Phase 8 design is Owner-accepted. The repository is now in Phase 9 Godot vertical-slice development, delivered as separately playable increments. P9.1 implements the opening Company and first-Market preparation only. Battle, result/recovery, persistence, bulk final media, packaging and publishing remain frozen until their later Owner-authorized Goals.

Current Product Boundary

Generated run-bound Recruits with no fixed story protagonists
One active equipment slot per Recruit; item form controls eligibility rather than adding simultaneous slots
Individual run-scoped Recruit levels 1..10 with non-transferable XP
12 base, 24 advanced, and 6 hidden Professions; 36 mechanical Traits
320 equipment identities and 60 run-wide Artifacts
100 ordinary/elite enemies and 16 bosses across 8 Regions
15-25 hour first clear and 60+ hour mastery breadth
Landscape 16:9, premium cross-platform target, English and Simplified Chinese
2D Japanese hand-drawn presentation using modular Recruit assemblies, profession/equipment overlays, authored key poses, and readable silhouettes

The game may learn structural lessons from authorized private reference research, but its setting, characters, enemies, names, art, audio, UI, progression, formulas, and expression must be original.

Play The P9.1 Godot Runtime

Requires Godot 4.6.1.stable. From the repository root:

/Applications/Godot.app/Contents/MacOS/Godot --path runtime

The playable boundary is Contract/difficulty, stable four-Recruit inspection, exactly-two Company creation, separate Mael/Ilya hires, EQ-012 purchase and equip, one Party-order swap and the readiness receipt. P9.1 deliberately stops before battle. Simplified Chinese is the default; English, 100/130% text, reduced motion and mute controls are in the fixed top bar.

Review The Phase 7 Production UI Atlas

The owner-facing HTML in prototype/site/ is the current responsive landscape production UI atlas. It keeps all 50 page IDs directly inspectable, uses page-specific compositions instead of generic fallback cards, and reads the current authorities directly when the Gallery bundle is built. Simplified Chinese is the owner-facing default; English remains available from the language control. The complete 23-state first-play chain, its decision labels, consequences, controls, and the Screen Atlas summaries use native HTML text rather than generated lettering.

First play: inspect 23 states from Contract setup through two-of-four run creation, two separate Market hires, party ordering, risk, automatic battle, diagnosis, reward, equipment adaptation, casualty, and recovery.
Screen atlas: inspect exactly 50 current page/state IDs. Every ID has a page-specific composition plus loading/empty, error/confirmation, and interruption/return variants; there are no generic page fallbacks.
Regions: inspect all eight Region directions, encounter pressure, enemy identities, and two bosses per Region.
Catalogs: search 42 Professions, 36 Traits, 320 equipment items, 60 Artifacts, 100 ordinary/elite enemies, and 16 bosses. Recruit offers, Party, Roster, Equipment and loss/progression pages expose individual level plus the one current equipment item.
Reference map: compare 15 proven functional structures with the current original Aetherbound composition; no commercial media is embedded.
Review gates: open the seven critical Owner review groups and keep human comprehension, visual, fun, listening, and device approval separate from deterministic HTML checks.

The seventh group covers the concrete Guild Charter (Renown spends for breadth, never permanent combat power) and the final-boss decision between Complete the First Chronicle and Open the Oath Season. Both choices archive the cleared generated Company; Oath Season begins with a new generated run and ordinary New Run remains available.

Run it locally from the repository root:

python3 -m http.server 8766 --directory prototype/site

Then open http://127.0.0.1:8766. The published Artifact Gallery link is a disposable presentation copy; this repository remains the design authority.

Gallery publication must use the self-contained bundle because the Gallery viewer intentionally sandboxes HTML and may not forward its access cookie to relative CSS, JavaScript, JSON, or image requests:

python3 tools/build_gallery_bundle.py

The build command regenerates prototype/site/data/catalog.json, verifies the current exact counts and unique IDs, recursively embeds the UI candidate PNG and WebP assets, and writes the self-contained prototype/gallery/aetherbound-guild-prototype.html. Phase 7 browser verification is in prototype/site/verify-r7.js; it requires an already-provisioned Playwright Node module and Chrome, starts no external service, and writes ignored screenshots to a caller-selected evidence root. python3 tools/verify_ui_asset_provenance.py proves that all 34 character, equipment and VFX presentation copies are byte-identical to their recorded accepted candidate sources. python3 tools/verify_recruit_loadout_level_contract.py proves the Phase 7.1 one-item, individual-level contract and preserves all 320 equipment identities.

Evidence Boundary

The HTML is an interactive design prototype, not a playable build. Existing image boards are labeled concept direction only. The current one-line party, transactions, readable UI, stable IDs, and text are independently authored in HTML. Traceable character, equipment and VFX candidate images are present to show composition and scale, but none is a final runtime sprite, animation, Godot integration, device capture or human-approved result.

See docs/README.md for the complete authority map and docs/reviews/PRE_DEVELOPMENT_READINESS_AUDIT.md for the exact completed and open gates.