Floor Is Lava | Developer Diary: Day 2 | Multiplayer Modes and Bug Fixes (April 29, 2026)

Wednesday, April 29, 2026; approx. 8:40 a.m. to 11:05 p.m.

Get Floor Is Lava on Google Play

Showing Lance the finished game

This morning, around 8:40 a.m., I had the “final” version of Floor Is Lava ready while Lance was getting dressed for school. I loaded it up and paused his show. He started playing straight away, died once (“All the players died”; he’d been playing against multiplayer bots), then I showed him the superpowers button.

“Great. Now the game is great.”

It worked on mobile too. I was already thinking about wrapping it in a Chromium interface.

Version 26: modes and a multiplayer fix

Once I was back from a delivery run, I got properly stuck into development and reached version 26. By this point the game had multiplayer mode alongside a standard single-player mode. I tuned “Frogger mode” down from showing three platforms above your head to just one, so you genuinely can’t see what you’re climbing into until you jump.

In standard mode the game generates about 50 platforms ahead of you, which matters for multiplayer: it lets other players get ahead. There’d been a bug where players who reached the top of the screen couldn’t progress further, because the game only generated the next platform relative to you, the local player. Fixed that, so opponents can now legitimately race ahead and win.

The watch-ad bug

Most of today’s focus went into the “watch ad” flow: you play, you fall into the lava or die on a purple platform, then you get a choice; play rock-paper-scissors to win your coins back from the piggy bank, or watch an ad. The sequence worked on some screens and not others. It should take you back to the main menu and animate the coins draining from the piggy bank into your balance; on one screen it credited the coins but skipped the animation and didn’t return you to the menu.

It took about ten prompt attempts and an hour and a half to run down. I noted a tension I kept hitting all week: Claude works better writing code directly rather than patching an external file, but patch-and-update was the workflow I’d gotten used to; and with the external-file method, Claude doesn’t have full visibility of all the code. Eventually it worked.

Icon design and balancing, with Lance

Lance had opinions on the game icon:

Lance: “I want the button for the game to look like lava rising, and the lava just burnt a platform. And the little Roblox guy is jumping to another platform.”
Me: “Okay, what does the icon for the game look like? What do you want to press? What do you want it to look like?”
Lance: “The little Roblox guy.”
Me: “The face, or the whole body?”
Lance: “The whole body as my icon.”

Separately, I hit a balance problem myself: reaching platform 874 at level 9, the lava was climbing too fast to be fair. That fed into a rebalance later in the day; I wanted the lava’s speed increase to be smooth enough that a player could reach 5,000 platforms before it maxed out.

Afternoon build session

With a friend over playing soccer with Lance outside, I got an hour to an hour and a half of solid, uninterrupted design time on the game. That session, plus the evening one, produced a big batch of changes:

• Night mode kicks in from level 20+.
• Lava speed rebalanced from a jumpy “up 20% every few hundred levels” to a smooth 6% increase per level, targeting 5,000 platforms before max speed.
• Tipping/falling platforms added, with a shake warning: landing under one when it drops causes a collision and kills you.
• Editor gained a lava start line and a locked starting platform per level (where all players spawn).
• Editor gained a width drop-down (200 or 500) for platforms, plus assorted bug fixes.

On the mobile level editor specifically: tapping the screen now places a platform at that position, a new “move” button lets you pick up and relocate a placed platform, and the editor can be scrolled up and down.

Late-night coding

I made a rice dinner and ate it in Lance’s room, then spent an hour and a half coding while he wound down watching Geometry Dash. I told him to come see what I’d added; he said he’d finish his level first. I ended up napping from around 9:00 to 10:10 p.m., overslept the alarm, and got Lance to bed just after 11:00 p.m.; turning off his TV, on his lava lamp, both of us falling asleep in his room.

Photos from today

Read what happens next in the dev diary: the next entry.

Toni Eleninovski

Diary Of A Mad Chaos is a daily diary written from March 1996 until today, of which individual books and book series have been created, namely “The Lost Years” an exploration of young, entwined love, the “Wubao In China (猎艳奇缘)” book series which provides an extensive comparative analysis of the cultural differences between Eastern and Western societies, and the book titled “Foreigner (华人)” an exploration of race relations in Australia.