Development covered 25 Sep 2026 to 26 Sep 2026 (commit dates).
In Myriad Immortal Sect you can light a Wayfinding Lamp to find your current quest target. Until this week the lamp showed you the way in two places: a highlighted diamond on the minimap and a line of text with a direction and a step count. Both worked. Both also meant looking away from your character to find out which way to walk.
So I added a third: a small gold arrow at the player's feet, pointing at the target, with the distance beside it. It took seven passes in two days, and almost none of them were about whether the arrow pointed the right way. They were about where it sits, how big it is and how it moves.
Pass one: agree with the other two
The first rule was not visual. The arrow, the minimap diamond and the text row all had to point at the same thing, so they all read from one place that decides what the lamp is leading you to. Three indicators that can disagree are worse than one, because the moment they split the player trusts none of them.
Passes two and three: a circle on the bearing
The first arrow circled the feet on a small flattened ellipse, which is the obvious way to draw something "on the ground". It looked right and behaved wrong. On an ellipse the arrow's position does not lie on the true bearing to the target, so it pointed one way and sat slightly in another.
It now orbits a true circle, 150 to 200 pixels out from the player in screen terms, and sits exactly on the line to the target. That had a nice side effect: clicking the arrow walks you towards the target, because the arrow is literally on the path. The step count moved directly under the arrow so the two never overlap.
When the target is closer than the orbit, an arrow circling at 150 pixels would point past it. Instead it glides in to just short of the target and points straight at it.
Passes four and five: smaller, then quieter
The arrow needed to read as "go this way" rather than as a static decoration, so it slides forward and eases back every 0.9 seconds. I kept that motion on even for players who ask for reduced motion, because that preference is about flashes and shaking, and a slow slide is neither.
Then I watched it for a while and it was too much. The arrow and its label came down by forty percent, the label rendered at high resolution so it stays sharp under the map zoom. The nudge got shorter. Then shorter again, from sixteen pixels to under six. Every one of those numbers came from looking at it during actual play, not from a mockup, because the right size for an indicator depends on everything else on screen at that moment.
Passes six and seven: depth, and room for the head
A flat arrow sliding back and forth is easy to stop seeing. Every five seconds it now rolls once around its long axis, a short flip that reads as three-dimensional without changing the direction it points. It is enough to catch the eye again without demanding it.
The last fix was about the player's own sprite. The character and their health bar stand above the point on the ground where they are anchored, so an arrow pointing upward at the normal radius crowded into the head. The orbit now widens by up to thirty percent as the arrow swings towards straight up.
The same idea applied to whole screens
A guidance arrow answers "where do I go?" without making you read. In the same window a handful of screens learned to answer "what is this page for?" in one line. The alchemy hall used to open with a piece of atmosphere, "One cauldron burns without rest", which told a first-time player nothing. It now opens with "Turn herbs into pills here. Each pill needs its recipe first." The Scripture Library, the Destiny page and the Treasures screen each gained a single plain sentence above their first card, and a recipe's description now says "Lets you brew X in the Alchemy Pavilion. It is never used up."
The codex of recipes lists every brewing and forging recipe that line now describes, and the guide to resources you find on the map covers what the lamp tends to lead you to.
What I took from it
Guidance elements are judged in context or not at all. On a blank canvas my first arrow was fine. On a busy map, next to a health bar, over a river, during a fight, it needed seven rounds of watching. Budget for that. And when you can, put the pointer where the player is already looking.
Light a lamp and follow it: play free in the browser, no download.
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