My Time at Evershine is developed by Pathea Games, the Chongqing studio behind the earlier My Time titles, and is the third mainline game in the series. It was announced in September 2024, crowdfunded the following month, and entered a closed backer alpha in October 2025. The announced release window is 2027 for PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and Nintendo Switch 2. This page tracks how the game has been built, drawing on the unusually steady stream of development posts Pathea has published since the announcement.
From Project ME to Evershine
Evershine began as someone else's idea. While the previous game was at the height of its development, a publisher approached Pathea about making a mobile game set in the My Time universe. Pathea agreed, and the project was named Project ME, short for "My Time in the Eufaula"; it was about developing the northern part of the desert beyond the previous game's setting. The publisher later made a strategic change of direction and dropped out, leaving the concepts without a home.
With the previous game wrapping up, Pathea folded some of Project ME's lore ideas into its next mainline entry instead. Because a mainline game is designed as a single playthrough rather than a live mobile product, the team says it "pretty much started from scratch." That restart became My Time at Evershine, with the player cast as a Governor founding a settlement rather than a Builder running a workshop.
Team and design goals
In October 2024 the studio said the Evershine team was approaching 80 members, a long way from the roughly ten people who started planning the first game in 2015. The same post laid out the design decisions made at the start of production: a main story about the length of the first game's, kept tight with no mandatory third act; a recruitment structure that varies sidequests depending on who the player brings to the settlement, with mainline characters fixed for everyone; co-op built into the single-player story from day one, an explicit lesson from the previous game's separate co-op client; and a deliberate effort to avoid what the team calls "expansionitis," the pile-up of mechanics and mini-games it felt bloated the earlier titles. The RPG side of the game is the stated priority.
On tone, the developers describe Evershine as keeping the series' positive energy while letting some character stories "get a bit dark," moving the writing from PG toward PG-10/13 territory with no cursing. A May 2026 post put the ceiling differently: the romance system will include "everything we can get away with in a game rated T by the ESRB," confirming the target rating. Members of the studio's writing team have been named in official posts: Yang, Feng, Fei, Peck, Venti, Lando, and Bamna.
Crowdfunding
The crowdfunding campaign of September and October 2024 shaped both scope and schedule. It raised over $2.9 million against a $200,000 goal, funded a ladder of planned features from body customization to swimming, and locked in one structural decision: at the $2.5 million milestone, Pathea committed to skipping Early Access and going from a backer-only alpha playtest straight to a full launch.
The art-direction overhaul
Evershine looks different from its predecessors on purpose. Early in development the project still used the previous games' stylized proportions. As an experiment, the director had artists stretch the character Avery to a normal height and ratio with added detail, loved the result, and pushed the change through for everything, accepting the cost of redoing environmental assets at higher quality (the studio notes it also ran surveys and research before committing). The team first tried a five-head body ratio, and the design that finally stuck came from Qin, the character designer on both earlier games.
The modeling side took longer. The character modeling department spent two to three months adjusting to realistic proportions, and the model that finally satisfied the team, for the new character Freya, was made by the studio's former lead terrain editor from Planet Explorers, an earlier Pathea game, who had prior experience with realistic characters. Animation was rebuilt around motion capture, replacing legacy animation from the previous game, with a stated quality target close to big-budget action RPGs. Hair proved the most expensive lesson: the approach shown during the campaign fell apart under close-up cameras, so the team rebuilt hair from scratch using hair cards, reconstructing materials, strand grouping, and dynamic behavior, at a cost the studio says ballooned to several times the original budget.
The same framework rebuild enabled player body customization, a campaign stretch goal that the studio says was impossible in the earlier games' pipelines. An April 2026 post showed the implementation: a skeleton-binding system allowing height and size changes of about 15% up or down from the default, with hands and feet excluded from scaling and clipping fixes still in progress. The post also showed dynamic weather running in the development build.
The gameplay loop rework
In September 2025, Pathea published an unusually frank post explaining why the first backer build had not shipped. The original design paired personal RPG progression with a strategy layer of settlement stats, and when the separately developed parts were combined into one build at the end of 2024, the result was, in the team's words, a mess. The two halves fought each other: the RPG side pushed the player out into the field while the strategy side wanted them home, the story demanded linear beats the strategy layer did not need, and tracking follower stats in third person annoyed everyone, the team joking that nobody wanted to care about a companion being hungry for the sixth time.
Rather than patch over the conflict, the team spent roughly ten months reworking the loop, simplifying the strategy systems and tilting the game toward open-world exploration and RPG play. The main story was tweaked to match, with some characters gaining importance and others losing it. The rework delayed the alpha, which opened the following month, though the studio says systems, character stories, and art assets kept moving throughout.
A March 2026 devlog described where the loop landed: Production, Trade, Money, Town Upgrades, and back to more Production, with the building system and settlement growth as the spine of the experience.
Devlogs and the road to 2027
Pathea has posted continuously since the September 2024 announcement: 33 posts on the game's storefront news feed by June 2026, plus 82 campaign updates. The material covers recruitment design, multiplayer, building, in-world lore dispatches, and a run of monthly devlogs through the spring of 2026 on construction, art, and the dating system. That cadence makes Evershine one of the better-documented unreleased games around, and most of this wiki's sourcing traces back to those posts.
In June 2026 the game appeared at a summer industry showcase with a new trailer and a booth at a platform holder's in-person event. The accompanying announcements confirmed the 2027 release window and named Nintendo Switch 2 as the fourth platform, firming up what the campaign had only been able to call the next-generation Nintendo console. No engine, official system requirements, or pricing have been announced; the hardware recommendation attached to the alpha playtest applies only to that test build.