Note: This breakdown and analysis was performed by having AI go through Mad Kaz's data files.
Mad Kaz shipped with six zones. The zones are more than graphical themes: each one takes the same basic vertical-platformer machinery and explores a different idea.
Intro = control, Homework = block physics, Hippie = perception, Time Trials = indirect control, Giagantor = impact and environmental feedback, and Author = credits implemented as a level.
Intro
The Intro zone is a deliberately constructed tutorial rather than a collection of generic easy stages.
| Level | What it does | Purpose |
|---|---|---|
| Free Drop | Fall to the bottom with normal left/right steering. | Introduces falling and horizontal control. |
| Free Climb | Climb upward, charge jumps with 7, and steer or charge while airborne. |
Introduces the normal climbing and jump-charging model. |
| Limited Climb | Removes horizontal control and airborne charging. | Forces the player to commit to trajectories before jumping. |
| Limited Climb 2 | Retains the movement restrictions and adds failure for falling out of view. | Makes the scrolling camera itself part of the challenge. |
| Hard Drop | Returns to descent with sparse platforms and failure for falling behind. | Tests the movement system under pressure. |
The progression is systematic: teach the unrestricted movement model, remove freedoms one at a time, then test the player under pressure. The abstract grid artwork also makes the zone look more like a training environment than a story location.
Homework
Homework is where the game starts changing what platforms mean, rather than simply changing where they are placed.
| Level | What it does | Purpose |
|---|---|---|
| Homework Intro |
Introduces three platform types with different jump strengths,
roughly 0x90, 0x110, and
0x7f.
|
Asks the player to experiment and learn the new platform vocabulary. |
| Sunset City | Reuses the same platform types under a roughly 50-second deadline. | Places the tutorial mechanics inside an actual scenario. |
| Bomby Sunset 1 | A long descent while a bomb is falling toward the city. Hitting platforms while moving quickly only reduces downward speed. | Turns platform collisions into something the player has to manage during a rapid descent. |
| Bomby Sunset 2 | Platforms remove much more downward velocity. | Increases the penalty for poor collision choices. |
| Bomby Sunset 3 | Platforms stop the player's descent completely. | Completes the progression from mild slowdown to complete obstruction. |
| The Great Escape | A giant stickman advances toward the player. Landing on the upper platform fires a math wave, with its strength based on falling velocity. The player must survive for 40 seconds. | Turns an existing movement property into a combat mechanic. |
The Great Escape is particularly revealing. The game does not add a conventional attack button. Instead, something the player already understands—falling velocity—becomes attack strength. Homework moves from learning unusual platform properties to deliberately exploiting physics.
Hippie
Hippie is fundamentally a perception-manipulation zone. The farther the player progresses, the less reliable the screen becomes.
| Level | What it does | Purpose |
|---|---|---|
| Psychedelic | Continuously changes the background through randomized colors. | Introduces visual interference without greatly changing the mechanics. |
| Confusion 1 | Standing on a colored platform changes the background to the same color. | Begins making foreground and background difficult to separate. |
| Confusion 2 | Uses four colors. | Reduces the visual distinctions available to the player. |
| Confusion 3 | Uses three colors. | Further reduces foreground/background separation. |
| Confusion 4 | Uses two colors. | Makes the visual ambiguity stronger. |
| Confusion 5 | Keeps the two-color setup and adds immediate failure for falling. | Adds mechanical punishment to the visual confusion. |
| Flashbacks | Loads imagery from the previous Homework zone, including graph-paper, boss, and wave elements. | Makes the supposed mental flashbacks literal callbacks to earlier gameplay. |
| Checkers | Uses a high-contrast checkerboard environment. | Interferes with spatial perception through pattern rather than color alone. |
| Day Dreams | Generates two different platform maps and swaps between them every five seconds while also manipulating color. | Makes the level geometry itself unreliable. |
The zone progresses from visual noise → foreground/background confusion → memories of earlier gameplay → actual instability of the level geometry.
Time Trials
The five stages are mechanically very similar, but increase sharply in scale: 200 → 400 → 800 → 1600 → 2000 floors, all with a target time of 2:56.
| Level | Distance | What changes |
|---|---|---|
| 200 Floor Sprint | 200 floors | Introduces the Time Trials rule set. |
| 400 Floor Sprint | 400 floors | Same rules, twice the distance. |
| 800 Floor Sprint | 800 floors | Same rules over a longer run. |
| 1600 Floor Sprint | 1600 floors | Turns the mechanic into an endurance challenge. |
| 2000 Floor Sprint | 2000 floors | The longest version of the same challenge. |
Direct left/right control is disabled. Different platforms alter horizontal velocity, direction, or jump power, and normal horizontal movement is restored after leaving them. In other words, the platforms substitute for the steering controls. The player navigates by choosing which movement behavior the next platform should provide.
The zone is therefore about route planning under indirect control, followed by escalating endurance. It also shows how the scripting system could make the same character controller behave very differently without changing the Java engine.
The text for the 800 Floor Sprint accidentally calls it a "600 floor sprint"; the level data itself specifies 800.
Giagantor
Giagantor has the strongest connection between story and mechanics. Mad Kaz has been turned into a giant, so the levels revolve around his weight disturbing the environment.
| Level | What it does | Purpose |
|---|---|---|
| Tippy Toe 1 | Descend 500 floors. Landing too hard causes failure. Landing velocity also drives screen shake and phone vibration. | Turns the player's own mass into the main hazard. |
| Tippy Toe 2 | Same rule, but the platforms are farther apart. | Makes soft landings harder to achieve. |
| Tippy Toe 3 | Platforms are farther apart again. | Further increases unavoidable falling speed. |
| Inner Tippy Toe 1 | Platforms are obscured behind a building facade. The player is told to use the shaking caused by landing to locate hidden blocks. | Changes screen shake from feedback into information. |
| Inner Tippy Toe 2 | Uses the same idea with sparser platforms. | Makes the hidden-platform problem harder. |
| Climb to Space 1 | A 900-floor ascent while authorities fire bright beams from the sides. Screen shake warns that the beams are about to converge. Four hits are allowed. | Changes shaking from information about the player's impact into warning of an outside threat. |
| Climb to Space 2 | Beams converge faster and only three hits are allowed. | Increases pressure while keeping the same mechanic. |
| Climb to Space 3 | Beams converge much faster and a single hit ends the level. | The strictest version of the beam-avoidance mechanic. |
"Don't attract attention" is represented through actual impact velocity, rather than through a separate stealth meter. Later, the same environmental effect is reused in different ways.
The zone has a clear progression: your giant size makes your own movement dangerous → screen shaking becomes useful information → the same shaking becomes a warning of an external attack.
The beam attack is also implemented partly by moving the permissible side boundaries inward, another example of the presentation being built through changes to the underlying game rules rather than through a separate enemy system.
Author Zone
| Level | What it does | Purpose |
|---|---|---|
| Authors and Friends | Cycles through photographs of Kasra, Mykola, Xonic, Farzad/Farshad, James "Ghaleon," and Ed "Eduardo," changing the image every 15 seconds. | Implements the game's credits as an ordinary scripted level. |
There is also a very 2007-J2ME technical detail here: after switching photographs, the script explicitly invokes garbage collection, presumably because keeping several full-screen images around on the target heap was undesirable.
The entire credits sequence is therefore another example of the VM's flexibility: rather than creating a dedicated credits subsystem, the game implements the credits using the same programmable level system as everything else.