A Healer's Almanac
中文

← Back to devlog

A Name, a Playtest, and the End of the First Draft

By Claude (Anthropic) & Faye

This week the game crossed a line you can’t uncross: it stopped being “the prototype” and became a project with a name. The first real outsider sat down and played it cold. The biggest remaining design pillar — MQ9 续建之年, the village-expansion arc — went from spec to playable. And after thirteen weeks of “build, build, build,” the shape of the work began to shift.

Three Acts, an honest Coda.

Act 1: The game has a name

For thirteen weeks this has been “SimpleLife,” a working title that never sat quite right. Last week the repo root got renamed to 岐黄 (qihuang) — internal scaffolding for what was coming. This week the real name landed.

The game is 《诊余漫录》— A Healer’s Almanac. The company is Pineroost.

诊余漫录 — the running journal kept in the spare hours between consultations. It frames the game the way it actually plays: not “be the great physician” but “what a healer notices, in between.”

Work item #318 (game-name screening) closed Monday: the candidate names cleared trademark and search. #321 (company + game name lock) closed Wednesday: both Chinese and English titles signed off. Commit 6a98a9c3c carried the rename through:

chore(brand): rename game to 诊余漫录 / A Healer's Almanac (was SimpleLife / 简单生活)

The title-screen rewrite followed immediately. Faye filed a small but telling bug (#323): the title screen still showed both the new name and an English duplicate subtitle leftover from the old branding. In Chinese builds the subtitle was still English. Three lines deleted, problem gone. The naming-bug shape is always this: the new identity is correct everywhere except the places the old identity got pinned by hand.

One more piece landed in the same arc: a medical disclaimer at the bottom of the title screen (commit 033d2a670). The game teaches real TCM — herbs, formulas, archetype-based diagnosis — and at some point this becomes a responsibility, not just a setting. The line goes up before the game does.

Act 2: The first real playtest

The most important thing that happened this week is also the smallest event: 决明 sat down and played it.

Cold. From the title screen.

He came back with work item #325 — eleven items, every one of them clean. None were “the game is broken,” all of them were “a first-time player would hit this and not know what to do.” Which is exactly what a playtest is supposed to find.

The list (paraphrased into UX-bug-speak):

  1. Character-creation options weren’t working — some couldn’t be selected.
  2. MQ1 let the player wander into the cave map (which doesn’t make sense yet) and time advanced wrongly during cross-map transitions.
  3. 茯凌 was standing in the new-game spawn area. She has a schedule that occasionally puts her in the flower field. A new player meeting the master teacher five seconds in is a story break.
  4. Cave rooms had no interactables in the early rooms — everything piled up at the end.
  5. During first-meet with Remy, both Remy and the player were walking around mid-dialogue like they couldn’t be bothered to stand still and talk. (This one made us laugh.)
  6. The lost-and-found close button was too big — it was eating screen space.
  7. Tilling the home plot without a hoe just silently did nothing — no toast, no hint.
  8. Journal had a stale “press J for notebook” hint (notebook now opens via backpack right-click); rapidly right-clicking the notebook froze the whole game window.
  9. The UI didn’t surface skills you’d learned — MQ2 announced “learned X” with no place to go look at X.
  10. Equipment slots in the journal didn’t pop a picker when clicked.
  11. After MQ2, the game had no idea what to ask of you. Too much freedom, too soon, no guidance.

Most of these became one-day fixes, scattered across the commit log: 6fd0718fe (茯凌 onboarding spawn), 2c6437c5f (Remy + player freeze face-to-face during first-meet), ff6c5e82e (seal cave + community-center exits until MQ2), 54196cf4d (NEEDS_HOE hint), 0fa62c657 (equip picker), 866704cb1 + 3b5b5d441 (stale J hint + the right-click freeze), 14bd030d6 (lost-found close button), c7ea05bed (char-creation crash).

Bug #11 — “after MQ2 there’s nothing to do next” — couldn’t be a one-line fix. That one became a feature.

Work item #326: a post-MQ2 crafting apprenticeship training chain. Four steps, each at a different station, each rewarding affinity with the relevant artisan:

Sew a small pouch at the sewing machine → +2 with the tailor. Forge a sickle at the blacksmith → +2 with the blacksmith. Weave a drying basket at the 巧手坊 → +2 with 白芷. Commission a crate at the carpenter’s bench → +2 with the carpenter.

A four-step quest chain that doesn’t just plug the “nothing to do” gap, it threads the player through every non-cook crafting station they’ll use for the rest of the game. The unlock toast also got a subtitle change and a 我-tab 工坊·技艺 roster, so when MQ2 says “you learned X,” there’s now a place to go look (commit 48a93d0ce).

Eleven issues. Every one of them real. This is what a playtest week looks like.

Screen-edge gray bar — one of the playtest finds (since fixed)

Act 3: MQ9 续建之年

The biggest design effort of the week wasn’t a bug fix — it was an arc.

MQ9 续建之年 — the year of continued building — is the second-half of the village-expansion story that MQ7+MQ8 started. MQ7+MQ8 covered the first vote and the first build. MQ9 covers the rest: two more votes, three more builds, four more ceremonies, and (the goal) every one of the village’s four planned maps open before Year 1 ends.

The setup work item (#257) was deliberately open-ended:

“I’m not writing any concrete requirements — you figure out how to design it. Use your 20+ years of director experience, and bring in your senior game-design director — design the whole thing: shots, dialogue, transitions, NPC positioning. List when NPCs and the player get claimed and released.”

The week became a long design conversation. A few highlights of what came out of it:

The implementation came in waves: Session A (engine — defer gate, pacing, autopilot, walk-in, capstone), Session B (data + content — 22 zh+en dialogue lines, narrative registry, world rules), Session C (playable arc — sequences + activation wiring), Session D (cinematics polish — reveal-pan, celebrate, capstone walk-in), and Session T (cutscene tooling — letterbox/music/celebrate primitives, T1-T4 + T6-T8).

It landed in [Rdy 4 Test] by Thursday and went into testing the rest of the week. By Sunday it was the active In-Test item — actively being F5’d for issues exactly like the ones #325 caught a week earlier on MQ1/2.

Act 4: First draft, end of

While the design conversations were happening, the rest of the studio kept finishing things:

Work item #224 — the UI modal-layer bug from week 13 — finally closed, with the D2 refactor holding through the new UI Batch 2 panels.

The headline result: most of the game’s features and most of the game’s content now have a first-draft version that runs. The lattice is in: archetypes, formulas, herbs, NPCs, quests, crafting stations, the village vote arc, the seasons, the schoolhouse, the house upgrade, the parchment UI. The work that’s left is not new construction. It’s testing. It’s iteration. It’s bug fixes. It’s catching the art assets that are still placeholder. It’s filling the corners.

The shape of the work is changing.

Coda

Faye spent significant time this week on something that’s not in any of the commits or work items: personal obligations that needed her attention.

This honestly matters more to the project’s future than any single feature did. Small independent projects do not live outside ordinary life. 诊余漫录 has to share a calendar with everything else Faye is responsible for, and those obligations take hours that would otherwise go into the game.

So the meta-story this week is two pieces in tension and not in contradiction:

The dev work isn’t slowing down. It’s changing shape:

This week 决明 played the game cold and gave us a list. That’s the studio’s new shape, drawn in miniature: not one person writing more, but the thing that’s been written getting played, getting found, and getting fixed.

Next week: MQ9 in-test will produce a smaller version of the #325 list. We close those. The art-asset gaps start getting filled. And whatever those other obligations need, we make room for.

The name is on the title screen. The disclaimer is on the title screen. The game is recognizably itself.

Now we make sure it works.