Friday, July 17, 2026
Get Floor Is Lava on Google Play
The guest-account payment hunt
Traced a guest-account Paddle payment that appeared to succeed in Paddle’s own dashboard but never showed up in-game; the cheat-prevention ceiling was rejecting it, because it was incorrectly counting a player’s starting balance against the cap. Also found a related bug: logging into an account could apply a purchase as minus 90,000 coins instead of plus.
Thinking hard about hackers: and choosing not to over-fight them
A genuinely thoughtful design decision: modelling out exactly how a determined hacker could exploit the coin-sync system (up to ~25,000 coins per injected write, repeatable) versus what a dedicated legitimate player can actually earn in a day (roughly 120,000-860,000 coins with a doubler). Concluded that throttling hard enough to stop the hacker would also punish genuine high-volume players, so the fix was to accept the theoretical risk rather than degrade the experience for real users; a rare case of consciously not fixing something.
Scorcha gets a backstory
A genuinely fun creative session: gave the recurring boss, Scorcha, speech bubbles and a full backstory; an alien stranded on Earth who shattered his own starship and hid the parts, terrified that if humanity reaches the stars he’ll be left alone again. He never tries to kill the player, only to stop them, which explains why he keeps reappearing rather than finishing the job.
Boss Mode, designed end to end
Built a full boss-battle mode around that backstory: at the end of every ten levels, Scorcha appears on a mirrored three-platform arena, throwing bats (1 hit point), lava rocks (2), nets (temporary stun), and glue platforms at the player, while the player’s own power-ups double as projectiles; vine (1 point), parachute (1), book (3), lava ship (4). Sixty-second timers for the first four fights; the level-51 finale is a fight to the death with Scorcha at 20 health, rewarding 250 bonus coins for a win.
🎮 Game Rules Log: July 17, 2026 (Boss Mode)
- Boss fight triggers on levels 10, 20, 30, 40, and a fight-to-the-death finale on level 51
- Scorcha’s attacks: bat (1 hp), lava rock (2 hp), net (stun), glue platform
- Player projectiles: vine (1 hp), parachute (1 hp), book (3 hp), lava ship (4 hp)
- Win the first four fights: Scorcha flees; defeat him outright; 250 bonus coins
- Scorcha can zap 33% of the player’s torch charge; in the dark he can also steal a platform (never the one you’re standing on)
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.
