Thursday, April 30, 2026; approx. 1:57 p.m. to 11:00 p.m.
Get Floor Is Lava on Google Play
Playing it back
Between transcription work I sat down and actually played Floor Is Lava for a bit. It held up: genuinely addictive. My favourite touch was the spaceship you unlock at 150 coins. Once Claude usage credits refreshed I planned to keep building on top of it.
Lance’s ice platform
Picking Lance up and driving home, he pitched a new mechanic:
Lance: “In Floor is Lava, there is something called an ice platform. You can put it in the builder. An ice platform, if you land on it, the lava goes down by two.”
Me: “You mean the lava goes down by two?”
Lance: “Yeah, but the two platforms are medium size.”
Me: “You mean the ice platforms, or the lava platform?”
Lance: “It goes down by a medium-sized platform.”
He wanted it placeable in the level builder specifically, and later added that the “ice spikes” that fall into the lava should be bigger. I want to implement his ideas properly, because at the end of the day it’s his game.
Playing together
Back home around 3:15 p.m., I got Lance set up on his little red stool next to me in the garage and loaded the game; his music started playing. I showed him the new lava ship (a spaceship power-up that launches you about 50 platforms up), played a round myself getting close to 1,000 platforms, then handed him the controller. He could only manage the space bar at first, not the movement keys, so I steered while he jumped and collected the coins I fed him. He asked for the spaceship, I bought it for him, and he launched it himself. Simple, but a good moment.
Working around a Claude outage
With Claude AI usage exhausted, I switched to ChatGPT and Google Gemini to keep building: a messier workflow. ChatGPT generated some good game icon concepts before running out too; Gemini picked up the icon work and did well, on par with Claude for that particular task.
I fixed the power-up dial so it properly lets you pick one of four slots. The fourth slot used to be the parachute, but since I want the parachute to eventually trigger automatically rather than be manually selected, I freed that slot up for the lava ship instead.
The cross-tool workflow was clunky: Gemini’s free tier only accepts 400 lines of code at a time, so I had to hand code over to ChatGPT to diagnose Gemini’s mistakes when it was back on free usage, then feed the fix back into Gemini blind when ChatGPT ran out in turn. At one point the lava ship was firing with the wrong animation; turned out to be two conflicting animations layered on top of each other, which Gemini eventually untangled.
Publishing to GitHub
By 10:40 p.m. I’d pushed the game to GitHub and tested it live online; the first time it existed somewhere other than my local files. I brought it in to show Lance: “Here, look at this. Your game is online now.” He was mid-Geometry-Dash but paused to look, then handed over another rule idea: losing 30 coins when you die.
More rules from Lance
Later that night he refined the death penalty rule further:
Lance: “New rule in the game: if you hit the lava, you lose 30 coins. And if you’re about to fall into the lava and you’re still in the air, and then you press the restart button right before you hit the lava while you’re in the air, then you still lose 30 coins.”
Me: “Yeah, we’ve got that rule already.”
His other request: power-ups should carry over into the next level when you win, rather than resetting.
🎮 Game Rules Log: April 30, 2026
- Lose 30 coins if you hit the lava
- Lose 30 coins if you restart right before hitting the lava while still in the air
- Power-ups carry over into the next level when you win, instead of resetting
Photos from today
Read what happens next in the dev diary: the next entry.
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.
