Thursday, May 7, 2026; approx. morning to 11:45 p.m.
Get Floor Is Lava on Google Play
Balancing the power-ups by spreadsheet logic
Fixed the teleport power-up (it only fired on one specific keystroke) and tuned it down; it now jumps up to 8 platforms, searching downward through 7, 6, 5 if it doesn’t find one, rather than being too generous. That got me thinking properly about value-for-money across all four power-ups: boost jump and teleport at 20 coins, book at 100, lava ship at 150.
Building a sandpit to measure it properly
Rather than guess, I built a testing environment in DeepSeek (after a first attempt broke things and had to be redone in Claude, costing a chunk of usage: up to 97% for the week). The sandpit gave every power-up, no coins, a solid floor with no lava, and a measuring tape marked in platform units from zero. That let me measure exactly how far each power-up actually travels rather than estimating.
The result: the book was the least cost-effective at 22 coins per 10 platforms. After retuning:
🎮 Game Rules Log: May 7, 2026 (power-up rebalance)
- Boost jump: 20 to 30 coins
- Teleport: 20 to 30 coins
- Book: stays 100 coins, but now swings you up ~17 platforms (was ~10-12)
- Lava ship: 150 to 120 coins (measured travel: ~53-54 platforms)
- Torch: 50 to 30 coins
- Parachute: unchanged at 50 coins
Version 123: the Platform Configurator
Back home from a delivery run, I had Claude add a Platform Configurator modal to the level editor: sliders and toggles for platform types and hazards, a Generate button that drops a random arrangement into the editor, keep it or discard it. Showed it to Lance once he’d had his shower.
Lance, watching it generate 100 platforms at once: “Wow.”
We found two rough edges together: no way to exit a test-play session back to the editor (risking losing your work; thankfully the level had auto-cached locally), and custom levels built with the configurator couldn’t earn coins yet when played as a standalone game.
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.
