Monday, July 13, 2026 (into the early morning)
Talking the game into my phone
Yesterday was a super manic day: a dozen Chrome tabs, half a dozen command prompt windows and a dozen apps on my phone. Today was calmer, so I could focus on the diary and do a bit of work on Polymatrix. Every now and again I’d talk into my phone, using Fable 5 to build up the game with new variables and new power-ups.
Lance’s spin-the-bottle idea
Last night Lance gave me an idea: you spin the phone around as if you’re spinning a bottle, and the dynamics shift. If you turn it upside down, the ice starts to fall towards the new upside-down direction, which is the top of the screen rather than the bottom. I thought it was a good idea, and I integrated it into the game today.
Hot bead spa units
I also integrated hot bead spa units. You place a bead into the water, and it uses the same water current style, but the current comes out of the round bead and pushes everything away from it. You can put beads in corners to make sure the polygons get pushed in a certain direction, and you can pick them up at least three times and move them somewhere else.
After a few iterations my usage limit ran out until 7 p.m. When it came back, I got onto my phone and continued with a new idea: a pebble jet power-up.
Playing at bedtime
With the light off, I told Lance it was time to close his eyes. It took about fifteen minutes. He stopped talking, and then he asked me something.
“Daddy, what are you doing?” “It doesn’t matter. Just go to sleep.”
I was playing Polymatrix.
The Tuning and Balance document
Two hours later I had the game at a point where it felt well established, so I created a design reference called Tuning and Balance. It showed every game mechanic and every variable that can be tuned.
The difficulty curve ran on two clocks: a whole-game ramp, and a late-game ramp that only kicks in after level 34. I asked Claude to draw line charts with level 1 to level 94 along the bottom and each tunable control up the side.
- Exit gap: the exit gate starts at 132 pixels and drops to 44 pixels by level 20, then keeps dropping by two pixels every three levels until it reaches a minimum of 12 pixels at level 82.
- The pack: the game starts with 12 ice polygons, called floes, and climbs to 48 floes by level 94.
- Pipettes: I changed it so the maximum number of pipettes on screen at once is 8 by level 94, and the gap between visits collapses from 11 to 20 seconds down to 3 to 20 seconds.
- Exit quota: it climbs, then drops after level 34, because with an 80% ceiling of floes reaching the exit, the game would demand the impossible.
There were also charts for the tilt mechanic, the ice mechanic, the tipping mechanic and how many glass structures appear per level. I asked for an interactive chart where you tick mechanics to see the levels they share. If I tick tilt gradient and ice phase, it shows they both start at level 11. It even graphs when the germ appears and for how long, plus power-ups and drop weights. It’s very, very detailed.
New icons at sunrise
At 4:50 a.m. I made a cup of matcha tea and wrote out more game ideas for Polymatrix. By 7:10 a.m. I was designing new icons for the game, and it came up with a few cool, interesting designs.
Game Rules Log: July 13, 2026
- New: spin the phone like a bottle; turning it upside down makes the ice fall the other way (Lance’s idea)
- New: hot bead spa units push a current outward; each can be moved at least three times
- Idea started: pebble jet power-up
- Exit gap: 132 px to 44 px by level 20, then down to a 12 px minimum at level 82
- Pack size: 12 floes at the start, 48 by level 94
- Pipettes: up to 8 at once by level 94, visits every 3 to 20 seconds
- Late-game difficulty ramp begins after level 34
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.
