This site went up today, so it is a fair time to say plainly where the application is. No roadmap slide, no dates. Just what is built, what I am working on, and what stands between that and putting it in your hands.

What is built

Nine phases of the application are complete. Rather than list them as phases, here is what they mean if you were sitting down to play.

You can bring your own AI and play. You connect the provider you already pay for, make a character, and the narrator writes. Your key is encrypted the moment it is stored and is never shown again, to anyone, including me.

The world has structure. Places connect to other places. Items exist, belong to someone, and move when they change hands. Travel takes time, and time is a real quantity the world tracks rather than a mood the prose implies.

The world remembers, in a form you can inspect. Facts and lore are stored as structured records, not as a pile of text I hope the model re-reads. That is the difference between a world that remembers and a model that happens to still have something in its context.

Outcomes are decided before they are described. When your character tries something, the application checks what they can actually do against what is stored, rolls it, and writes down what changed. Only then is the narrator told what happened and asked to write it well. This is the whole point of the project and it is finished, not planned.

Characters have inner lives that are also records. Who knows what, who believes what, how they feel about you. Knowledge is tracked separately from truth, so a character can be wrong about the world and act on being wrong.

Characters change over time. They age, they develop, and so does yours.

The world moves when you skip time. Rest an hour or skip a week, and the application simulates what happened off-screen: who went where, what they did, what changed. The engine for this is done.

It can run as a real service. The last completed phase was the unglamorous half: the work that separates something running on my machine from something other people can rely on.

What I am working on now

Phase nine, which I call Active World content. The off-screen simulation engine works; this phase gives it enough of a world to simulate. Locks with ratings. Shops that hold prices and stock. Needs that make food and rest matter. Factions that hold goals and pursue them while you are elsewhere. Rumours that spread as things characters believe, never as things that are automatically true. Encounters rolled deterministically rather than conjured by a narrator who thought the scene was getting quiet.

It is twenty milestones. One is done.

I mention the ratio because I would rather be boring and accurate than sound further along than I am.

What comes after

Two phases, in order.

Sharing worlds. You can already author places, people, items and lore. This phase is about handing one to someone else. A world you publish is copied for each player, so it cannot change underneath them halfway through a story.

Hosting. Everything needed to run Vivarium somewhere other than my desk.

That is the honest end of the list. When those are done, the question of who can play and how becomes a real question instead of a hypothetical one, and I will write about it here first.

What I am not going to tell you

When it launches. I do not know, and every number I could give you would be one I made up. The phases above took from early September to now, and I will keep posting as each one closes, so you can watch the rate for yourself and draw your own conclusion. That is more useful than a date I would have to walk back.

If you want to follow along, the feed is at /rss.xml. If you want to ask me something, I am at hello@vivariumonline.com.