ArcoMage

We can finally say it out loud, and we have the email to prove it: ArcoMage has been accepted into the PlayStation Partner program. The spellbook duel is coming to console alongside the desktop and browser builds — same game, same hand-painted spells, one shared book that follows you across every platform you play on.

What this means for you: the Kickstarter isn't a bet on a game that might one day reach a real platform. It's already on the path to PlayStation, with the partnership signed and the build pipeline targeting console from day one. Your founder spellbook, your rank, and your dust carry across PC and PlayStation through the same account.

This is the single biggest validation the project has had, and it happened before the campaign even launched. We're grateful, we're a little stunned, and we're heads-down making the game worthy of the badge.

One of the three hardest problems in ArcoMage was never the art or the netcode — it was balance. A game with a few hundred hand-written spells has an astronomical number of interactions, and no human team can playtest them all. So we built an opponent that plays the game against itself, millions of times, with no graphics and no waiting.

This week it crossed a real threshold: the current neural-net snapshot now reliably beats its own older versions in headless self-play. That matters because the same engine that makes a tough single-player opponent is also the engine that auto-balances every spell. When a card is too strong, the AI discovers and exploits it long before a human would — and because every spell is defined as data, not buried in code, rebalancing is a one-line change the AI itself proposes.

Translation: ArcoMage gets more balanced the more it's played, not less. No power-creep, no dead cards, no “banned list.” Just a book that keeps getting fairer.

The full pool of Founder Portraits is finished — two dozen wizards spanning every school of magic, every walk of life, every temperament from hopeful apprentice to grim necromancer. Back at the Founder tier and one of these becomes your permanent in-game avatar, shown in the lobby, in-match, and on your forum profile.

Each was painted in our house style to sit alongside the spell art, then hand-cleaned for transparency so they drop cleanly onto any background. Here's the whole gallery — pick your favorite now, you'll be able to claim it at checkout:

Both our Discord server and Telegram channel are live. That's where the campaign actually breathes: daily dev updates, spell-design brainstorms (some of which have already made it into the book), playtest sign-ups, and first dibs on beta keys when they go out to backers ~3 months before public launch.

Come argue about whether Twin Cast is busted. Pull up a chair by the fire — the troll doesn't bite. Much.