Astra arrived. Public Alpha is close.

Last time I posted, I was still waiting for Astra to appear in my Codex model list and wondering what it would do with Sylvia.

It has accelerated things significantly. We have now finished the focused testing, and I am running an end-to-end test through a six-act campaign. Once that passes, it is time for the final cleanup and checks for Public Alpha.

Currently in Act 2. Still a fair bit of campaign to get through.

The thing I want to verify is whether Sylvia can keep a longer campaign coherent and on-track without forcing the player through every prepared event. That has been part of the reason for building this from the start. I want a GM with a Campaign Plan that it can actually use, while still leaving room for the player to do something the Plan did not anticipate.

In the previous post, I wrote about the GM reading the Campaign Plan too literally. Prepared events were being treated as though they were already happening. A future encounter being written down is useful information for the GM, but it should still need a reason to happen in the current game.

That becomes more complicated as a campaign goes on. By the time you reach a later act, you may have changed the circumstances that an earlier version of the Plan assumed. The GM needs to work with those changes. If you have already dealt with a problem, it should stay dealt with. If you have taken a different route, the next part of the story needs to make sense given how you actually got there.

I still want the campaign to go somewhere. Having prepared material gives the GM something to develop over time, including things the player will not understand until later. But getting to those later parts needs to feel natural. I do not want Sylvia quietly undoing a decision because it would make the next planned scene easier to run.

This is why I want to finish the full six acts. The focused tests let us check particular behaviours and work through the problems they exposed. Now I need to see how those behaviours hold up together over a whole campaign. Something that was established early on may only become relevant again much later, when there is a lot more history for the GM to keep straight.

I am happy with how much faster development has moved. There is still the rest of this campaign to get through before I can say whether the whole thing holds up.

After that, the work is final cleanup and release checks. It will be a Public Alpha, with more work to follow, but I want people to be able to sit down and run a campaign with it.

Assuming the campaign test passes and the final checks do not turn up anything that needs to hold the release, I expect Sylvia GM's Public Alpha to be out by 4 October at the latest.