Nine days ago I wrote that fifteen phases were done. Ten more have closed since. Twenty-five of forty-two are done, and the twenty-sixth is a short one.

Most of this stretch went into how the game looks and reads, which is why the site has a new page. Screens shows the application’s own screens, taken from the renders the build checks itself against. More on that below. First, what changed if you were sitting down to play.

Fights, and what Consequences left open

A short phase first. Every character now has pronouns: she, he, they, or a set you type yourself. A party can make a promise together, and recall by meaning got steadier.

Then Conflict. A fight starts only from a decided act, never because the prose drifted into one. Each exchange is a check on who has the upper hand. Injuries sit on a named ladder, not hit points, and they heal with world time, rest and care. You can always yield or flee, at a cost you are told before you choose. Capture comes with a way out, and what losing costs follows the stakes you set for the story. Fights can be switched off for any story, and theft and disputes over property stay.

Keeping the people you meet

When the narrator invents someone you like, you can now keep them as a full character. The AI drafts their card from the scenes they appeared in, and you approve it. You can see everything about them at once, or leave their hidden depths to be discovered in play. If someone keeps turning up, the game quietly suggests keeping them.

The first live playtest

On the first of October I played the build against a real provider for the first time, in the hosted shape it will run in. I wanted to do it before adding more, because the game has to be right before it is big.

The playtest found forty things. The worst was that the hosted stack could not reach a provider at all, which every automated test had missed because the tests use a stand-in. That is fixed, and the deploy now checks the route out. The rest were the kind of thing you only see by playing: the narrator inventing a character who was not in the scene, a clue that changed when a turn was regenerated, a readiness check that said Ready for a model that could not do the memory format. Each has its fix. Models that think before they answer now work on every call, a scene’s memory survives a reply with a few bad parts, and Remember this keeps one fact that you accept or edit, not the whole message.

Every screen, laid out again

The playtest also showed me that the screens had grown by accretion. A panel here, a banner there, each sensible on its own and noisy together. So I stopped and did the screen work I had planned for later, now, in two phases and three rounds of fixes.

The rule is quiet by default. One clear action in each place. Help, hints and first-time explanations live behind a question mark instead of in the way of the story. Forms open when you ask for them. Nothing empty takes more than a line.

Inside a story there is now one bar of seven rooms: Story, You, People, Groups, Belongings, World and History, with Help and the menu beside them. The story is the only thing that scrolls, the place to write stays pinned, and every entry names its speaker. On a phone the panels become sheets. Before you attempt a check, the screen tells you in words how hard it is, and looking costs no roll. You can search every closed scene and jump to it, and when you come back to a story it opens on where you left off. The World room shows only what your character could know.

The second phase did the same for everything outside the story: your account, home, the library, sign-in, and the administrator’s pages. Two design reviews followed, each with a list of fixes, and the third and shortest is being worked through now.

The thing I care most about from this stretch is not a screen. It is a gate. Every screen state is rendered at three widths, in both themes, and compared against a set I approved by eye. If a change makes a screen overflow its window or drift from what was approved, the build fails. The layout slips the playtest found cannot come back without someone noticing.

The Screens page

That approved set is also where the new Screens page comes from. I had chosen diagrams over screenshots for the home page, and that stays: a diagram can explain a turn, and a screenshot cannot. But now that the screens are the ones I mean to ship, there is no reason not to show them. The page takes its images straight from the approved renders, so it shows what the screen does, not a mock-up. Everything on it is from a test story. When the screens change, the page is refreshed from the same set.

The order has changed

The roadmap now lists the remaining phases in a different order from the one I gave in September. The economy no longer comes next. First come the foundations that everything later depends on: personality that really changes what a character chooses; how people treat each other, so witnesses remember what characters do to one another and not only what you do; asking and owing, so a yes really hands the thing over; owning; family across generations; and leading an organisation. Then generated events, getting better at things, and the economy.

The reason is the one I keep coming back to. Build what everything depends on first, so each later phase only adds. An economy built before people have traits and debts would need rebuilding once they did.

When

The target is still a first playable release in the first quarter of 2027, after the beta. It is a target, not a promise. If it moves, it moves on the roadmap first, and I will say here why.

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