Each phase ends with an honest go/no-go — not because a calendar arrived, but because the exit criteria did. What follows is what's locked now, what's next, and what each phase has to prove before the next one starts.
Art, palette, and visual language lock. No gameplay code until the look and feel pass review on Apple TV 4K.
A still frame of the overworld at Dawnwash reads correctly on a TV from across a living room. The three Mote Lineages can be told apart at gameplay distance. Performance holds under a crowded test scene.
One biome, one Mote, one combat loop, one settlement. Small, narrow, polished until it reads as Emberline — not a tech demo, not a prototype. Single-player first; the shared planet follows.
A full play session from forage to refine to build to fight to upgrade, without a crash, at a locked framerate on Apple TV 4K. An internal review confirms the feel is Emberline, not something else.
Multiplayer arrives. The first handmade dungeon opens. A second Vocation joins. Characters, claims, and what you build with others survive crashes and restarts.
Five hundred players can share a session without crashing the server. Data survives a deliberate mid-session restart with nothing lost. The dungeon and extraction loop holds together end-to-end.
The full planet comes online. A third Vocation completes the launch cohort. Additional biomes open. Guilds, trade, and structured PvP arrive. The single-shard promise — one planet, one clock, every player — has to hold under real load.
A sixty-player settlement event holds the framerate on Apple TV 4K. The economy stays stable across a month-long test. Moderation tooling resolves a test griefing incident inside fifteen minutes.
Final polish. Servers scaled for launch-week load. A day-one update and an emergency fallback both rehearsed. The ship gate is quality, not calendar.
No critical bugs. The emergency fallback has been rehearsed and completes inside the target window. Servers hold at three times projected launch load for eight hours straight. The Apple TV 4K build is certified and submitted to the App Store.
The calendar moves when the work demands it. The standard doesn't.