This site went up today, so it is a fair time to say plainly where the application is: what is built, what I am working on, what stands between that and putting it in your hands, and when I think that will be.

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. Five are done: towns with districts and quick travel between neighbouring areas, characters who either stay where they live or travel with you, items that change your odds on a check, rated locks, and needs. Shops are on the bench now.

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

What comes after

Four phases, in order. I wrote about each of them in The road to launch; this is the short version.

Play quality and first run. The defects players of AI roleplay actually report: a narrator that speaks for your character, the same phrasings every turn, a provider refusal stored as if it were story, an empty library on day one.

The world catalogue. Five starter worlds with full casts, so a new player has somewhere to go in the first minute, in one catalogue with the larger worlds I write for Vivarium.

Launch readiness. Sign-up, account deletion, restoring your own exports, and converting the character cards and lore books you already have.

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

One thing is not on that list. Sharing worlds between players was planned, and I have withdrawn it from the first release. The same post explains why.

When

I am aiming for a first playable release in the first quarter of 2027.

I want to be precise about what that is. It is a target drawn from work I have already scoped, each piece with its own acceptance check, measured against the rate of everything already behind me. It is not a promise, and it is not a date I will defend by cutting things that should not be cut. If it moves, it moves on the roadmap first and I will say here why.

The roadmap lists every phase with the features in it, and how far into the current one I am. That includes the unglamorous phases. Accounts and hosting are not features you would feel while playing, but they count toward the date, so they are on the page.

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.