Monday, May 4, 2026; approx. 11:30 a.m. to past midnight
Get Floor Is Lava on Google Play
The bad guy
Today’s headline feature: a recurring enemy who shows up every three episodes with four moves. He can turn a normal platform into a tipping platform, turn one into a crumble platform (survives three landings, then disappears), turn one into a sticky platform (also three uses before disappearing), or throw a net that ensnares the player for two seconds. The sticky platform is the standout; land on it and you’re stuck for a second, then slowed to a crawl with only a half-jump available.
I also had Claude build start and escape animations (SVG) for three more episodes, matching the rescue-and-eruption structure from Story Mode.
Showing Lance, and the “no touch” negotiation
Lance got to test the bad guy build tonight and immediately had two more ideas, which I recorded as he spoke them.
One was a bug report: the lava ship was getting hit by platforms mid-flight and dying, which upset him. I’d actually already fixed it; made the ship invincible while flying, which Lance calls “no touch.”
Me: “I made it so that nothing hits you when you’re flying in the lava ship.”
Lance: “Yeah, I want no touch when you’re in the lava ship, and touch when it finishes.”
Me: “Yeah, I already did that.”
The second was a genuine design compromise on the tipping platform. Lance’s version doesn’t kill you outright: it pushes you off, into the lava, which is functionally similar but reads much fairer to a kid. I liked it and wrote it up.
Lance’s Time Complete mode
Lance also dictated a full new mode idea into the recorder:
“In Floor Is Lava, I want there to be another game mode called Time Complete. You have to complete a level: the level has 250 platforms, and you have to get onto 250 platforms to win. But there is a four-minute timer. If you don’t make it under four minutes, the lava rises up and gets to you… that only happens at zero minutes and zero seconds.”
This is the seed of what would become Timer Mode a week and a half later.
Building an online leaderboard
The other big push today: a community leaderboard, so Lance and I can see the same high scores rather than just our own local ones. DeepSeek walked me into Firebase Realtime Database; a frustrating first-timer experience, because Firebase’s built-in Gemini chatbot gives step-by-step instructions with no actual links or in-product help, and you can’t even turn it off. DeepSeek ended up giving the real step-by-step guide. Database created, “Hello World” test message sent successfully.
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.
