Placeholders Deleted, Catch Zone Widened

The night before, the game stopped being one room. Stockroom and serving are two scenes. A physics playground sat beside them so the catch could be tested without the whole stall pretending to be finished. Shift mechanics and dev probes came with that split. Useful. Not pretty.

The pretty was the problem. Concept sheets and placeholder bitmaps were deleted. A style reset, not a touch-up. The replacements were copied in: a melon base, a caught and dropped sheet, a smash sheet for the ones that hit the floor. No regenerated stand-ins. The base sprite shows on ready, not after some state nobody remembered to set.

Then the catch itself. Trampoline raised. Catch zone wider. Spawn rate halved so the vendor is not buried in fruit. Vendor centered under the drop. Launch biased toward the middle, plus ten percent, because the first arc was polite and wrong. If the bowl gets it, the dropped animation cancels. The barrier is a twenty-pixel bump at floor level, on the vendor's layer, so melons ignore it and the vendor does not walk through the stall. The melon's mask includes the trampoline layer. Idle and walk cycles came off the handed-over sheets.

The bowl is the catch. Not a wobble sprite. Not a hope.