-screen beside the court); umpire triple-tap
works at the new chair position; tennis serve benchmark 33/36 across two runs
(first 12 was flub noise); no console errors.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
- RES 2 -> 3: phone screens now DOWNSCALE the canvas (crisp pixels) instead
of upscaling it (soft). Umpire-tap coords un-hardcoded from RES=2.
- Flatter lens: camZ 36 -> 42 with camF scaled per orientation (406/580) so
the PLAYER stays the same size — far-court zombies render ~25% bigger and
finally read as individuals from the baseline.
- Smoother animation: 4-frame walk cycles for both classic shamblers and the
runner's sprint (new sheets, same style anchor; z_a1-4, z_b1-4, z_f1-4).
Same cycle frequency — frames subdivide the stride. Render falls back to
2 frames per variant until its sheet loads.
- Tiered gore (GORE_MUL): the more advanced the zombie, the more absurd the
mess — classics 1x (base bumped 24 -> 30 particles), runner 1.8x, shield
2.5x, racket boss 3x, brute 4x (120 particles, a scatter of stains, an
instant size-3 mound).
Verified: fresh origin, canvas 1440px, umpire triple-tap works at RES 3,
all 4 anim frames cycle at the old stride rate, brute kill = 120 parts /
2 stains / size-3 pile, far-court lineup screenshot clearly readable,
portrait layout numbers correct (810x1440, camF 580), tennis 11/12,
no console errors.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
THE FREEZE (root cause found): the game-winning kill fires INSIDE the zombie
update loop — killZombie -> splatPoint -> gameOver -> sweepCourt guts the
zombies array mid-iteration, the loop reads zombies[i] === undefined, throws,
and the un-rescheduled RAF chain dies: a permanent hard freeze. Crowded courts
(later games, brutes) make the mid-loop game-winner likelier — hence 'freezes
around game 3 when the fat zombies arrive'. Fixed at the root (null guards in
every loop whose body can cascade into a sweep: zombie walk loop, meleeSwipe,
explode, pellet + extras inner loops) AND made frame() reschedule RAF FIRST so
no single bad frame can ever kill the loop again.
Aim awareness: the reticle now appears the moment the thumb lands (mag 0 =
auto-target the most advanced zombie, red lock immediately). A pure HOLD
(>250ms, no drag) releases into the auto-target serve; dragging aims as
before; the serve prompt switches to 'RELEASE TO SERVE / RELEASE FIRES THE
BOMB - DRAG BACK TO CANCEL' while aiming.
Duel presentation: the interlude now opens with a 2.4s intro beat — serving
blocked, centered card (SUDDEN DEATH / ONE POINT - THE LINES ARE LIVE / WIN
IT FOR THE NEXT TIN), and the palette lerps back to the TENNIS colors for
the duration of the duel (duelLerp, 0.8s each way) — order visibly restored,
then the rot returns.
Machine-gun steering: absolute now — the finger x IS the player x, zero lag
(was sign-quantized velocity). Clamped to what the camera can see
((W/2-14)/proj-scale — portrait's world bounds are wider than its viewport),
keyboard steering clamped the same during auto-fire.
Verified: the exact pre-fix crash scenario (game-winning kill mid-loop,
9 zombies + brute) survives and sweeps clean; intro blocks taps then the
duel plays; hold-release fired at the auto-lock and won a tin end-to-end;
screenshot shows tennis-green court + centered card + GAME 2; MG jumps
P.x to the finger in one frame, clamped; tennis 12/12; no console errors.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Flick-to-aim was aim-by-faith — you learned where you aimed after the ball
was gone. Now, at a serveable pretoss, touching and dragging shows a LIVE
reticle (same mapping: direction + length = landing point); release serves
there. The magnet is finally visible: within zSnap the ring turns red and
rides the locked zombie (plus a marker over its head) — you see the lock
BEFORE you commit the tin.
- Context locked at touchstart: a movement drag started mid-rally never
morphs into a serve when the ball dies (sub-300ms releases still count
as the rapid flick re-serve — the Phase 1 cadence survives)
- Drag back home = cancel: no serve, the tin stays in stock
- Aimed (drag) serves commit specials at fixed 0.62 quality; the tap-toss
ritual keeps the PERFECT-timing power ceiling and the stock — placement
vs power is now a real choice
- Rally / horde / machine gun untouched: drag steers, flick swings
- Serve prompt: 'TAP TO SERVE - HOLD + DRAG TO AIM' / 'AIMED SERVES FIRE
THE BOMB - TAP KEEPS IT'
Verified with synthetic touch sequences: drag arms the reticle without
serving and it tracks the thumb; release serves at the marker with the bomb
committed; cancel keeps the tin; rally-started drags never morph; locked
reticle renders red on the zombie (screenshot); tennis 12/12; no console
errors.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Oliver's six complaints, addressed:
1. Opponent never came — a racket zombie now spawns on EVERY game you win
(if none alive); endHorde no longer double-spawns
2. No wave-cleared feeling — sweepCourt: at game end the surviving wave
collapses, every game gets a real beat (gameBeatT 1.6 / changeover 4.5),
and 'GAME N' announces the next wave when play re-arms
3. Serve-posture lockup during machine gun — root cause: any 'over' beat
expiring into setupPoint() -> pretoss during auto-fire (no movement outside
rally, no serving during horde/GUN). The over-expiry now returns auto-fire
modes to 'rally', never the serve loop
4. Forced bomb spending — specials commit ONLY on deliberate serves: flick
(or arrow-aimed keyboard serve) fires the tin, plain tap keeps it; serve
prompt teaches it ('FLICK FIRES THE BOMB - TAP KEEPS IT')
5. Auto-aim — free-aim: the flick vector maps to a landing point (length =
depth, up to 22m), zombies within zSnap 1.4 magnet the shot, otherwise the
ball lands exactly where flicked; taps keep the old auto-target assist;
flicks now also work at the toss apex
6. Zombies walking through you — option (a): touch is honest. eatenR 0.9
(brute +0.2) matches the visual sprite overlap
Phase 13 — SUDDEN DEATH interlude: court clear + un-dueled racket zombie +
about to serve -> 'Quiet, please. Play will resume.' / 'Sudden death.' One
point under REAL tennis rules (line calls live, the boss plays every ball,
spawns paused). Win (line call, double bounce, or regicide by any weapon) =
the next tin delivered on the spot; lose (out, or its return passes you) =
a game on their scoreboard + an instant 5-shambler surge. One duel per
opponent. New lines: play_resume.m4a, sudden_death.m4a.
Verified in browser: horde 'over' beat -> rally (lockup dead); game win ->
sweep + boss + beat -> SUDDEN DEATH chains naturally; duel lose path (GAME.
THEM., surge 5, scoreboard), no re-duel, fresh-boss duel, bomb regicide ->
tin on the spot; tap serve keeps stock, real touch-flick consumes + lands
at the flicked point, magnet snaps when near; eaten at 0.85m; tennis 11/12;
no console errors. PLAN.md/HANDOFF updated: plan v2 complete.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Deliveries cycle BOMB -> TRIPLE -> FIRE -> GUN (G.deliveries indexes the
ladder); one tin at a time, a fresh delivery replaces unspent stock. All
weapons stay one-thumb: the serve auto-consumes, zero new inputs.
- Triple serve (x3): one real serve fans two ballistic clones +-6deg (extras[]
in zombies.js — NOT the reverted rapid-fire: each fan costs a proper serve).
Side balls respect variant rules (wound brutes, clank off chairs, pass the boss)
- Flame ball (x3): kills on ANY contact regardless of pow, chair ignored,
full pierce (splatter pace tax undone), ember trail, white-hot render
- Machine gun (8s): horde auto-fire as a pickup — no serving, drag steers,
no assist, spawner keeps running, ammo bar drains on the HUD, then the
serve loop resumes
- HUD pips per type (black/yellow/orange) at the bomb slot; flash names the
tin ('NEW BALLS: FIRE')
Verified: ladder cycles across 5 deliveries; triple spawns 2 extras and the
fan kills flanked targets; pow-0.1 flame ball clears shambler+shield+brute in
one pass with TRIPLE KILL chaining; GUN tin arms at changeover, blocks taps,
streams pellets (kill in 5 frames), expires back to pretoss; tennis 11/12;
no weapon-flag leaks into tennis; no console errors.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
- Spawn mix (pickVariant): roster grows one type per set — runner from set 1
game 3+ (12% slot, at most one alive, shriek on spawn = the fairness contract),
brute from set 2 (15%), shield from set 3 (15%); classics fill the rest
- Runner ('f'): 3.2x shamble speed, faster leg cycle; new shriek() synth in audio
- Brute ('g'): hp 2 vs splat-quality balls AND pellets, 0.55x speed, 0.75m target,
pushback-immune, 0.9m eaten radius, dies to double gore + size-2 pile, towers
at 1.5x height
- Shield ('s'): blocks front balls with the chair (clank, ball spent), the block
drops the chair for shieldDown 1.5s — any splat-quality ball kills in the
window (z_s3 staggered pose renders); chair recovers after; always dies to
bombs, melee, pellets
- TUNE: runnerSpeed 3.2, bruteHp 2, shieldDown 1.5
Verified in browser: per-variant stats; brute soft-ball immunity, 2-hit kill,
2-pellet kill, size-2 pile; shield block->window kill->chair recovery->blocks
again; melee kills f/s but not the racket boss; tier-2 spawn mix over 1500
spawns = 14/15/8/63%; all five sprites render with correct scale+occlusion;
tennis regression 11/12; no console errors.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Sheets generated with the existing zombie sheet as the style anchor (edit mode);
sliced to z_f1/2 (runner sprint), z_g1/2 (brute + net-post club), z_s1/2/3
(shield zombie, chair up / chair dropped stagger), x_tin (black new-balls tin).
assets/_slice.py is now committed (chroma-key + de-fringe + segmentation) so the
pipeline survives scratchpad wipes; HANDOFF updated.
Sprites are NOT wired into render.js yet — Phase 11 does that after Oliver
approves the sheets (plan's design checkpoint).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
- Deliveries are scheduled by the rules of tennis: game ballChangeFirst (3),
then every ballChangeEvery (4) games; the tin lands at the NEXT changeover
(a due tin survives hordes and even-game endings until a changeover comes)
- Fresh tin = bombMax (3) bombs; boy run + 'new balls, please' + NEW BALLS flash
- Shame rule: zombies took a game since the last delivery -> NO NEW BALLS,
slate wiped either way
- killMeter/bombEvery deleted from state/config/zombies
Verified: delivery at game 3 (bombs 3); due-but-even games hold the tin until
the next changeover; NO NEW BALLS withholds and clears shame; bomb serve still
arms and detonates; killMeter gone; no console errors.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
- Camera shake (G.shake, decays over 0.35s; HUD stays steady via transform reset)
- One white flash frame (G.boomFlash overlay)
- Scorch crater: near-black stain the boys mop 10x slower — the lawn scars
- Hitstop 0.1 -> 0.18
- Umpire loses composure: 'Order. Order, please.' (new order.m4a), rate-limited
so bomb chains don't spam him
Verified: explode kills cluster of 4 (MASSACRE x4 chains), shake/flash set and
decay clean, 2nd bomb order-call suppressed, 1s of mopping erases blood (0.9->0)
but not the crater (1->0.84); screenshot mid-shake; no console errors.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
- Spawn director: gap and court cap scale with games finished (runGames);
game 1 is three lonely shamblers, late runs approach zSpawnMin/zMaxCap
- Changeover after odd games: 4.5s forced breather, no spawns, no serving
(melee still works), boys mop, umpire calls 'Time.' (new time.m4a)
- 6 games = a set; set end launches the horde (replaces the splatGames>=2 trigger)
- Zombies taking a game sets shameGame (phase 9 withholds the delivery)
- Eaten = the run is over: GAME, SET, MASSACRE summary with games/sets survived
and best run (localStorage); HUD shows sets in splatter (SETS·GAMES PTS)
- spentBall() helper so dead-ball paths can't clobber a changeover's beat
- T surface: splatPoint + explode exposed for verify scripts
Verified: game-1 cap 3 held 25s; changeover blocks taps+spawns then resumes;
6 games -> set+horde -> racket zombie; runGames=6 tempo ~6 spawns/10s;
eaten writes best; tennis regression 11/12 CPU returns; no console errors.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
wuwiandClaude Opus 5