Development covered 6 Aug 2026 to 9 Aug 2026 (commit dates).
Myriad Immortal Sect has a design document per system, and I write the document before I write the system. This week I finally built one of the oldest ones and discovered it described something that cannot exist.
Reading your own spec like a stranger
The system is a slow-earning currency. The document said, in effect, that you earn it while you are in the game, at a rate set against a balance, with the earning gated on a condition. I had read that paragraph perhaps thirty times over several months and understood it every time.
Then I sat down to implement it exactly as written, and the gate could never be satisfied. The condition the document set was one the game reaches only after the currency already exists. Read literally, the faucet never opens on a new account, which is the only kind of account that matters for a currency meant to accumulate slowly.
I want to be clear that this is not a typo I could have caught by proofreading. The sentence is grammatical and it names real things. It is wrong in the way a plan for a bridge is wrong when the two banks are at different heights and nobody drew the elevation.
What "an hour is worth an hour" means when you write it down
Settling it meant answering a question the document had been quietly avoiding: what is one hour of play actually worth here?
An idle game has to answer that in a currency, not in a feeling. Once the number exists, everything downstream stops being an argument. The production rate became plain arithmetic that a test can assert, which sounds obvious and was not obvious for months, because the rate had been living inside a paragraph as a description rather than inside the game as a value.
The moment it was arithmetic, a second problem showed itself: a faucet with no relationship to a balance is just a number going up. So the rate now reads from the same balance the rest of the economy reads, and the two move together. If I change what an hour is worth, one number changes and the whole system follows. Each attribute that rate eventually feeds is described in the guide to what your cultivation attributes do.
The rest of the week was the same lesson at smaller scale
I spent most of this stretch checking documents against the game that shipped, one document at a time, and the pattern repeated in miniature everywhere.
A file promised a discount that scales with your realm. Built version: a flat one, and the document had claimed the scaled version superseded it. A card advertised perks that were compiled into the build, while an operator was supposed to be able to change them. An index named the wrong starting sect. A guidance table ranked two actions it had never actually ranked. In one document three separate claims described behaviour the code does not have.
None of these were caught by reading. They were caught by holding one document open and one game open and going line by line, which took a full day per batch and turned up something almost every time. Several of those documents describe trade, such as the weekly sealed-bid sale and its pricing.
The takeaway I would give a past version of myself
Write the document first, still. It remains the reason the game has a shape. But treat it as a hypothesis with an expiry date rather than a record of what is true. A spec that has never been built is not verified, however many times you have read it, and rereading is the exact activity that will not verify it. The only reader who finds the missing elevation drawing is the one holding a shovel.
I now finish a system by going back and rewriting its document to describe what shipped, including the places where I decided the original was wrong. That is not bookkeeping. It is the only way the next thing I build starts from something true.
Go straight to the game and play for free, or browse the design notes at Incremental RPG.
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