Inside Paradigm / The engine behind your life
Many systems.
One accountable world.
A turn is more than a reply. It connects intention, place, time, knowledge and consequence, without letting the storyteller decide what is real.
- 01
Player
ChoosesYour intention starts the turn. The engine does not choose your life for you.
- 02
Interface
ConnectsCarries your action and presents the facts and controls available to you.
- 03
Simulation
DeterminesSpecialized authorities validate actions, resolve consequences and own world state.
- 04
Narrator
PresentsGives prepared and committed facts a voice. It does not own those facts.
The simulation turn
From intention
to lasting consequence.
Fourteen named stages make the handoffs explicit. The sophistication is in their contracts: each system answers its own question, in a defined order.
Prepare
Resolve the intention before asking for prose.
- 01
Capture input
Receive the player’s action or explicit control. An optional provider-backed interpretation proposes typed input; it does not execute the action.
- 02
Read the world
Start from authoritative WorldState, not the transcript.
- 03
Resolve intent
Deterministically resolve committed typed input into supported actions and authority-owned outcomes.
- 04
Retain the prepared turn
Keep the exact base and prepared facts for the turn’s lifecycle.
- 05
Compose grounded context
Project only the facts this observer may perceive or know.
Provider
A presentation layer, not a world-state writer.
- 06
Render narration
The language provider renders the prepared context. Its output is not simulation authority.
Commit
Validate, advance, resolve and preserve.
- 07
Separate prose and proposals
Parse structured proposals and strip their metadata from visible text.
- 08
Validate and constrain
Receiving authorities reject invalid proposals and bound permitted changes.
- 09
Advance accepted time
Time validates the interval; ordered subsystem passes process its consequences.
Inside this stage - 10
Apply through owners
Validated changes enter the appropriate authority, never a direct prose-to-state write.
- 11
Resolve task outcomes
Completed tasks yield consequences through the outcome resolver, guarded against duplication.
- 12
Resolve witnesses
Knowledge records who witnessed or heard committed events, without rewriting what happened.
- 13
Attach the committed snapshot
Associate the turn’s presentation with the resulting world state.
- 14
Persist and record history
Save the committed state; Chronicle then archives qualifying occurrences.
Interpreting an action and narrating its result are different jobs. Input capture may request one interpretation proposal before deterministic intent resolution; a narrated turn makes at most two provider calls. Neither call grants authority to invent a capability or change the world directly.
Same authorities / Different presentation modes
The simulation can run without a narrator.
The sequence above describes the narrated path. Narrator-Off omits stages 5–8 and the proposal portion of stage 10, committing prepared facts through the shared simulation tail. Provider-independent prepared decisions have a shared commit path too: in narrated mode, that path runs before provider dispatch. Stage numbers describe responsibilities, not a claim that every write waits for generated prose.
Provider failure still has defined abort and retry behavior for provider-dependent work. Narration is neither an unrestricted command channel nor a requirement for the Narrator-Off simulation.
Recent engine work · September 29, 2026
A choice today.
A different tomorrow.
Three recent pieces of work, each followed through browser play or focused checks on the current build.
- Discovery → Movement → Economy
The search leads somewhere real.
Phone search finds an existing local shop. Its travel control starts the journey; arrival puts you at its premises. An accepted purchase settles through Economy. Discovery, location and payment are connected facts, each with its own owner.
- Occupation → Time → What’s ahead
A new job changes your week.
An opening carries its declared pay and weekly hours. Leaving one job and taking another changes the work obligations ahead. The schedule comes from the committed job, not from a paragraph announcing a career change.
- Knowledge → Memory → Phone
The record keeps its meaning.
Recent presentation work gives Memory, Phone history and the day’s summary shared, Knowledge-owned wording for discoveries and visit outcomes. What you learned and how you learned it travel together, without the interface inventing a second version.
Discovery and job change were followed through browser play and Save/Continue. The record-presentation changes have focused implementation checks. See the everyday examples
Inside stage 09 / Accepted time
Time crosses boundaries.
Not just a finish line.
A larger time advance must still encounter the relevant moments inside it. A shift boundary, a transit arrival or an activity beat belongs to the system that declares it.
- 01 / Accept
One interval
Time checks validity, pause, limits and duplicate requests. An unclaimed or unsupported action cannot buy simulation time.
- 02 / Visit
Declared moments
The engine visits due boundaries in ascending order, then re-reads the state for newly declared moments.
- 03 / Apply
Ordered effects
Each authority applies its own consequences. Arrival can change attendance; an appointment can change shared presence.
- 04 / Complete
A coherent world
The remaining interval is accounted for. Reaching the end of a request does not itself invent another occasion.
This is a conceptual view of the accepted-time mechanism, not a second pipeline or a gameplay recording. Game time advances through play, not against a wall clock while you are away.
Specialized systems / Shared contracts
One owner
for every fact.
WorldState carries the authoritative simulation. Systems communicate through bounded interfaces; they do not rewrite one another’s facts or keep competing copies of reality.
- Time
- The accepted interval and clock.
- Spatial
- Where entities are and what is perceivable.
- Movement
- Journey execution and arrival requests to Spatial.
- Needs
- Physical needs and accepted-time effects.
- Occupation
- Shifts, attendance and work obligations.
- Business & Economy
- Formation, catalogs and published terms; exact monetary input, conserved transfers and ledgers.
- Knowledge
- What each person has learned, with its source.
- Relationships
- Directed social state and evidence from shared experience.
- Agency
- NPC decisions from admissible facts, not narrator instructions.
- Activity & Conversation
- Shared engagement and the committed acts within it.
- Appointments
- Agreed plans, attendance onset and shared-plan protection.
- Place & Environment
- Declared place concepts and physical features; world-scoped weather and light.
- Correspondence
- Remote message transport with an explicit audience.
- Chronicle
- Durable history of qualifying committed occurrences.
- Save System
- Persistence and validated adoption of world state.
Selected responsibilities, not an execution order. Agency owns NPC choice; the player always owns protagonist choice.
What makes the structure matter
Memory is state.
Not prompt length.
A fact, someone’s knowledge of it, and the words describing it are different things.
Prepared inputs and stable request identities guard against repeated effects. A completed purchase does not become unpaid because the next paragraph changes. A narrator cannot grant knowledge just by mentioning a private fact.
Committed state is preserved through the save system. Chronicle separately records qualifying history; it is not a transcript pretending to be the world.
Paradigm remains in active development. These foundations connect one turn to the next, and one ordinary decision to the life that follows.
Follow the bakery’s price change