Level design lessons from the first tile a player stands on

Development covered 11 Sep 2026 to 13 Sep 2026 (commit dates).

When you join a sect in Myriad Immortal Sect, the game puts you on the world map at that sect's home. For a long time "home" meant a point somewhere inside the compound, chosen because it was safe and central. It was fine in the way a hotel lobby is fine.

This stretch I rebuilt the four joinable compounds around a different idea, and it produced a batch of level design lessons about first impressions. The first thing a new disciple sees should be the front door of the place they just chose, with someone standing at it.

Arrival is composed

Every compound now has its gate on the main avenue, two guards in front of it, and the player spawning just outside, three and a half tiles from the threshold. That number came from trying the alternatives. At half a screen away the gate was out of frame on the first render, which is the opposite of an arrival. Right on top of it, the guards and the player overlapped and the gate shrank into a doorway in a wall.

At three and a half tiles the opening frame holds the gate, both guards and a slice of the avenue behind them. You can see where you are going before you have touched anything, and the first quest is to walk through.

I also had to stop calling everyone a gate guard. The figures standing at the edge of each sect's protective dome are now Formation Wardens, and "Gate Guard" names only the two at the front door. When the first quest says "speak with the Gate Guard", there should be exactly one obvious pair of candidates.

Four sects, four silhouettes

With the door settled, the approach was doing the work of telling the four compounds apart, and the colour palette was doing very little of it.

Azure Cloud Sect has a mountain range at its back and a tower throwing sword-light. Medicine King Valley has a valley rim, a spring pond and a herb garden right beside the alchemy hall, because that is what that sect is for. Black Iron Valley closed its fortress wall, sits on sand with earth-fire around the smithing tower and an ore yard. Grand Void Dao Sect lines its halls up along an axis and you enter through a wall of forest marked by array pillars, with open sky over its star disc.

None of it is decoration for its own sake: it answers "which sect am I in?" without a label. If you are still choosing, the comparison of the four orthodox sects covers what each one offers beyond its scenery.

Walls are rules, and the rules have to match the art

Deciding what the player can walk through took more iterations than any of the drawing.

The first version made each gate prop solid across its whole width. That turned the avenue through every gate into a wall. A gate's footprint is now its two pillars, which is obvious once you say it out loud and was invisible until a click-walk refused to go anywhere.

Black Iron Valley's desert ground cover had the opposite problem. One tuft of grass was drawn just tall enough to count as solid, so a decorative tuft became an obstacle the pathfinder gave up on. Solidity here comes from how tall the art is drawn, so the fix was to keep that ground cover below the line instead of adding an exception.

And the coast. Water blocks you only where water is actually painted, so a paved slab over a river is a crossing and a one-tile river thread is not a hidden wall. "The walkable coast is the drawn coast" is now a written rule, because every time the two diverge a player sees open ground and cannot step on it.

Small labels that tell you where you are

Two quieter changes help the same idea. The region label in the corner now names the dome you are standing in, so inside a sect's shield it says the sect's name and outside it says the biome. And a building's name label steps aside when you stand on its door tile, because it was sitting exactly where your own level bar is drawn.

The guide to sect protecting formations explains what those domes do once you are inside one.

Level design lessons I would pass on

Pick the spawn tile the way you would frame a shot: decide what must be in the first frame, then work backwards to where the player stands. And whenever you draw something new, ask what it does to the walk, because the player tests your collision rules with their first click.

You can see all four front doors for yourself: pick a sect and arrive, free and in the browser.