Friday, July 17, 2026
Gaming the usage clock
I played Polymatrix in the shower before heading home. I’d worked out a plan for my Claude usage: the five-hour limit clock only starts once you use it, so if I start it a couple of hours early with a timed scheduled task, then by the time I get home most of the window is still waiting for me.
Tonight I’d rather switch to Polymatrix if I’m going to be working on games at all.
Fixing the slow start
I worked on the level progression so people wouldn’t get bored on the first few levels. I pulled one of the baddie injection points forward from level seven to level four so it happens sooner, and around level seven I pulled in another baddie.
Two versions, one game
I asked for an inline table showing which baddie appears at what point in the game. It gave me a rundown, but it didn’t include the jellyfish. When I asked why, I looked back at my earlier prompts and realized another version was about three versions ahead. I had gone back to an old version and started building on top of it. I had to merge the two versions together, and Polymatrix moved forward a bit more.
An almost invisible enemy
I still need a few more baddies as the game goes on. I was thinking about a hot bubble: a bubble floating around in the water that you don’t really recognize, but it’s heating up the water. While your ice polygons sit in the heated area, they slowly thaw away. It’s like a hot bead that drops into the water, except it works against you.
Game Rules Log: July 17, 2026
- Changed: first baddie now arrives at level four instead of level seven
- New: a second baddie joins around level seven
- Merged two diverging versions back into one build
- Idea: hot bubble enemy that slowly thaws ice
Photos from today
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.
