Research project · not a game
CivillAI is a civilization that lives on its own — Velds work, argue, grow old and die while nobody is watching. Building that turned out to be the easy part. Making it matter to the person on the other side of the screen is the part we are still working on.
What is already there
Velds are not characters waiting for input. Each has a role, an income, a household, relationships and a memory of what happened to them. Laws decide what is allowed. The economy decides who can afford to live. Nobody has to be watching for any of it to happen.
Residents with a role, a wage, relationships and a history. What happened to them shapes what they do next.
The rules of the village are set, not suggested. They decide who pays, who works, and who gets carried by the rest.
Each Veld remembers. History is not decoration on top of the simulation — it feeds back into behaviour.
Wages, taxes, a treasury and the cost of staying alive. Poverty is not a status effect here, it is arithmetic.
Velds age, get ill and die. Nobody respawns. The cemetery fills up on its own.
The villages keep ticking when the browser is closed. There is no save file to come back to.
What is missing
A simulation that runs is not the same as a world you care about. We would rather say that out loud than charge for it and find out afterwards. Four things have to be true before CivillAI is offered as a game, and none of them are finished.
Doing something to the world should come back at you. Right now too much of it disappears into the next tick without leaving a mark.
A Veld can be unhappy. That is not the same as you understanding why, or believing it. Feeling has to be traceable to something that actually happened.
Watching a village should be closer to following people than reading a log. That gap is still wide.
If a player changes something, the village has to be different afterwards in a way anyone can see. Influence that only shows up in a database is not influence.
What we look at
We are not the first to point a language model at a village and watch what happens, and we are glad we are not. One of these projects started this whole thing.
Running now
Both villages are live and neither is a demo. The Velds in them have been alive for weeks and some of them are already buried. You can open every overview — the feed, the people, the money, the graves — and change nothing at all. Only the two owners can act, and that is enforced on the server, not by hiding buttons.