Wednesday, July 8, 2026
A game without a name
Lance showed me the new level he was building, and after watching him play for ten minutes, I showed him my new game.
“Have a look at this. I built a new game last night.”
I didn’t know what I was going to call it. Something like Viscosity, or Fluidity, or Fluid Matrix, or Fluid in a Bottle, Bottle Mix, Bottle Up. Maybe Claude AI could come up with a mishmash of those. (It ended up with a name two days later.) I had to use Claude to make the second and third versions.
Fable 5, the greedy consumer
Fable 5 is a good model, but it really is a vibe-code killer. It had used 30% of the Fable model allowance, but all my other usage was up to 76%, and it was only Wednesday. I had three more days to go, so I’d have to stay under 10% usage a day to make it.
“Fable 5 is just a greedy consumer of compute.”
Version 5: tilting the bottle
By 2:25 p.m. I was up to version 5. I wanted to add a new pinch and swirl gesture to manipulate the game so the bottle tilts. The plan was to put a pole underneath the middle of the bottle that tilts it higher and lower.
If you swirl your fingers at the top of the bottle clockwise, it tilts the pole back towards that side. If you swirl anticlockwise, it pushes the pole downwards, but it will only push the pole in the direction that makes the game easier, never harder. Maybe two fingers to push the pole makes more sense.
Every 15 seconds you get a chance to push the pole. So if the pole is at a 10 degree tilt and you push it, it goes to a five degree tilt. Push it again and it goes to zero, and that’s where it stays, because the pole has been pushed out from underneath the bottle.
Food coloring that eats the ice
The second idea was ball coloring. You add some food coloring onto a ball and it changes red or blue, and that makes the ice smaller because it’s eating away at it. If the ice becomes too small and disappears, you lose those points. But smaller ice is more mobile in the water, so you can push it out more easily, while bigger ice particles are slower.
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 8, 2026
- New: pinch and swirl gesture tilts the bottle on a pole
- Pole push every 15 seconds: 10 degrees, then 5, then 0 (pole knocked out)
- Pole pushes can only make the tilt easier, never harder
- New: food coloring ball shrinks ice; smaller ice moves faster, but vanished ice loses points
Version progress today: up to v5
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.
