Tuesday, August 25, 2026 (morning to late night)
A 3D look
While I was getting Lance ready, I quickly created a new version of Polymatrix with a 3D-type effect. I made a feature image that came out with real bloom depth, particle explosions, bright cyan neon edges, warm amber accents at the exit, and glowing faceted floes. It made the floes glow a bit more and put some background glow on the objects in the game.
“It looks much better, to be honest.”
Once I was properly home, I developed the new look and feel and tested it on my phone.
Borrowing difficulty easing
By 11:35 a.m. I was fixing little bits in the game that were slightly off. I also borrowed a concept from Snake Clash: difficulty easing. In Snake Clash, after a few failed turns, extra power-ups appear and magnets show up more often, making the level easier to complete.
So in Polymatrix, if you can’t complete a level two times, the third time you get a 10 to 12 percent easing of difficulty. There are about 12 different levers that can make the game less difficult.
Recruiting closed testers
I got Polymatrix onto Google Console yesterday, and now I want to push closed testing along quicker, so I started promoting it on Facebook. Getting its own AAB file into Play Console took about half an hour, because I kept confusing it with another app I was setting up at the same time. Upgrading the build got tangled and messy before I found a rhythm.
I added two people from Facebook closed testing groups. One tester sent a video, and I could see him playing for about a minute. That was nice. Later, while eating, I found more testers in the groups and got five more to sign up, so six testers are now opted in.
“That should be a breeze to get over the line in fourteen days because it’s a playable game.”
Ice sludge and boiling water
I created new animations for an ice state and a heat state, as well as the standard state. In the ice state, ice sludge appears in the glass container and moves around your ice polygons, but only as an animation, not physics. It doesn’t affect the floes at all. In the heat phase, bubbling water effects show up.
The feature image also gave me ideas for the top info boxes. Temperature became a horizontal line with a pin in the center that slides left as it gets colder and right as it gets hotter. Crystals became ten hollow circles, and each crystal you earn lights one up.
Playing the update
That night the changes were published and I played the updated version. It played better. The game starts heated, goes to normal temperature, then to freezing, but freezing only reaches about minus eight degrees. I think it should be colder, but minus eight doesn’t take long to get back to normal, so I can understand why the game chose that. I’ll keep it.
The water effects were good: hot water slightly hued orange or red with bubbling drops, thinner and clearer drops at normal temperature, and then the ice sludge, which made a noticeable difference. Suddenly you were ice.
The compiler and irregular flasks
I couldn’t see the irregular-shaped containers, though. Claude took screenshots of level 40 that apparently showed them in action, but I played ten or fifteen levels and still couldn’t see them.
So I decided to make a new object called a compiler, available from level three. It takes one irregular shape and tacks it onto a normal container. After five levels it adds two irregular shapes, then three, and so on, until irregular containers become the norm. Compilers phase out around level 40.
When I tested the compiler update, it was really cool. Sections of the flask had dents and different shapes and angles. Having that from an earlier stage makes it a more playable, more visually pleasing game.
“Polymatrix is looking better. I like the neon-colored graphic design effects I added to the containers, and now we’ve got all these water variations. It’s good, and the irregular flasks are good too.”
Game Rules Log: August 25, 2026
- New look: neon cyan edges, amber exit accents, bloom and glowing floes
- New: difficulty easing. Fail a level twice and the third attempt is 10 to 12 percent easier
- New: ice sludge animation in the ice phase and bubbling water in the heat phase (visual only)
- New: temperature slider and ten-circle crystal tracker in the top info boxes
- New object: the compiler, from level three, adds irregular shapes to the flask; phases out around level 40
- Closed testing opened with six testers
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.
