Game Director David Sirlin talks about the ranked mode in Fantasy Strike. He covers the tournament structure that ranked mode uses, the team battle format of the gameplay, and the point system used to adjust your rank.
https://youtu.be/U3_QbZtTHfg

This update to Fantasy Strike is live right now.

This update is especially exciting for expert fighting game players. The highlights are:

• We’re unveiling our ranked mode.
  
  
• We’re unveiling a new feature never before seen in a fighting game: visual effects on every hit that tell you who will recover first and by how much.
  
  
• Our practice mode has always had dynamic frame data and frame step, but now it’s presented in a prettier, more clear way. Also the frame step mode can now be used by game controllers, and it can be accessed instantly, without even going into the menus.

Our ranked mode is unusual in that it uses a tournament structure, and the gameplay itself uses our team battle mode, which doesn’t work like team battle modes in other games. Here’s a video from our lead developer about the ranked mode.

Ranked play takes place in automated 8-person tournaments. The brackets are built on-the-fly so that it doesn’t slow down matchmaking. The matchmaking is not the usual “try to give you a 50-50 win rate” style. Instead, it’s like a tournament: you’re matched with a random player in your league, and if you win, you’re matched with someone else who won. If you win three times in row, you win that tournament. Each of those opponents is likely to be harder than the last, so there is an exciting texture to your opponents being more skilled as you, until you lose and reset to a new tournament.

The gameplay uses our team battle format. You pick a team of three characters and play a best 3 out of 5 series of games with your opponent. Each game, play a new randomly chosen matchup. You'll go through all your characters before repeating. Must win with all 3 of your characters to win the match!

The way this mode works ensures there’s a lot of variety. You'll play an even spread of many matchups, rather than playing only the most unfair matchups, which is how it would work a standard counter-pick system. In our team battle though, it’s not about counterpicks. You’re best off picking your three best characters and enjoying the wide variety of matchups you’ll play with them.

Our point system is as simple as our lifebars: you get 1, 2, or 3 stars for winning, depending on if that win was the first, second, or third round of the tournament. You lose a star when you lose a match, unless you’re in bronze league. And once you reach diamond league, you no longer get a star for winning the first round of a tournament (but you still lose one for losing), which makes it very difficult to rank up through diamond. If you do, you reach a special master league that ditches the star system entirely and just straight up shows your actual ranking amongst all other master league players.


Hold onto your hats because this is something that has never been in any fighting game before, ever. Really. Visual effects on every hit that show you if you recover first, or if your opponent does, and an idea of the magnitude too, based on how big the effect is. This is a very important concept in fighting games, but it's always been invisible until now.



You're likely to learn a lot by playing with these new effects. Try Setsuki's slide from far, medium, and close ranges. It's very safe / slightly safe / minus frames at those different distances. Valerie's B can be plus or minus frames depending on how you hit with it too. DeGrey's B -> A is very safe! His B -> B is really unsafe and his B -> C is unsafe too, but less-so. Now you can actually see all this all the time.

Here’s a few other examples of the frame advantage effects in action:

Attacks showing frame advantage
Projectiles showing frame advantage


Here’s the new display of frame data in practice mode:



Remember this dynamic frame data, meaning it’s computing the frame advantage on the fly, depending on exactly how you hit. The frame advantage numbers take into account if you hit early in your jump or late, if you hit with the very first active frames of an attack or the tail end, etc.

Also new in practice mode is a new UI for frame step mode that now allows controllers to use it. Just press L2 while in practice mode and the game will pause and turn frame step on. From here, you can press R2 to advance one frame, hold R2 to advance many frames continuously, and you can also hold various attack buttons, then press R2 in order to perfectly execute moves as you frame step. You can also do all this with keyboard, and default controls are listed at the top of the screen. You can change these buttons to anything else you want in button config, just switch to the “other controls” tab there to do it.


GRAVE

--Grave fireballs no longer go through the opponent when done from too close.

--Grave hold B fireball is no longer invulnerable at the end for no reason.

--Grave air super and ground super have real hitboxes now. This allows the ground super to occasionally armor break Midori’s Dragon’s C throw, rather than never. This situation won’t be fully fixed until Midori is upgraded to our new hitbox system.

--When Grave throws the opponent, his animation no longer slightly floats downward at the end.

--Grave has a new animation for throwing Rook specifically. Rook is extra heavy, so as a bit of polish, Grave struggles a little more when throwing him.

JAINA

--Jaina’s head hitbox is now marked as “high” rather than “mid” in all frames of all her ground moves. This is to make block/hit effects look correct. For example, when she blocks Rook’s thunderclap, the spark now appears correctly near her head rather than incorrectly by her knees.

--Jaina has a new animation for throwing Rook specifically. Rook is extra heavy, so as a bit of polish, Jaina struggles a little more when throwing him.

ROOK

--Jump forward/back A has a smaller vulnerable box on his feet, more how it used to be, so that he doesn’t have such a hard time jumping over projectiles.

--Air C has 14f more recovery when it doesn’t touch the opponent directly. This is because before, doing it over and over so quickly felt out of character for a big rock guy. If it knocks them down, the victim’s knockdown time is now 14f longer, so that the resulting situation is the same as before. (But if they jump to avoid the knockdown, Rook is more punishable now.)

--Thunderclap (back+A) now sucks in the victim a little bit, even from fullscreen. This changes quite a bit and especially helps him vs projectile characters. Also, there are new visual effects to convey this new property.

VALERIE

--Fixed a hitbox bug with the recovery of her ground super. She has some invulnerable frames there that are correctly marked with a white highlight, but she could have additional invulnerable frames for no reason in some cases. This fix makes it possible for DeGrey to block her super and hit back with his back+A ground punch, for example.

--Her neutral A doesn’t knock air opponents as high anymore. For a long time, she could hit air opponents with air A,A, then land and do neutral A, then threaten to cross-up or not with yellow (B). Then we fixed a bug with gravity on juggle hits a while ago that made this technique not work for her anymore. We’ve now specifically adjusted neutral A’s force against air opponents so the technique works again.

GEIGER

--Delayed Time Spiral (hold B) now has 7f more startup. While this is a nerf, the power level isn’t exactly the point. It’s more that in some matches, Geiger was better off doing the delayed version almost all the time, when it’s really supposed to be “sometimes”. Also, when his opponent guessed that he’d do the delayed version, it was a little too hard for some characters to actually hit him.

--When Geiger throws the opponent, he no longer slightly floats downward at the end.

--Geiger has a new animation for throwing Rook specifically. Rook is extra heavy, so as a bit of polish, Geiger struggles a little more when throwing him.

SETSUKI

--All setsuki’s moves have been updated to our new hitbox system. You might not notice, but this makes things subtly work better in various edge cases. Also, while we’re at it, priority is a lower on ground B’s first hit, and a little bit lower on divekicks and Flying Fox (air C).

--Super refill is now 11 seconds rather than about 9.25 seconds. This will slightly reduce how often she can do her standard 4-damage combo in an effort to at least barely bring down her power level.

--Air super’s invisibility now last much longer, 3.5 seconds -> 10 seconds. This helps the air super be useful enough that you’ll consider using it a little more, and also make it more realistic to sometimes parry a fullscreen projectile with it, specifically to activate the invisibility.

--Air B (kunai), the projectile itself can now be hit by strike attacks to destroy it. Keep in mind that trying to hit it will often not work because an attack’s vulnerable boxes might get hit before its attack boxes happen to overlap the kunai, but it is now at least possible to hit the kunai out of the air.

--The first of her B attack (when she’s invisible) no longer crosses up. It was never intentional that this move crossed up from close, and it was just too hard to reasonably block because of how fast it is and that she’s invisible during it.

--Fixed a bug where sometimes Setsuki’s upward trajectory Flying Move (the one you get when pressing C on the ground then C again) would sometimes wrongly come out while jumping.

DEGREY

--DeGrey’s clothes now move with cloth physics again. They used to do that, but an update to Unity ruined how it worked, then a later update to Unity has allowed us to add it back in, this time with a little better motion than before.

--When DeGrey successfully parries with his ground super, instead of instantly cutting to the cinematic where he hits you back, it now pauses with him highlighted green, so you can more clearly see the move he parried. This is how Grave and Setsuki's super parries work, so this change is just to make DeGrey's feel consistent with those (and it doesn't affect gameplay).

MIDORI

--Smoother animation transition when Midori goes from parrying an attack to his “I’m going to throw you” stance.

LUM

--Fixed a typo in the text that appears when you pick up Lum’s cake. Now says “+50% SUPER” rather than “+50 SUPER”.

ARGAGARG

--Using the B+C macro to pop the super bubble is now just as good as using the S button. Before, when coming out of the bubble summon animation you could instantly pop the bubble with S and also block, but if you used B+C in that situation you’d instantly pop the bubble but NOT block. Now, B+C to pop has two fixes that make blocking possible:

1) if you press B and C on almost but not exactly the same frame, whichever move you got one frame of will cancel, allowing you to block, and

2) if you press B+C and happen to hold the B (even just slightly), it will no longer cause the B fish to come out, ruining your block. Holding B usually makes a fish projectile come out at the earliest opportunity, but if the reason you’re holding B is specifically from a B+C super bubble pop, then it will not spit out a fish. (Release B and press or hold it again to spit a fish.)


--When your super meter fills up, there’s now a purple flash from your character’s eye to help you realize it happened.

--All characters now have footstep sounds. This is especially helpful for blind gamers, as the footsteps work with stereo sound.

--In survival mode, the “cruel 10” metal bosses now all have metal sound effects when you hit them, and it’s great.

--In the move list, the character name in the upper left is no longer way too huge accidentally.

--Going from "Solo" to the "Survival" submenu shows the screen fading in instead of instantly showing the new buttons.

--In survival mode, if you win a round by time out, you now get healed as usual.

--The survival VS screen (the one that has silhouettes on the right side) no longer accidentally shows particles of a character that isn’t even there, such as floating fire from Jaina or floating paint particles from Valerie.

--After manually quitting survival mode, you will no longer wrongly "resume" it after an online match.

--If you quit the tutorial when launching the game for the very first time since installing it, the main menu no longer fails to show a character.

--If you’re playing local versus mode, then you get an online match, the vs screen no longer sometimes wrongly shows characters from your local match as if they are the ones in the upcoming online match.

--When characters perform their win poses, they now do so from the center of the stage, rather than from wherever they were when they won. This prevents win pose animations from occasionally showing glitchy objects in front of characters when they were too near the edges of the stage when they won.

--When playing an online casual match, the versus screen now shows platform icons for each player (Steam is currently the only platform though).

--The armor break effect no longer makes hitpause shorter than usual on the victim (this was pretty noticeable for DeGrey’s B->B Tyrant Crusher.)

--Normal throw attempts no longer auto-correct their facing for no reason when you cross them up.

--Fixed a bug where the victim of a counterhit would be hit-paused for 1f longer than the attacker would be. Before, the frame data in practice mode didn’t match reality about who recovered first. The fix wasn’t to change the displayed frame data there though, it was effectively to make counterhit victims really recover 1f sooner (relative to the attacker) than before.

--AI characters are now a little better at jumping out of special throws.

Hey there Fantasy Strike fans! Today's the day! Tune in at 3pm EDT at https://www.twitch.tv/opnoobsonline to watch our live tournament hosted by Attila of E4i and... myself! We'll be doing Steam key giveaways during the tournament as well so come hang out with us!

Also, if you missed the signups for this tournament, we've already announced the next one on October 6th. Head over there to sign up now.

We'll see you out there!

Hey fans, Leontes here with a quick message:

You may have noticed a small update this morning for Fantasy Strike; that's because we've added Linux to the list of available platforms on Steam Early Access!

When we launch Fantasy Strike early next year, this brings the available platforms to Steam (PC, Mac and Linux), PS4, and Nintendo Switch. We can't wait to bring our game to as many new fans as possible, and we're sure you're all waiting for a way to play Fantasy Strike on your couch or on the go.

Thanks for following along with our development. We'll continue our track record of releasing new updates to the game every month (we've got some great stuff to show you soon!) so stay with us!

This update to Fantasy Strike is live on Steam right now.

We're issuing this update ahead of our regular schedule in order to fix several critical bugs. And while we're at it, you get a new beautiful stage and some new visual effects, too.


Here's Argagarg's Murkwood Marsh. We especially like the fireflies and fog effects. :)




When you get counterhit (hit out of the startup of an attack), it's now even more clear that the counterhit happened: your character flashes red in addition to the hitsparks looking different. (Last month we added special hitsparks for counterhits).

https://gfycat.com/CapitalOblongAphid

There are only a few moves that can break armor in the game: DeGrey's Tyrant Crusher (B -> B), Setsuki's Ninjaport Kick (B), Grave's ground super, and Jaina's ground super. When these moves hit a character in blue armored state, that armor breaks and the hits will really cause a hit reaction. Now, there's a visual effect and sound effect to go along with that

https://gfycat.com/ElderlySplendidFruitbat


Here are the bug fixes that we wanted to get to you as soon as possible:

--Fixed a bug introduced last patch with performance in menus. When launching the game, there would accidentally be useless 3D cameras doing nothing that reduces fps until you reached a score screen via survival or online play. Each time you restarted the game, the fps problem would return. Now fixed.

--Two patches ago, Unity introduced a bug in their engine that caused textures to become corrupted when you change the graphics quality settings. In our game, this caused buttons to have no text on them, and million other problems until the next time you restart the app. Unity issued a fix to this, which we incorporated into our game in the August update. Unfortunately, we now know that Unity's fix failed, as it only fixed the issue when running the editor that game developers use, not the builds that players use. Now, they have claim-fixed it again, this time in builds too, and we've incorporated that fix. So you can now change your graphics quality settings in the video options menu over and over to your heart's content.

--Last patch, we increased the game speed by 8%. Pretty much everyone likes this (yay), but it did introduce some bugs in frame data. One is that all blockstun values in the entire game were set incorrectly last patch. That said, the magnitude of error was very small in most cases, and happened to be very large in the case of Argagarg's blue fish (B button projectile). Blockstun values are now correct. Also, several moves ended up with "off by one" errors that accidentally made them too good relative to how they worked before. We have manually fixed these. In other words, "daylight savings for frame data is now over."


GRAVE
--Grave’s powered up big cloud (hold B while wind is blowing) now has the same 22f startup as the non-wind version, rather than accidentally being 2f faster.
--Fixed a bug where doing wind summon (air C) very close to the ground could result in your B and air B moves not getting powered up during the wind.
--When Grave's wind meter reaches full, there is now a sound effect that plays (suggested by a blind gamer).

JAINA
--Jaina’s chest hitbox is now marked as mid rather than high in her idle, walks, turn around, block animations. This affects the look of her pose while she blocks some attacks.
--Jaina’s ground super has correct hitboxes at the end, rather than missing them entirely.
--Level 1 B shot has 6f hitpause now, rather than 0. During this hitpause there is now just a slight screen shake. Also, the hitstun and blockstun by are 1 less now, meaning in total it causes 5f more stun now. Not for balance reasons, more for making it feel stronger. Balance is probably ok since she was really unsafe up close anyway.
--Air B freezes the opponent slightly longer on hit, for drama.
--All Jaina’s flame arrow shots now make the victim turn red in “on fire” state, since it seems like getting hit by a fire attack should do that.

ROOK
--Landslide (B attack) is back to -4f on block, the same as before the 8% speed increase, rather than -3f in the last patch. It was not intentional to make it -3f, and that’s a big difference since it became safe vs throws last patch.
--Rook's 3 frames of pre-jump animation now look correct. They were somehow missing before. This doesn't affect gameplay, just a cleaner look.

VALERIE
--Fixed a blockstun bug introduced in the last patch that caused Valerie’s air super disc to have blockstun so long that it was no longer possible to do mixups on an opponent blocking it (they would be stuck blocking it no matter what you did). Now back to the previous state where blockstun is very short, they can be mixed up, and they can do reversal attacks between the blocked hits too.
--During the startup of Valerie’s air super, the skin of her knees no longer penetrates her leggings.
--Her forward+A poke was accidentally +0f advantage time on block in the last patch. This was not intentional, and because that move has always been a little too spammy anyway, it now has more recovery, bringing it to -3f on block.

GEIGER
--Fixed a bug from our 8% speed increase that accidentally caused Geiger’s Time Stop super to have 13f too much recovery. Now it’s back down to 7f recovery, as was intended before.
--Fixed Geiger’s watch being misaligned (with his thumb sticking through it) during his win pose, yomi counter, and ground super startup.
--Fixed Geiger’s watch face so it’s no longer upside down whenever we see it. Also, separate from this, Geiger’s watch face is no longer incorrectly mirrored left/right when he’s on the p2 side.

SETSUKI
--B kick was accidentally made 2f too fast last patch, causing the two hits to combo much too easily. It’s now restored to its earlier combo-ability, where the two hits will combo if spaced correctly at max range, but will not just always combo no matter what. This accidental change made her way too good last patch, sorry.
--Ground super now prevents meter gain for the victim during the super’s animation, as other supers do.

MIDORI
--When Midori successfully parries an attack, he has always entered an “empowered” state where he glows yellow and will automatically throw at his first opportunity. Now, in addition to glowing yellow, he also visually changes stance. The new stance implies “I’m going to throw you!” so that it’s even more clear what’s going on.

https://gfycat.com/TediousYawningGalapagoshawk

--When Midori parries with C, he no longer has a glowing triangle of green on his sleeve for no reason.

LUM
--Lum's ground super once again hits on the same frame he loses his invuln, rather than hit on the last frame of the invuln. This was an error that resulted from the 8% speed increase last patch. Even though this bug only shifted the hitboxes by one frame, it made a massive difference (by giving him a real reversal that ALSO summons 4 items) and was much too strong.


--Fixed a crash when going to survival character select, then to daily challenge character select, then backing out twice.

--Character select screen: fixed “vs Everyone” portrait not being disabled correctly when starting an online match during a survival game.

--After playing survival, if you didn’t get to the end, the score screen now has buttons for retry / change character / done, rather than just “done”.

--Survival score screen: the buttons (retry / change character / done) now appear more quickly than before, so you can leave this screen more quickly if you want.

--Survival score screen: If you’re in the online queue, the "searching for match" box doesn't overlap the buttons anymore.

--Survival score screen: fixed alignment of title and FantasyTag names so the left edge lines up better with the word “Survival” above them.

--Survival: All hits now whiff during the locked-inputs transition to introduce a shadow boss. This way, the player isn't forced to getting hit by a stray projectile.

--Fixed Survival round win icons when you return from an online match that previously interrupted your survival progress. They’ll now show the correct round count.

--Fixed Survival wrongly showing wins amounts for each player on HUD after playing more than 1 consecutive game.

--The first metal boss in survival 10 now gets extra moves, like all the others.

--Fixed issue where Setsuki's air super VO "I'm Gone!" was not having Shadow/Metal Boss effects applied to it when she was a Shadow/Metal Boss.


--There are now sounds for entering and leaving the matchmaking queue.

--There's a new sound for when you lock in your character choice on character select (after costume color is chosen).

--Fixed a bug with pushback against cornered opponents. Pushback was accidentally slightly too much. An example is Geiger hitting with back+A kick, then after that trying to do a 2-hit combo of A, C. Midscreen, the A did combo to C. In the corner, the pushback was too much and the C whiffed, but now it works the same in the corner too.

--The team battle character select screen now has blank portraits on each side, showing that you will be picking 3 characters each.

--Fixed a bug on the team battle character select screen that could cause the outlines for character boxes to be too large and wrongly appear multiple times.

--Fixed a bug where weapons (Grave’s sword, Valerie’s paint brush) were visible and floating in the air for no reason at the end of DeGrey and Midori's win poses.

--The frame advantage display in practice mode now shows correct numbers when the opponent is hit out of the air. It used to be totally wrong in these cases.

--Minor improvements to Grave AI. He should now block meaty attacks more often (if at all), and has a chance to super against meaties. Mostly, he should now block more often, instead of just getting hit a lot.

--Minor optimization of the Master's Dojo stage. Estimated +1 fps compared to before.

--Major optimization of the Library of Justice stage. This affects low end graphics the most. On the "low" quality setting, estimated +20 fps compared to before.

--We have disabled several visual effects on the Liar's Lair casino stage. While they looked nice, their performance cost is mysteriously high. For now, we think you'd probably rather have the stage run well, so we'll temporarily remove them until we can figure out how to optimize them better. This change gives an estimated +20fps or more on the "high" quality, with similar or possibly more gains on lower settings.

--Organized the game options menus. Moved "Game HUD" and Event Mode to the "game" tab, and added a description of what Event Mode is. Moved "show FPS" to the video tab. Added a new "online" for online options.

--In practice mode, fixed and improved many things about the frame advantage display, which is the number showing +X or -X (the number of frames you recovery before your opponent, or after). This number was incorrect in all cases when the opponent was hit out of the air, now fixed. We didn't used to show any data at all for projectiles, now projectiles also show advantage time. When two hits trade (both hit each other), the numbers used to be incorrect, but are now fixed.

Hey there Fantasy Strike fans! We recently exhibited our game at the Evolution Championship Series in Las Vegas, Nevada. With the help of the talented Esteban Martinez (@thebesteban on Twitter) we've got another great recap video of our booth and tournament. Check it out!

https://youtu.be/8ZotDA-cvbo
As you can see, we had a fantastic turnout as usual and the game is looking better than ever. Sirlin made a flyer specifically to highlight all the improvements we’ve made since last Evo:



That’s a lot of new stuff! If you’ve been following along with our development, you’d know about most of these new modes and features, but it’s pretty crazy to look back at just how far we’ve come in just a year’s time. We’re getting closer and closer to the actual launch of the game, and at each showing we’re told that we’re looking more polished as the months go by.



Booth was pretty much this packed the entire weekend...



...and more packed as time went on.

Last year, we had some extra time in the booth to run two tournaments, both capped at 32 players. Juan Faria-Jones won the early tournament, and the late afternoon tournament had a fantastic grand finals of LordKnight (Prominent Anime FGC competitor) and Snake Eyez (Renowned Zangief player across multiple Street Fighter titles) with LordKnight’s Valerie play edging out Snake’s Rook.

This time, we decided to run one mega tournament at 2pm on Saturday. Before we knew it, we already had over 50 signups, and decided to cap the tournament at 64 so we wouldn’t be completely overrun (we only had 4 stations at the demo booth). Shortly after, we hit the 64-player cap and had a waitlist that would have resulted in 90 or so entrants!

Juan Faria-Jones (aka "FinalAbe") ended up winning the tournament, defending his title from last year. CIRCA Nicky took 2nd and Solacracy and Bio Billy Bones rounded out the rest of the top 4.



Here's 1st place Juan Faria-Jones and 2nd place Nicky posing with their bead sprite mains.

More about Nicky; he has been a fan of our game since he first played it last year at SoCal Regionals, competing in both of our tournaments there as well. He is one of the best Killer Instinct players and dabbles in other games like MKX, Injustice 2 and recently Tekken 7, so he’s an all-around fighting game player with lots of high-level competitive experience. He ended up winning Evo 2018’s Killer Instinct side tournament, and during his winner’s speech, he told the stream that Fantasy Strike had made him a much better KI player, and that they should all go play Fantasy Strike to practice good decision making and fundamentals. Thanks again for the endorsement, Nicky!




Here's Nicky falling in love with our game at SCR 2017.

Speaking of Killer Instinct, we decided to check in on some of the other side tournaments at Evo and found that we had more entrants for our Fantasy Strike tournament than Killer Instinct did. We applied to be an official side stage game at Evo this year but didn’t make the cut, but our tournament numbers this year give us hope that there’s a community out there that wants to see more Fantasy Strike events at major FGC events.  



Here's Sirlin teaching Woolie Madden of the Super Best Friends the latest Geiger tech.

A last note about release platforms. Right now, we're available on Steam and we're coming to PS4 and Switch early in 2019. In selling Steam keys at Evo, two moments stuck out to us. One was right after some players played an insane match of Lum vs Lum (random items everywhere!), they were all laughing and Sirlin said "How many Steam keys will that be?" Known they were checkmated by how much fun they had, they bought three. A bit later, there was a player who said his computer isn't good enough to run games, so a Steam key wouldn't help him, but he loved the game so much and wanted to support it that he bought TWO keys anyway. That was pretty heart-warming.

We hope you'll all help us spread the word, help run Fantasy Strike at your own local events, and generally grow the scene. By doing that, we'll be able to afford more content and features, which we'd love to do.

Thank you to everyone who stopped by our booth at Evo!

This update to Fantasy Strike is live on Steam right now.

We turned up the speed of the game, added four survival modes and a daily challenge mode, implemented lots more facial animations, new hit sparks for counterhits (when you hit someone out of their move), and lots more polish.




Get a little pep in your step: gameplay is now 8% faster. We have been testing this for a while internally, and with our patrons, and at the Evo tournament. People liked it, so there you go!




We now have multiple single-player modes, shown above. We added arcade mode's illustrated, voiced story intros and endings two months ago. Now there's survival and daily challenge as well, explained below.


There are now 4 survival game modes (up from zero, before). You can pick whether you'll fight a series 20, 35, or 50 opponents, or choose 10 "cruel" opponents who are extra strong.



In the first three survival modes, the opponents come at you rapid-fire. They have less life than usual, and when you defeat them, the next one instantly jumps in to fight you with no loading time or pauses at all. Every fifth opponent is a SHADOW BOSS. They have extra life, cool looking graphics, and sometimes extra moves and special properties.



The "10 cruel opponents" option has you fight a series of METAL BOSSES. All 10 opponents have extra health, extra moves, and special properties. Can you survive it?



These modes are difficult because you only get ONE lifebar. In other words, if you lose a single round, you lose the entire mode. You'll heal 1 hit point after defeating each opponent (or two hit points per metal boss), but it's still not much margin for error.

If you get to the end of a survival mode, you'll get  a crown icon under that mode, signifying your accomplishment. Can you collect all four crowns? (In the future, these crowns will be reset each season.)


This is a new mode that you can only play once per day. It's basically an endless version of survival, so get as far as you can. At the end, the score screen will tell you how well you did compared to everyone else who tried the mode in the last 24 hours. If you do really well or really badly, then you should probably post that on Twitter.



Facial Animations
We've added new facial animations to all characters except Grave and Jaina, who got lots of facial animation in last month's patch. This is most visible when they perform supers and yomi counters.


GRAVE
--Grave's charged fireball shows "KD~20" for hitstun, rather than just "KD", because it changes hit type throughout the move. (It knocks down during the first frame, then changes to grounded-push with 20 frames of hitstun.)

JAINA
--Removed a stray hitbox during her knee that was way at the top of the screen.
--Air C flame arrow has 6f landing recovery (rather than 2f like before) so that Rook has a better chance to Earthquake her.
--Fixed an animation glitch with air C that caused jaina to flicker briefly to a wrong position if she did the move while jumping back or forward (rather than straight up). This fix doesn’t affect gameplay, and just makes the air C animation look more correct at the end.
--After hitting with her ground super, the very end of her animation no longer instantly pops from her crouching to standing.

ROOK
--All his air moves are now upgraded to our new hitbox system. Also, his ground f+A kick was only halfway updated last time, and is now fully implemented in the new system too.
--The “earthquake” voice line during air C is said earlier in the move now so the timing makes more sense.
--Air C has slightly more recovery. In reviewing past builds, it seems to have been accidentally 2f shorter than we intended.
--Rook now has special sounds when he’s knocked down, which sound more rock-like.
--ALL of Rook's animations have been updated with new technical settings in our backend. They all look the same, generally, but this process fixed various small compression errors, cases of animations not perfectly lining up with each other, and cases where he slightly floated or wobbled here and there. These are mostly not things you'd consciously notice, but he might feel more "solid" overall now.

VALERIE
--Graphics for the B, B, f+B “yellow” attack now show the yellow paint trail lasting longer, to better convey how the hitbox works.
--Paint trail for neutral A is now aligned a bit better with the brush.
--Ground C rainbow now has less pushback, so that it works like it did a few months ago. Now (like back then), making Rook block B,B,C usually leaves you inside his throw range.
--All of Valerie’s moves are now upgraded to the our new hitboxes system. (Developer’s note: this takes an incredibly long time, we hope you enjoy the intangibly more solid feel it all has, or maybe you won’t notice). Some attacks are slightly stronger or weaker, but not for balance reason, just for the sake of hitboxes making more sense overall. For example:

--air C no longer crosses up and hits later rather than before the paintbrush really touches you.
--B,B, neutral+B (or A, then neutral+B) no longer has a hitbox way behind her for no reason. Also, the hitbox of her actual attack in front of her extends farther forward, to where it looks like it would be.
--The attack boxes for B,B now extend farther than before to better match the graphics (this is the most significant change gameplay-wise).
--The first hit of Jump A is not longer as good as a crossup.
--The second hit of ground A,A hits how it used to, but in addition to that, is capable of hitting a bit higher up so you could conceivably use it as anti-air if you managed to time the second hit correctly.

SETSUKI
--The first hit of her B teleport dash now has new visual effects that tell you it’s a hit at all, and it is now vulnerable during the 7f during which that first hit is active, rather than totally invulnerable. (The periods where she’s invisible before and after the first hit are still totally invulnerable.) This move being a completely invulnerable hit has been a little too noob-crushing and is often pretty hard to counter at the expert level either with some characters, so this gives it some counter-play. It is still very good, and a bit more readable what’s happening.
--The recovery of her hold-B throw whiff no longer slides around for no reason.
--Setsuki’s pushboxes are wider during idle, walks, blocks so that at point blank, Grave’s B and f+A do not miss her by hitting past her.

GEIGER
--Better-looking animation for neutral A punch (no gameplay change).
--During the Time Stop super, Geiger no longer becomes vulnerable 2f before the cinematic ends. (He's still vulnerable during the short recovery after it ends.)

DEGREY
--The ghost no longer destroys Argagarg’s air super fish or Geiger’s air super gear (because it looked stupid).
--The very end of his win pose no longer has a camera-wobble.
--The frame data display for DeGrey's counter-hit bA (ground punch) in practice mode now says "KD" instead of "+4c" in the case where it counter-hits because on counter-hit, the move really does knock down.
--When you highlight DeGrey on the arcade or casual online character select screen, the lower left corner of the screen no longer shows part of the ghost’s dress for no reason.
--Fixed up the animation for neutral A punch so that it doesn’t slide, float, or wobble.

MIDORI
--The very end of the Dragon’s win pose no longer has a camera-wobble.
--In practice mode, fixed a bug that caused Dragon Form to instantly end when you went into it.
--Temporary fix to Dragon’s C grab pushboxes so that the move doesn’t whiff vs idle Geiger. These hitboxes will all be replaced for real later.
--New Dragon voice over for "Dragonbuster!" and "Talon Swoop!".  More intense.

ARGAGARG
--Back+A punch, startup reduced 7f -> 5f so he has a better chance of hitting Setsuki’s divekicks.
--The very end of his win pose no longer has a camera-wobble.
--Goldfish (C then C) now has a sound effect.
--Polished numerous reaction animations for Argagarg specifically. That is, when Argagarg reacts to getting hit by various cinematic moves, such as supers, yomi counters, and throws, he now looks and moves better. 

--Fixed an issue on the left side of the Fox’s Den stage where some moves (such as the Dragon’s air C or ground C toward the left) that move the camera would show a large black object blocking part of the scene.
--Added environmental sounds to Tavern, Fox’s Den, and Wall of Truth stages.

--When you get a counterhit (hit the opponent out of the startup of their move), the hit sparks are now different looking and reddish, so you can better tell that the counterhit happened. This video shows two normal hits (yellow sparks), followed by two counterhits (bigger, orange sparks):

https://gfycat.com/TerribleCoarseHammerkop

--In the menus, characters appear with a visual effect of whitish light rather than instantly appearing (for example, when you highlight different characters on the arcade mode character select screen).

--Main menu has a link to our discord chat (now that we finally have a human-readable URL for it.)

--Incorporated Unity's fix to controllers on Mac. Last month, Unity broke all functionality of using game controllers on the Mac OS version of the engine, and that problem is now fixed.

--Incorporated Unity's fix to changing graphics quality settings. Last month, Unity introduced a new bug in their engine that caused graphics to become corrupted whenever users changed the graphics quality settings in-game, and that problem is now fixed.

--Fixed an issue on some graphics hardware that caused horizontal black lines to appear sometimes, especially when the camera moves to different angles (during supers, yomi counters, etc). We are unsure if there is a performance hit or not for this change. To test it, go to options -> debug options, then change the setting for "ambient occlusion downsample". If that is set to "always off" the issue of the horizontal lines should be fixed. If you set it to "always on," check if you get better fps and please report this to us. An intermediate setting is "off (cinematics only)" which means during cinematics (whenever the camera moves its angle) then the problem of stray lines is fixed, but during the regular gameplay cam you might still see this artifact sometimes. We're very interested in hearing how these settings affect you.

--When you face Lum in arcade mode, it’s now on the Liar’s Lair stage.

--Fixed a bug in online matches that could give you the wrong opponent if you were in the matchmaking queue and then did a friend challenge.

--Fixed an off-by-1f error in the frame advantage display for moves that secretly contain multiple animation files, such as Midori ground B, Dragon ground B, and Lum ground B.

--In the tutorial, it’s no longer possible to “kill” Midori with throws during the block damage task.

--In keyboard mode, on the arcade and quickmatch character select screen, the “costume” button no longer has a stray outline and now works correctly in mouseover state.

--Fixed a bug where the “searching for opponent” box that appears on the bottom of the screen during gameplay (while you’re in the online queue) would wrongly stay on the screen in menus. In menus, there’s a different “searching for opponent” box at the top, and the game was wrongly showing both at once.

--Removed the swords icon from "You have X friend requests" notification. (The swords are only for a challenge to play, not for friend requests.)

--Fixed a bug where the game showed the wrong costume colors for your character if you played a character online, then happened to see that same character on the next time you went to the main menu.

--Fixed a bug that caused the lighting on characters to pop to a slightly wrong state during cinematics on some stages. For example, Geiger's Time Stop super on the Tavern stage showed this wrong lighting during the startup of the super, but is now fixed.

This update to Fantasy Strike is live on Steam right now.

We have an exciting update this month for explaining how the game works! Here are a few highlights:

• An interactive tutorial that teaches the basic workings of the game.
  
• Tutorial videos for every character are in the game itself.
  
• A new stage.
  
• Better performance on Mac computers.
  
• A lot of bug fixes and bits of polish added here and there.

The tutorial explains the basics, so if you've never played a fighting game before, you will learn what's going on.

If you're familiar with fighting games, the tutorial is still helpful because it explains things unique to Fantasy Strike, such as how block damage works, how yomi counters work, and details of some of Grave's moves like the interaction between his wind and other moves.

The tutorial is short, only 5 minutes to complete it.

It's all action. The first moment it starts, you can immediately move your character. There is no loading time during the tutorial to reach other sections; it all flows continuously.



All characters now have "spotlight videos" in the game itself. These videos explain the workings of the moves and tips on how to play them all. There's a lot of nuances you might not realize about Fantasy Strike, so these videos help you get a bit deeper into the game.

We went out of our way to make an exciting screen to display all these videos. It's as if you're using a video streaming service and each character has their own tv show.

The videos themselves show old, out-of-date graphics. We know this and we plan to replace all video footage with final graphics just before release. The actual information should be correct still. If you find any information that's out of date in these videos, please let us know about it in the forums (bug report section would be best), so that we can fix that when we update all the graphics.



Lum is a champion of the card game Pandante, and is a well-known patron of the Liar's Lair casino. The Liar's Lair is also featured on one of the cards in the human version of the game.

The Mac version of the game now uses Apple's "Metal" API. You might experience better performance overall on Macs.


GRAVE
--Grave now has facial animation on his moves, most noticeable during his yomi counter.
--Grave’s yomi counter against an opponent with flashing life from block damage now preserves that flashing life on the next hit point, as all other yomi counters do.

JAINA
--Jaina now has facial animation on all her moves, most noticeable during her ground super.
--Air C flame arrow falls 10f sooner so that her “f+A (knee), air C” loop has a bigger gap if you do it over and over. While it is intentional that her divekick, knee, and air C can be used as rushdown tools to give her a secondary plan apart from zoning, the timing of this loop made it a little too solid as a rushdown tool before.
--Knee’s hitbox extends down more so that it doesn’t whiff against Setsuki so much. That’s a bug fix rather than a “buff”, and has the counter-intuitive consequence that it’s actually slightly nerfed on block in some situations. The hitbox extending lower means it’s more likely to hit on the way up, rather than the way down, meaning Jaina will less often end up plus on block than before.
--Back+A kick recovers 1f sooner. When you block Grave’s sword, this kick is your only way to punish him at most ranges, but when you hit him with it, he could hit you back with his super. The kick being 1f less recovery prevents Grave from punishing her on hit.
--After hitting with Jaina's ground super, at the end the sound effect of the victim landing is now timed correctly.
--The ground recovery animation after doing an air B shot has been updated for smoothness of visuals, no gameplay change.
--Jaina no longer slightly wobbles up and down during her ground B shot, and her front foot no longer slides back incorrectly at the end. This same fix might remove small errors in this animation as well.

ROOK
--Fixed bug with Rook’s air C that was knocking the victim down a few frames before it landed. Knocks down 4f later now, to match last patch’s change of making it hang in the air 4f longer. Also, the last 4f before it lands were missing hitboxes last patch, now they are restored.
--Upgraded all of Rook’s ground moves to use our new hitbox system.

VALERIE
--Valerie’s ground super on hit or block (but not on whiff) used to have the recovery completely invulnerable for no reason. Now, the final hit of her super has some invulnerability whether it hits, is blocked, or whiff, and that invulnerability is marked with a white highlight and does not span the entire recovery.

SETSUKI
--Fixed a bug introduced last patch that caused Setsuki’s air super not to turn her invisible anymore after a successful parry. Now she does turn invisible.
--Fixed a different bug with the air super that was not correctly pausing the opponent during the cinematic after a successful parry.
--The last few frames of Setsuki's C->C ground recovery is no longer missing vulnerable hitboxes for no reason.

GEIGER
--Fixed the animation smear on his f+A poke so that the smear isn’t behind him for a few frames anymore.
--Air C now has voice for “Drop Gear”
--On the character select screen, when you pick Geiger, his watch now shows up as it’s supposed to, rather than being accidentally invisible.
--Geiger no longer slightly floats up and down at the end of all his animations while standing. This same fix might remove small errors in all his animations as well.
--Hold B (delayed Time Spiral) has a new visual effect for the time distortion.

DEGREY
--When DeGrey does a second Tyrant Crusher (B -> B) in a single combo, he says “Truth” for the first one and “Justice” for the second one.
--The last few frames of DeGrey's A,A second punch are no longer missing vulnerable hitboxes for no reason.

MIDORI
--Midori no longer slightly floats up and down at the end of all his animations while standing. This same fix might remove small errors in all his animations as well.

LUM
--Improved the alignment of yellow highlights on Lum’s hands and feet during air B.

ARGAGARG
--f+A really set to 12f startup now (4f faster than before so that it usually can punish a blocked Setsuki B kick).
--When Argagarg has Bubble Shield up, the bubble will now correctly follow his position during various cinematics. For example, it’s now in the right place during his yomi counter animation, when Rook throws him a normal / special / super throw, etc. (This has no gameplay effect.)
--Using the B+C macro to pop the bubble, rather than pressing S, now works correctly. Before, it could accidentally allow the summon of a new bubble (if your super meter was full) rather than pop the current bubble. Also, the B+C command now has the same few frames of leeway as all other macro commands, rather than accidentally requiring frame-perfect timing.
--Fixed Argagarg's winpose causing an animation-freeze on his opponent for a while on rematch.
--When Argagarg is reacts to getting hit, such as by yomi counters, supers, throws, etc, he used to have a technical error that caused his mouth to fold up into his head. This is now fixed in all his reaction animations.

We had to upgrade the Unity game engine to a newer version, and the engine itself has these two bugs. We're very sorry, but we must wait for Unity to fix them, as they are problems with the game engine itself, rather than our game code.

1. Game controllers no longer work at all on Macs (just keyboard controls work).
   
2. When you change the graphic quality settings in the video options between "High" and "Medium" or change it between "Low and Lowest," the graphics may become corrupted, and you'll have to restart the program to return to correct-looking graphics at your new quality setting.

We will do another update as soon as we can once Unity has fixed these problems.


--When you block an attack that can deal block damage (cause your life chunk to flash), the block spark now looks different. When you block an attack that actually causes you to lose a hit point from block damage, the block spark looks even more different and there is a now a sound effect for this kind of damage. Here's what it looks like:

https://gfycat.com/ReliableScholarlyBaiji

--In practice mode, your super meter now refills much faster after you use it. Also, the refill is now fills up the meter in a continuous way, rather than filling it up slowly to about 15% then suddenly jumping it to 100%.

--When you have Event Mode on, it now says "Event Mode" in the lower right corner. Event mode is accessible (to turn on or off) in the options menu under the debug tab. It's for running live events and makes the top item in the main menu be local play, instead of online play, and online play is removed while in Event Mode. It also adds a "demo" option to the main menu, where the CPU fights itself so that people walking by can see the game in action.

--Story art in arcade mode: Added visual effects to the swamp in Argagarg’s intro.

--Story art in arcade mode: Added paint splotch effects to Valerie’s intro, third scene.

--All sounds now play in full stereo rather than “partial stereo” whenever the camera changes angles. That includes the startups of super moves, victory poses, yomi counters, etc.

--Fixed an issue with the “fullscreen” option in video settings. Before, on 16:10 monitors it would fail to offer any resolution choices other than 640x480.

--Fixed a rare crash that could happen during rollbacks online.

--When you login, if you have more than one friend request pending, you no longer get a separate notification for each one, one-by-one. Instead you just get one message (with no sound) telling you that you have 37 friend requests, or whatever.

--If you’re not a Steam friend with a user, but you are a friend in-game with them, it is not possible to message them through steam. In this case, we no longer have the “message” option in the dropdown box when you click on them. Before, that option would lead to a buggy, useless Steam message to “unknown user.”

--When you click on any user’s name anywhere in the friends list (such as in the “friends” tab, recent opponents, friend search results, etc) you now have the option to see their Steam profile in the dropdown menu. If you want to message them, you can add them as a Steam friend through Steam’s U and then do so.

--Fixed a spectator bug that would occasionally give you a black screen instead of actually spectating if a player was Midori.

--Spectators can no longer click any buttons on the rematch screen.

--Fixed a bug that caused your character to attack the wrong direction if after you get crossed up if your move happened immediately after your blockstun ended.

--Fixed a bug during the first frame of super flashes (where the game briefly pauses) that used to allow the opponent’s character to sometimes do a move at full speed during this pause.

--When you accept a friend request, the pause menu no longer wrongly still shows that you have that request waiting.

--Environmental sounds for each stage no longer wrongly play during the vs screen before a match. They now start playing when you actually see the stage, after the vs screen is finished.

--In arcade mode, CPU DeGrey now appears on the Library of Justice stage.

--Library of Justice stage: visual effects such as Grave’s cloud projectile are no longer overly dark on this stage.

--Snowy Mountains stage: slight improvement to how the stage looks when shown at odd angles during win poses.

--On the button config screen, if you're using a controller and have a game function highlighted such that hitting the circle button will set that function to be circle, the help text at the bottom no longer wrongly says that pressing circle will back out of the screen.

Argagarg Garg is a wise and patient fish-folk who uses water magic. He is known for his pacifist beliefs. Learn about his gameplay in this video.

You can find our other character spotlight videos here

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vHqSgX2GsNg