A Letter About the Vision

A Letter About the Vision

Hey everyone,

I want to talk about what Low Magic, They Said! is today, and what it is going to be. This is less of a patch note and more of a conversation, so settle in.

Where This Game Comes From

I have been a gamer my whole life. Across consoles, PCs, card games, board games, in every country I ever lived in, games are where I kept finding the feeling I wanted more of. And a lot of the time, when a game really hooked me, I walked away wishing it had gone further. More depth. More secrets. More reasons to come back.

LMTS is me trying to give that back. I want there to be at least one game where the player never has to feel that. Where the moment you think you have seen what it is, it shows you something else underneath.

That has been the goal from day one. Everything I have built is in service of it.

What You Are Playing Right Now

The game that is live today is roughly the first third of the vision.

Act 1 is the most familiar piece. If you have played a deckbuilder before, you will recognize the shape of it. Procedural maps, runs that escalate, deckbuilding, relics, bosses, a growing roster of unlocks. On top of that sits the town, the Heritage system, World Prestige, temple magic on your weapon, and a lot of systems that quietly interact with each other once you start digging. One class is playable. Many bosses, events, and relics are in. The core loop is complete and it stands on its own.

That is a real game. It is also a foundation.

Why the Berserker Comes First

This is intentional, and I want to be upfront about it.

The Berserker is designed to be the calm entry point. He plays close to what you would expect from this genre, because that is the job he is doing. He is there to teach you the rules of the world, to let you learn the town, the magic system, the Heritages, World Prestige, all the systems you will be using for the rest of the game, without also asking you to learn a brand new combat philosophy at the same time.

If you have played the game so far and thought "this is solid but it feels pretty familiar" — that is by design. Act 1 with the Berserker is the on-ramp.

The Illusionist and the Ninja are the other side of that philosophy. They are not variations on the Berserker. They are not "the same game with different cards." They are built to make you sit up and go"wait, you can do that in this genre?"I have shared a little about them already — time manipulation, mirror images, enemy intent manipulation, assassination of NPCs with permanent consequences across your save. There is more I am not ready to show yet, but I expect some heads to turn when it lands.

If you are on the fence about whether this game is for you, the honest answer is: what you are seeing now is the approachable version. The full vision is substantially weirder and more ambitious.

One of Each, On Purpose

I want to be very clear about something, because I do not want anyone to misread what is in the game right now.

What you are playing is one class, one act, and a sample of everything else — bosses, elites, enemies, cards, relics, events, dungeons, locations. One of each, broadly speaking. Not because I ran out of ideas. Because I was proving the concept. Note on acts before we continue: You still have the full map with the three sections each with a town and a dungeon and two unique biomes (adds up to 9 unique biomes in the game right now) as acts in this game are tied to the story and not where you are on the map.

Every system in this game had to be built from scratch and then stress-tested. Does the combat engine hold up under weird card interactions? Does the boss framework support the variety I want? Does the event system scale? Does the relic pool stay interesting when it triples in size? You cannot answer any of those questions with a spreadsheet. You have to build one of each, run it through the grinder, and see what breaks.

That is what the current build is. It is the proof that the machine works.

From here, the multiplier kicks in. More bosses. More elites. More enemies. More cards. More relics. More events. More locations. More dungeons. More secrets. Everything you come to love about games in this genre, multiplied — because the foundations are in place and the bottleneck is no longer "can we build it," it is "how much do we build."

This is the opposite of the approach where a developer ships the bare minimum and calls it a day. I deliberately held back content so I could make sure the skeleton could carry it. Now that I know it can, the content phase begins in earnest.

Where It Is Going

I am going to describe this carefully, because the biggest reason for this letter is that I do not want to spoil what is coming. The discoveries are the game. If I tell you what Act 2 is actually about, I have stolen something from you before you ever get to find it.

So I will stick to the shape of it.

Act 1 is the part that looks like a roguelike deckbuilder. You learn the rules, you build your town, you fight your way through a world that is mostly what it appears to be. Mostly.

Act 2 is where the game stops being what you thought it was. Things you encountered in Act 1 — systems you took for granted, characters you trusted, rules you assumed were stable — several of them turn out to have been something else all along. New threats become reachable. New questions become askable. The deckbuilder you thought you were playing gets reframed.

Act 3 is the payoff. Everything you built, everything you earned, everything you spent, all of it starts to matter in ways I will not describe here. There is an ending. There are also endings you will not find unless you have been paying attention across many runs, many classes, many worlds.

The long-term vision is 20 classes, each with their own magic system, and the ability to share that magic across classes as you unlock them. Class stories are interconnected — what you do in one class's arc affects what is available in another. Some secrets require solving problems across multiple campaigns before they open in your own. The game is built to reward players who keep coming back for years, not weekends.

That is the scope. I am not going to pretend it is small.

About the Delay, and Why I Feel Good About Where We Are

Some of you noticed the Early Access release slipped from April 13th to April 18th. I want to be straight about what happened there, because it actually matters for everything else in this letter.

The delay was not a content problem. It was caused by foundational systems and configs that needed to be in place to support the classes coming next. That forced a platform upgrade, which cascaded into a pile of smaller issues, which took a few extra days to work through. Annoying in the moment. But it left the project in a significantly better state than if we had shipped on the 13th.

Here is why I bring it up: the hard architectural work is done now. The combat engine, the card and relic systems, the save system, the town, the Heritage system, the World Prestige scaling, the True Seeing layer, the campaign scaffolding, the boss templates, the event framework, the magic-on-weapon system — all of it is built. The Illusionist is almost done. The Ninja has come a long way. From here forward, the work is content on top of tools, not tools from scratch.

That is a different phase of a project, and it moves differently.

A Thank You, and a Request

The game launched in Early Access at $14.99 with a 10% launch discount, and that discount will stay in place throughout Early Access. If you are buying the game today, you are buying the first third of something much larger, and you are helping me get the rest of it built.

I am also actively looking into extra goodies for players who buy before full release — ways to acknowledge the people who took a chance on the game during this phase, when the vision is still proving itself out. I am not ready to announce specifics yet, but it is on my desk and I want the people who showed up early to feel that.

If you want to help beyond buying, here is what matters most, in order of how much it moves the needle for a solo dev:

• Wishlist the game if you have not yet. Wishlists are the single biggest signal Steam uses to show the game to new players.

• Leave a review once you have played enough to have an honest opinion. Positive, critical, whatever is true. Reviews are oxygen.

• Tell one person. One friend, one stream chat, one Reddit thread where it fits. Word of mouth does more for a game like this than any marketing I could afford.

• Come to the Discord. Tell me what you love, tell me what is broken, tell me what you want to see. I read everything.

One Last Thing

I started this project not knowing how to code. Every design decision in the game is mine, fought for and iterated on over and over. The game you are playing is the result of tens of thousands of hours of that, and the game you will be playing a year from now is going to be something I think very few people expect.

Thank you for being here for it.

— Eric