Wednesday, July 15, 2026 (all day into the late night)
Testing on the go
After my shower I loaded the updated Polymatrix APK onto my phone with the edits from the night before. Later, lying down for a nap, I played it and talked some fixes into my phone through the Claude app.
A console-log version for testers
Some of the fixes came from a new console-log version of the app. That version writes down your game stats: the level you’re on, when items drop, how many collectibles drop and how many you collect, and all sorts of information about power-ups, levels and enemies that I can tweak.
It has an extra button next to the audio volume button at the bottom right. Press it and it copies all the console log debugging to the clipboard. I can paste that into Facebook messages, and then into a new HTML file made specifically for testing. You paste in the CSV the console log produces, and you get a table of everything that happened in the levels you played.
I got to about level 21, and I was already thinking some elements took too long to arrive. I started noting things like “level 20 took too long to get to” and “in level 25 this came too fast.”
Three fixes before a nap
Before I fell asleep I talked out three changes into the Claude app. One was the tilt power-up. When the glass container’s exit shared the same area as the tilt bar, I’d flick my finger across the exit trying to get the ice polygons in, and it would move the tilt bar and waste power for nothing. So I made the tilt a long press.
Another was the streaks you win. Now if you win three streaks, the streak resets until you win four in a row, then five in a row. If you miss, it resets back to three. By 8:20 p.m. I was too tired and went to sleep.
The jellyfish starfish
I woke up properly around 10:15 p.m. after a two-hour nap, checked Facebook to see what the console-log testers had said, and checked the new version of Polymatrix.
By 11:35 p.m. I’d added a jellyfish starfish to the game. It drifts around the water as a tiny jellyfish, then absorbs water like a sponge. The bigger it grows, the more the water around it drags ice polygons in and makes them heavy, almost as heavy as ice in the ice phase, within a radius of three times its size.
The only way to release the effect is to hold down on the starfish, which releases all its absorbed water in a one-time wave. Then its countdown resets and it starts absorbing water again. I added it around level 13.
Game Rules Log: July 15, 2026
- New: console-log build with a copy button; testers paste stats into an HTML session viewer
- Changed: tilt power-up is now a long press, so flicking ice at the exit no longer wastes power
- Changed: streak goals step up from three to four to five wins in a row; a miss resets to three
- New enemy: jellyfish starfish (around level 13) that swells and drags nearby ice; hold it to release a wave
Photos from the build
Read what happens next in the dev diary: the next entry.
Melt, shake and blast the ice out of the bottle before time runs out: one gap in the glass, ninety seconds. Download the game on Google Play.
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.
