Roadmap

Where LivingSim is today, what's active now, and where it's going. The live narrative index is the top-level ROADMAP.md in the repository; the milestone plan with gates and evidence criteria is docs/product/master-plan.md in the repository; the honest capability inventory is docs/product/what-livingsim-is-today.md in the repository. This page is the reader-friendly summary of all three.

Shipped today — the social-consequence engine

A character feels the weight of its own history. All of this is in the engine now, deterministic from a seed and explainable:

  • Memory, emotion, relationships, reputation — durable per-character state formed from typed events.
  • Needs, goals, planning, utility scoring — characters pursue what their state makes important, and the planner turns goals into concrete actions.
  • Social exchanges & gossip — news propagates between characters, with confidence decaying each hop.
  • Trauma, beliefs, identity — lasting avoidance, expectation and surprise, and self-image that shame or pride reinforce.
  • Norms, secrets, theory of mind, habits — the interpretive layer: social rules, concealment and discovery, modelling what others know, and earned tendencies.
  • Causality graph — every later action traces back to the events that caused it.
  • Determinism, save/load, multi-tier population, material state — reproducible runs, byte-identical reloads, large casts, and health / money / employment / legal consequences.
  • Authoring & inspection — declare a world as data, and read back the "why" behind any decision.

Start with the demo and the overview to see these in motion. For what's dark-by-default, shallow, or not yet built, read what LivingSim is today (docs/product/what-livingsim-is-today.md in the repository). The playable proof exists (The House Share, samples/Console/SharedHouse — M4); the current milestones take the engine into Unity.

Now — the Unity Asset Store candidate

M0–M3 shipped 2026-07-02 (v0.1-eval is an internal checkpoint; public release/posting stays paused unless the owner reopens it). M4 shipped 2026-07-04: The House Share (samples/Console/SharedHouse) met the done-gate — ~5 minutes of play with surprising-but-explainable consequences — with the owner verdict "interesting enough as an engine proof, not yet a polished game". Demo work reopened on 2026-09-07. The engine freeze that held from 2026-07-02 was lifted on 2026-10-03: quality first. Detail: docs/product/master-plan.md in the repository · docs/product/decision-log.md in the repository.

  • M5 — Unity import/package proof shipped 2026-09-06 (#170 + #25 closed): the staged DLLs proven inside a real Unity Editor by scripts/run-unity-smoke.ps1 — 8/8 on 2022.3.62f1 and 6000.4.5f1 (Mono), and again in an IL2CPP standalone player at Low and High managed stripping with no link.xml; every shipped assembly carries the repo VERSION (#572). The House Share scene port was never M5's gate; it is M6 sample work.
  • M6 — Asset Store candidate (#549): the .unitypackage build shipped 2026-09-06 — scripts/build-unitypackage.{sh,ps1} packs it without an Editor and scripts/run-unity-smoke.ps1 -Package proves the built package in one; the layout question is settled as one folder with the full closure (sdk/PACKAGING.md); the listing copy is drafted (docs/product/asset-store-listing.md in the repository, #158). The M4 scene shipped as the Unity sample on 2026-09-06 (Samples/HouseShare/HouseShare.unity, Editor-generated and Play-Mode-tested; the game logic is plain C# shared with the console sample). Owner decisions and what remains are recorded once, in docs/product/milestone-status.md (in the repository) — this page links there rather than keeping its own copy, which is how the licence once managed to be both settled and outstanding on the same page. IL2CPP validation from M6's original scope is already done.

Next — paid launch / marketing (M7)

  • M7 — paid launch / marketing follows; external feedback channels (e.g. r/gamedev) are used for advice and positioning once there is a real playable example to show.

Later — evidence-driven expansion (post-launch, M7+)

Resumed only where real users pull, per the master plan:

  • Engine deepening — process layer (investigation as the first autonomous process, then court), richer per-verb effect resolution, SimulationEngine partition, generalizing the reaction→goal bridge.
  • Performance & architecture — directly-serializable RNG (#116), simulation-time abstraction (#36), hot-path allocation pass (#35).
  • Physiology / routine module — biological needs as a separate, opt-in scheduler. #281
  • Interactive-story cores — a modular toolkit for text/interactive stories (world/map, objects, parser, affordance resolver, dialogue, knowledge, story director, renderer, content packs, turn loop, save/replay), with LivingSim as one optional adapter and Treasure Island as the first target world. Tracked in #452 with scenario packs in #361. Deliberately frozen until post-launch evidence says where to invest.