Saturday, July 18, 2026 (late afternoon)
Building the hot water bubble
I got home at 4:55 p.m., and the first thing I did was get back to Polymatrix. I created another session viewer and built the hot water bubble baddie I’d been talking about earlier in the car.
The first seven levels were empty
Playing through on my phone, I realized there needed to be something between level one and level seven or nine, before the first baddies show up regularly. Those first levels were just an empty glass container. It was very easy to get the ice polygons straight to the exit: no tilt, no structures, nothing. The only things that came into play were tilt and pivots from level four, which inject color into the game. But by the time they had any effect, you’d already gotten all your ice out.
Raising the exit target
I checked what percentage of the ice needs to make it out of the exit before a level is marked complete, and it was too low: about 55%. That’s okay for the first one or two levels, but I pushed it up to at least 65 to 70 percent.
I also built a new stats viewer, so I can check variables like the exit percentage a level starts with and how many seconds it took to complete the level and reach that minimum. If it’s too easy, I need to make the levels harder.
By around 6:30 p.m. I’d made enough progress to pause there. Later I played Polymatrix again, trying to get the configuration right so it gets slowly more difficult.
Game Rules Log: July 18, 2026
- New enemy: hot water bubble that heats the water and thaws ice sitting in it
- Changed: required exit percentage raised from about 55% to 65 to 70 percent after the opening levels
- New: stats viewer showing exit percentage and time to complete each level
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.
