Friday, July 10, 2026 (into the late night)
Burning usage on a Friday
It was Friday, and I had two days before Claude reset its usage limits, which gave me a lot of time to muck around. I came to the computer with my iced latte and used Fable 5 to work on the Viscosity game, mostly so I could burn through usage before the reset.
A long list for version six, and nothing back
When I got home at 10:05 p.m., I started with the bottle physics game, now called Polymatrix, and wrote out a long list of things I wanted for version six.
I used Fable 5 in its highest mode with a brand new screen open. It spent about thirty minutes trying to create something, then it condensed the page, and finally gave me nothing back. All that compute used and nothing in return. That annoyed me.
The version was still available, so I could press continue and get it to spit out what it had built so far. With later versions, I’m going to have to halve the number of things I ask Fable 5 to build, and let it spend max compute on smaller bits and pieces.
“But Fable 5 is for the rich guys.”
Version seven: a catalog of 100 chambers
I went back to Polymatrix and got to version seven. This version created a catalog of exactly 100 variants, each with a difficulty rating. It had trap cubes: small boxes with an in and an out on opposite sides, adjacent sides, or both openings on one wall, and a narrow opening that snagged the bigger floes. Then there were pockets, green rectangles that act as dead-end chambers with a single exit at the end, mid-side, or tucked in a corner. It also had flow chambers, air-pocket chambers, tunnels and exit tunnels. An exit tunnel is the only way out.
I wanted the glass container to have all these different rectangles that you enter in and out of: self-contained rectangles with trapped air pockets, where the ice polygons drift towards the air-pocket chambers and you have to take the ice through tunnels. It was good.
Up to level five
When I played, I got up to level five and thought, wow, that’s really good. The game is turning out to look really good. But there needs to be a way to sweep the ice polygons in a direction. The swirl effect does that: swirling two fingers around sweeps everything one way. It’s still quite difficult once the exit narrows to get everything through.
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.
Game Rules Log: July 10, 2026
- The game is now called Polymatrix
- New: catalog of exactly 100 glass chamber variants, each with a difficulty rating
- Chamber types: trap cubes, dead-end pockets, flow chambers, air-pocket chambers, tunnels and exit tunnels
- Two-finger swirl sweeps the ice in one direction
- The exit narrows as levels go on
Version progress today: v6 to v7
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.
