An AI RPG that tracks stats for real, not decoratively
An AI RPG that tracks stats for real keeps every number itself and makes the narrator read it before speaking about it. An AI RPG that tracks stats decoratively shows you a character sheet while the model narrates your health from memory. The two look identical in a screenshot and play completely differently by the second session, because narrated numbers drift: gold inflates, and the sword you dropped is somehow back on your hip. If the storyteller is allowed to say a number it did not read, the sheet is set dressing.
We build Branching Skies, a mobile AI RPG. The rule underneath everything in this post is one sentence long: the narrator never announces a change to your health, coin, inventory, or experience unless the game actually made it first. Below is what that rule buys, and a five-minute test you can run on any app in the category.
Why do stats drift in AI story games?
Because a language model re-derives numbers instead of reading them. Your health exists as scattered mentions across the transcript, and each turn the model rebuilds a figure from whatever mentions it can still see. That is arithmetic over a long, partly visible history, which models do badly. Players build the workaround in public: hand-rolled trackers and spreadsheets kept open next to the game to hold the numbers the game keeps fumbling. The spreadsheet is the confession: the player built the part the product skipped.
We made the opposite choice, the same one behind why our worlds remember your story at all: the game keeps the numbers, and the model never does.
What does it mean for a number to be real?
It means the number has one home and one door. The game keeps your health, mana, coin, and experience, and only the game changes them, when damage lands or a payment goes through. Algus, our narrator, reads the current values and narrates within them. When he tells you the fight left you badly hurt, the damage has already been applied.
The discipline sounds obvious and is rare in this category, because it takes the most convenient tool away from the model. An improvising storyteller loves to round your gold up and gift you gear the scene made convenient. Ours is not allowed to: if the game did not make a change, the change did not happen, however confidently it was phrased. The same split decides whether your choices leave permanent marks.
What about money and inventory?
Money is where decorative tracking dies fastest, so we built it hardest. Every shop and tavern in Syrinway carries written prices, authored into the world's files, and a drink costs what that particular place charges. Your purse holds a real number, and only a payment moves it. Your pack has a size, so carrying everything is not an option forever. Each item records its history, including whether you bought it or took it off somebody, which matters in a world where people remember what you did.
And there is one promise we are particularly attached to: the story cannot hand you something you did not pay for. A storyteller left to its own devices will cheerfully give you a free sword, so the game refuses any item that skips payment. We keep checking that it holds every time the game changes.
What does the character sheet actually show?
The same numbers the story runs on. The Sheet tab in our development builds shows your health, mana, and level from the same values the narrator reads, so the sheet and the story agree. For a while ours was not this honest. Early on, the pools shown were placeholders while the real values ran underneath, and the sheet even showed an internal class code where it should have said Spellcaster. We fixed both the same week the sheet went live on real data, because a sheet that is wrong in small ways teaches you not to trust it in large ones.
The five-minute test for any AI RPG: ask for your exact health, play two scenes, ask again, and check the answers agree with the events between. Then buy something and watch whether the price matches the menu and your purse moves by exactly that amount. Most products fail on the first purchase, and the usual ways it goes wrong are in why your AI RPG charged you twice. The ones that pass are running on real numbers, which is the first thing our buyer's guide looks for and the same property that decides whether a companion fights with its actual abilities.
Where this is heading
Branching Skies is a curated, mobile-native AI RPG set in Syrinway, a world we ran as a homebrew tabletop campaign for close to a decade before writing a line of code. Everything above is working in our development builds today, from menu-exact prices to the Sheet tab, and the examples come from our own play. The early beta list is open now. If you want a campaign where the numbers are load-bearing, the form below is where it starts.