Sunday, May 3, 2026; approx. 12:40 p.m. to 12:45 a.m.
Get Floor Is Lava on Google Play
Vines, and a two-to-three-minute rule
Testing yesterday’s build (Claude’s version 51) turned up two bugs introduced when Claude copied over the DeepSeek version: Story Mode levels couldn’t be completed, and the new vine-swing mechanic wasn’t working. Vines hang from the underside of a platform; jump up, grab on, and swing 15 platforms higher, which is handy for pushing through a hard stretch quickly.
That fed into a design principle I wrote down today: I want a level to finish inside two to three minutes. Kids want to play for two minutes, clear the level, move to the next one; not sit there endlessly jumping.
The Story Mode coin bug
A genuinely hair-pulling bug: Story Mode was supposed to carry your coins over when it starts, add bonus coins on level completion, and save everything back when you leave; and it did none of those three things. It took about an hour of back-and-forth with DeepSeek to trace it to the root cause: Story Mode used its own separate coin variable that never talked to the main game’s variable. I started hard-coding pieces of DeepSeek’s self-contained Story Mode block back into the main game so the two stopped competing.
Also logged today: Claude usage is burning faster than expected; about 15-20% gone on the first day of the week, which pencils out to running dry after five days of full use if that rate holds.
Rocket Mode: a idea we didn’t take
Lance pitched a sideways-scrolling mode where you play as a rocket racing left to right while lava rises beneath you. I pushed back hard on this one; it’s a good record of how these design conversations actually go:
Lance: “In Floor Is Lava, I want to make a game mode called Rocket Mode. It gives you an ability to boost up 50 platforms.”
Me: “That’s what we already have.”
Lance: “But it’s a different level and you start with a rocket. It is a rocket game mode where you start as rocket, and the level goes from left all the way to the right.”
Me: “That’s too much. You’re going to change the direction of the game. It’s not Geometry Dash. It is Floor Is Lava.”
[…]
Me: “We shouldn’t make a Geometry Dash game in Floor Is Lava. You can make a different game. If you want to make something like that, you gotta start again with a new game.”
[…]
Me: “That doesn’t make any sense. All right. Anyway, that’s it.”
Rocket Mode didn’t happen: but the sideways-movement idea would resurface later, reworked, as the horizontal platformer mode.
Showing Lance Story Mode
Back home, I walked Lance through the finished Story Mode: the ice platform, the intro animation, the new music, the vine. His eyes lit up at the animation. Watching him play it, I started thinking about a wobbling platform for the volcano-cave sections, one that rocks or shakes as the volcano rumbles.
Level editor wishlist
Lance also wants his own custom level editor, with rules of its own:
Lance: “When you make your own level, and you jump into the lava, or you stay on the platform for too long, then you don’t lose coins, because it is your level.”
[…] “There should be a button that says ‘New’ so you can create a new level. There should also be another button, and there is a number that starts at one, and you have to search which level is the number of the ID of the level or the name.”
In short: a “New Level” button and a search function so you can find and name your own levels.
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.
