Sunday, May 31, 2026; approx. 10:40 p.m. to 1:55 a.m.
Get Floor Is Lava on Google Play
The parachute-down mode, built in two hours
With Lance asleep, I picked up the parachute-down idea from May 27 and, remarkably, had it fully signed off within two hours. Claude’s first pass was a basic black-screen scene: a person animation with a parachute on its back, flailing legs, plenty of bugs; chiefly that I couldn’t tell what was actually hitting the player. The concept: lava hurls up from the volcano below as you fall, and you have five hearts; get hit, lose a heart.
Design pass through Claude Design
I fed the scene description to Claude Design, which came back with a genuinely strong visual concept. I picked the elements I wanted, decided what counted as a projectile, and fed that back into Claude AI to wire up against the new art. Big improvement over the first pass.
Fixing the “what just hit me” problem
The core fix was anchoring obstacles to a fixed point 35 platforms down the fall, rather than letting them fly at the player within a millisecond with no warning. Once they had a predictable anchor, the whole mode became readable; I could duck and dive, moving in eight directions rather than just up or across. Also removed the character’s legs by default, then turned that into a small premium hook: unlock legs on the player if you buy premium.
“This has to be the last mode”
A genuine milestone entry; reflecting that after seven weeks (technically five, since starting April 28), the mode roster feels complete:
“After a few iterations playing through that game mode, I was really happy with it. I thought, I don’t want to mess around too much with this level. All my levels look really good now. This has to be the last mode.”
The one idea still on the table: Lance’s minecart concept, dodging lava left and right on the way up or down a mountain. Otherwise, the plan from here shifts from building to shipping.
🎮 Game Rules Log: May 31, 2026 (Parachute-Down Mode)
- Player has 5 hearts; getting hit by rising lava projectiles costs one
- Obstacles anchor to a fixed point 35 platforms down the fall, so they’re visible and dodgeable rather than instant
- Movement in all 8 directions while falling (duck, dive, and steer, not just up/across)
- Character legs removed by default: a premium unlock re-adds them
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.
