Chapter 5: Childhood, Nascent Souls, and Reincarnation

The following plots are purely fictitious and any similarity is purely coincidental.

Opening

L started to think the game was too thin.

It’s not that it has fewer functions. Features are being added all the time. It feels less. She couldn't speak clearly, but she used one word repeatedly: "There is no history." A cultivator started cultivating at birth, had no name, no gender, no childhood, and never even cried - this is not practicing cultivation, this is an assembly line.

"You have to be a human being for a few years first." After she finished chatting with Teacher G, she turned around and started to do it.

She filled in a past and present life for each character.

On the morning of February 12th, L opened Kimi and started feeding the requests one by one. There is a large section of `birthDesc` in `game-config.js`.

When a boy is born: "The family is looking forward to it, a boy is born." When a girl is born: "The eyebrows are delicate and beautiful, the mother is overjoyed." Then comes childhood. Twenty events, written from one year old to ten years old. "I ran after dragonflies all day." "I had a high fever, and I seemed to see immortals in my dream." "I was chased three streets by the neighbor's goose."

Some events can only be triggered by male accounts, and some events can only be triggered by female accounts. The men will meet Nangong Wan, and the women will meet Han Li. The man picked up the secret book, and the woman dug out the magic armor. L wrote all the copy himself, and Kimi was responsible for stuffing the content into the correct structure of the config. L was feeding very smoothly, as if she was filling out a form that she had already thought about.

Conveniently, she also changed "Tianlinggen" to "Great Cleverness".

Y was not around at that time. He saw this name change later when he was looking through the submission records. He was stunned for a moment, and then laughed.

One afternoon, six submissions, just for a breakthrough

That same afternoon, L entered a very special state.

She began to adjust the breakthrough. It is the level at which immortal cultivators advance from one realm to the next. The original logic is very simple. Just shake the random number and pass it. L doesn’t think so. "What's the difference between this and a lottery? It depends on the attributes."

She first discussed with Teacher G what a breakthrough should feel like - not pure luck, nor pure numerical crushing, but both. After the conversation was clear, I went to find Kimi: "Add a two-stage breakthrough. First, look at the basic success rate. The higher the level, the more difficult it is; then look at the sum of understanding and luck, and you will have to pass the line." Kimi gave her a version. Got a run. It's too difficult. L Change the number and ask Kimi to refresh it. Another run. Too simple. Change again. Threshold changed from multiplied by 20 to multiplied by 15. Run again. Still not right. Base penalty changed from 5% to 3% per level. Attribute weight changed from 2x to 3x. The threshold has been adjusted upward again.

From 2:30 to 5:30 in the afternoon, six submissions were made. Submission messages are getting shorter and shorter: `breakout mechanism correction`, `breakout value correction`, `breakout probability correction'. In the end, there was no punctuation left.

Every time L is adjusted, the game will be played from the beginning again. She played about twenty games that afternoon. At the end of each game, she would stare at the cause of death for a while, muttering something like "wrong", "too fast", "this death is unreasonable", and then go back to change the numbers.

It's not like she was messing around on a whim. She was using the stupidest way to measure the feel.

She also changed the title

After changing it again and again, L began to think that the title was not fun enough."Physical training" is too serious. Change it to "the silly son of the landlord". "Short-lived ghost" is too straightforward. Change it to "That's it?". "Medicine jar" was changed to "Mortals practicing cultivation". Then a few new ones were added:

"Change fate against the will of heaven" - starting with three negative talents, it can still last until foundation building. "Heaven's Jealousy of Talents" - three positive talents at the beginning, but ended up not surviving enough to build a foundation. There is another one that she is particularly satisfied with: "King Kong Barbie" - a female figure with a physique of over 100.

When she added "King Kong Barbie," she paused, read it twice, and then said, "This is good. This one must stay."

Even the conditions for achieving the title were taken action. The luck threshold of "Peerless European Emperor" has been raised from 30 to 150, which is a five-fold increase. The "Ten Thousand Years Bastard" changed from looking at physical fitness to looking at age - only those who have lived to be 300 years old are considered. "Eating soft rice and eating hard" is even more severe. You must have triggered the "indescribable thing" and have to encounter the Hehuan Sect more than five times. The expression on L's face when adding the event counter was very subtle, as if he was holding back a joke that was not suitable for telling.

Yuan Ying Incident: She wrote that she was happy

On February 13th, L started writing about Nascent Soul exclusive events.

She first chatted with Teacher G for an entire afternoon, discussing what the state of an immortal cultivator should be at the Nascent Soul stage—no longer an ordinary person, with more knowledge and more absurd things. L thought they should experience something different. To what extent is it different——

"My spiritual consciousness traveled eight hundred miles away and listened to the emotional entanglements of the elders of the Hehuan Sect next door."

This is the first one. The follow-up the male account saw was: "I discovered that the stunning fairy is actually a bad old man who has been picking his feet for 30,000 years."

Then: "I took a nap in seclusion and woke up to find that my sect had changed its head three times."

And then: "Tao gives birth to one, and gives birth to two. It turns out to be binary."

L was stunned for a moment after writing this. I originally wanted to write about Enlightenment, but it became crooked as I wrote it. Very good. Add ten points of understanding.

There is another one that she particularly likes: "Thousand-year-old spiritual grass that looks like leeks has been fried with eggs, and it tastes a bit bitter." Exclusive version for women: "The enshrined portrait is too beautified, and the juniors of the sect cannot recognize the ancestor's milk."

The copywriting was all written by L himself, and Kimi was responsible for packaging them into the correct event format, probability, and attribute impact in the config. After writing these events, L felt that the impact was not big enough, so he asked Kimi to double all the values ​​the next day. As for Nascent Soul, the ostentation needs to be grand. Three more rare events were added later. One of them, "Splitting the Soul and Seizing the Body," has only an eight-in-a-thousand chance. Once triggered, it will directly add 2,500 cultivation points.

"It's not easy for people to cultivate to the Nascent Soul," L said, "You have to give them something good."

Reincarnation hook and share screenshots

She also did two other things on the same day.

The first one: reincarnation and inheritance. After the character dies, the next life can inherit the strongest attribute from the previous life - plus one point. not much. But it’s enough to make you want to play again. A small line of text will be written on the settlement page: "Reincarnation Blessing: Physical fitness +1 in the next life."

It's not of much use numerically. It's a psychological hook. It makes people feel that this death was not in vain.

Second piece: share button. L asked Kimi to add a screenshot function, use html2canvas to take a picture of the settlement page, use the Web Share API on the mobile phone, and download it directly on the desktop. The file name is `Xiu Xian Settlement_128 Years Old_The Foolish Son of the Landlord.png`. She tried it, took the screenshot and said, "This is just right for the group."

Later, the screenshot button was complicated once—a QR code and a sharing bar were added—but it was rolled back again. In the end, the simplest version remained. Sometimes the function is like this, and adding three layers is worse than taking two steps back.

Y Took Apart the Tests Overnight

While L was busy filling in the content for the past few days, Y kept reading.

What are you looking at? See commit record. The more I looked at it, the more I felt something was wrong. It’s not that L was not changed well. It was changed too quickly. Incidents are increasing, breakthroughs are being adjusted, titles are changing, talent conflicts are emerging - the config is getting fatter and fatter, the logic is getting more and more complicated, and the original test is almost unbearable.

At 10:30 pm on February 15th, Y opened Codex and started to dismantle it.

He asked Codex to split the original large test file into three: `config-contract.test.js` only takes care of the structure and type, `engine-behavior.test.js` takes care of the process and state changes, and `pinned-values.test.js` only pins truly stable constants. A paragraph has been added to the README explaining why it is so divided. Then I added several sets of smoke tests: navigation process, reincarnation archive, cultivation growth, and ran each one.

L doesn’t know about this. During those days, she continued to adjust the Nascent Soul event value, fix the bugs triggered by events after death, and test the switch to add unlimited redraws to the talent. After she made changes, she would run the game herself to check it out, never running a test.

Y didn’t tell her either. There is no point in talking about testing this kind of thing. Just run through it.

Last bug

On the afternoon of February 16, L reported a bug.

"The cause of death cannot be seen."

"What do you mean?"

"The person is dead, and the bottom line is blocked by the button."

Y took a look. The settlement button is located above the last line of the log area. Pure CSS question. Let the Codex add `padding-bottom: 60px`.

Sixty pixels. Finished in two minutes. But L can notice this, which means that she is really playing it over and over again. Play till death every time.

From February 12th to 16th, this game went from a running prototype to something with gender, childhood, breakthrough feel, Yuan Ying depth, reincarnation hook, shared screenshots, and test guardrails. It's not just a few more functions. It's a thick layer.

L calls this "it finally feels a bit like a game."

Y calls this "she finally held up the config until she needed to dismantle the file."

It's the same thing.