Game Update: December 2016

A new build of Fantasy Strike is available to our patrons on Patreon.

EDIT: now version v7361. (Was version v7350. See note at the end.)

This month we cleaned up a lot of our current content. Setsuki has a new character model that is much higher quality and matches her Yomi art better. (The fixes to the modeling of her shirt are especially improved.) Several characters had their placeholder hit reaction animations replaced, so they don’t slide and pop in glitchy ways when they get hit. We have new visual effects on more of Jaina’s moves as well as a new tech for exaggerating limbs on Rook. Midori’s Dojo stage looks even better now that it has more highlights and contrast as well as some effects. There are a few balance changes, the most fun of which is Setsuki’s ability to cancel her teleport kick (B button) with a super. Also try out Grave’s new, faster sword attack.

Here's old and new Setsuki:

And the old Midori's Dojo stage followed by the new one:

PlayStation 4
--We put in a lot of work making the game run properly on PlayStation 4, for the PlayStation Experience trade show. It generally ran well and maintained 60fps during the 19 hours of play at our booth. That said, we did experience some jittery framerate and sudden frame skips after it had been running a while, so we had to restart the build every so often to get back to non-jittery framerate.
--After the show, we investigated the problem and found a memory leak that our game has probably had for a long time (on all platforms). We have now fixed this. We hope this allows the game to stay solid feeling even after hours of play. (But it needs more testing.)

GRAVE
--Air super has new animation.
--All of Grave’s hit reactions are now animated for real.
--Fixed a bug that made Grave’s big fireball during wind play a successful-hit sound even when it didn’t hit.
--Grave’s sword (C button) is now 5 frames faster.
--Grave’s projectile (B button) no longer knocks down.

JAINA
--On the local versus and training mode character select screen, she now has fire effects on her bow and arrow.
--After firing a level 1, 2, or 3 arrow, her feet no longer slide around during recovery.
--Jaina’s fire arrows have new visual effects when they impact the opponent. This is for the level 1 ground arrow as well as the air B, C, and super arrows.
--When Jaina causes the victim’s body to be on fire, they effects are all new. This happens when she hits with a level 2 or level 3 arrow with the B button, or her Dragonheart C attack, or her ground super.
--New visual effects when the fire arrows hit the ground (from air super or air C)
--Flame arrows from air super and air C now form during startup instead of instantly popping into existence.
--New fire effects during her Dragonheart (C button) attack, including fire effects on Jaina herself at the end to hint that she takes damage.
--New dust visual effects on the ground during her back+A kick.
--New dust visual effects on the ground during her f+A knee.
--All of Jaina’s hit reactions are now animated for real.
--New visual effects for her ground super, including a corkscrew of fire and a fire dragon.

VALERIE
--Valerie f+A hitbox now extends into her body. This fixes a problem where she could get a “meaty attack” mid combo after air B because the first part of the f+A would whiff.
--Fixed an animation problem when she gets up from a knockdown. Before, when she appeared to be fully standing up, there were still many more frames of this pose that didn’t count as “fully standing up,” which made it very hard to time your attack to hit her right as she got up.

ROOK
--All of Rook’s hit reactions are now animated for real. This is a bigger improvement than for other characters because Rook’s placeholder animations had several technical problems where his body scrunched up or collapsed in on itself. His new hit reactions are animated just for him and make more sense for his size and weight.
--Improved his turn around animation (for example, from when someone jumps over him.)
--Rook’s air B now has a new animation where he spins around with his vines extended.
--New visual effects for Rook’s air B
--Thunderclap (back+A) no longer has a hitting zone above rook’s arms and head, so that the hitbox better matches the animation.
--Kick (forward+A) no longer has the hitboxes extending slightly beyond the tip of his foot (very small change).
--Rook’s ground super has way less range now. That said, the range is still really far (farther than his already very far normal throw). We think he probably doesn’t need that anymore as he has enough tools to get in, and a fast 3 damage throw that can’t be yomi countered is good even when it’s only “really far” rather than “3/4ths of the screen”. Also, the startup is slightly faster now, only 1 frame startup.
--Air C now has the statue tilted to the side a bit. (No gameplay change.)
--New dust effects on his kick (forward+A)
--New tech: we can now scale parts of characters during moves to exaggerate attacks. This is currently used by Rook’s b+A, A, f+A, and B attacks. Do you like it? (No gameplay change.)

SETSUKI
--Setsuki has a new character model. It fixes several technical and aesthetic problems of the previous version and better matches her Yomi art now.
--Adjusted all of Setsuki’s costume colors.
--All of Setsuki’s hit reactions are now animated for real.
--Fixed a bug that caused A-button kick done in neutral state to fail to combo to super if the super input used A+B (rather than the dedicated super button).
--Setsuki’s teleport kick (B button) now has bigger hitboxes so it can better hit jumpers.
--Setsuki’s teleport kick (B button) can now be cancelled into her super. If the kick hits, this allows her to combo into the super. If the kick was blocked, doing the super allows her to potentially be safe from retaliation.
--Setsuki’s slide (back+A) gives a couple more frames of hitstun and blockstun. It’s now barely possible to combo into f+A double palm. On counterhit, this is much easier so counterhit slide, f+A, super is possible as a combo.

GEIGER
--Fixed Geiger low punch (neutral A) causing the wrong hit reaction. It used to trigger a heavier hit reaction animation than intended. This doesn’t change frame stats.
--All of Geiger’s hit reactions are now animated for real.
--New main menu idle animation.

DEGREY
--Air super can be done much lower to the ground now.
--Pilebunker (B, then B again) now uses our new character scaling tech to make DeGrey’s fist bigger during this move. (No gameplay change.)

MIDORI
--Doing a yomi counter while in dragon form now resets your dragon form meter so that you can stay in dragon from longer, rather than instantly leaving dragon form. It was always supposed to do this.

STAGES
--Snow stage. Fixed a lighting issue on this stage that was slightly hurting the framerate.
--Dojo stage. New sunlight effects, dust-in-sunlight effects, and falling leaves.
--Dojo stage. More shading on the rocks. Better use of highlight / shading on the building. Highlights on on the grass too. Slight adjustments to the waterfall.

MISC
--Fixed bug where finishing a game of local versus would show the rematch menus partially off screen on resolutions larger than 1080p.
--Fixed a bug that accidentally removed the “crossup” message during gameplay in the last build.
--The keyboard buttons shown for each move in the move list are now your currently set buttons, rather than always the default buttons.
--Training mode now displays “S” rather than “AB” when you input a super.
--Fixed a bug that triggered if you landed a killing blow just as the timer hit zero. No longer causes the following round to end instantly(!).

EDIT: BUG FIX

We have done an emergency from version v7350 to v7361. The purpose of the update is to fix a bug that the grass on Midori's Dojo stage appear as large black rectangles on some computers. Please download new builds at the patreon link at the top of this post.

Though the black grass fix is the reason for the update, there also happen to be these changes too:

--Geiger Main menu animation changed so that he doesn't put his hands in his pockets.
--Removed the empty stage from the game (not the training stage, but the completely empty gray stage.)
--Fixed a bug that made Rook’s "blob shadow" way too small.
--Fixed bug where blob shadows weren’t correctly mirrored on p1 / p2 sides.
--Jaina's character select screen arrow rotated so the arrow's dragon head looks better.
--Fixed a bug when selecting Jaina, after she shoots her arrow when you confirm your selection of her, her next arrow instantly appeared instead of forming over time.
--Fixed big hands/feet being stuck big bug (e.g. when hit out of DeGrey’s pile bunker)
--Fixed rotation of Rook Air C on hit/block
--Fixed Rook’s Ground super reaction causing opponent to have and opened mouth after the super.

Game Update: November 2016

A new build of Fantasy Strike is available to our patrons on Patreon.

EDIT: now version 6963. (Was version 6956. See note at the end.)

In this build, we have a lot of new animations for Geiger, a lot more progress on Midori’s Dojo stage, a wider variety of sound effects, and more hitstop on almost every move to make the hits feel stronger. But the biggest advancement by far in this build is performance / framerate improvements.

BETTER FRAME RATE

When making performance improvements, there’s often a tradeoff of lowering graphics quality. Not this time! We focused on optimizations that have zero effect on how graphics look. So nothing looks worse, or even different, yet you’ll see a big boost in framerate. You don’t have to care about any of the details about how we did this, but here’s a few items of interest if you’re curious.

--Character shadows. Character shadows drawn on the ground do have a performance cost. We changed the way we draw these shadows (with no visual difference!) in such a way that it improves framerate by as much as 4 - 6 fps with this change alone.

--Blob shadows. When graphics quality is set to “lowest,” we used to show no character shadows at all, and that looks really bad. We now show “blob shadows” (kind of like in SF2, but a bit more advanced) and it has virtually zero performance cost. So it looks better and is no slower—actually much faster because of all the other unrelated performance improvements. Furthermore, when graphics quality is set to “low”, we now use blob shadows rather than full character shadows. This is the only case anywhere that we reduced graphics fidelity (and only on the “low” setting), but we believe that if you’re setting graphics to low, you’d probably rather have the increased framerate from blob shadows rather than even our newly-optimizied real shadows.

--Character lighting. We changed the way we use lights in the stage to light up our characters during gameplay. We were able to use one fewer light than before. Although this has no visual change at all (remaining lights now do exactly what the deleted light used to do anyway), this one change improved framerate by a staggering 9 - 12 fps on most machines.

--Character meshes. We changed the way we split up our character models into various mesh pieces for rendering. This does not change the way they look at all, but it gave us significant performance improvements. The amount of framerate improvement varies by character, and Jaina saw by far the most improvement. This is totally mind-blowing even to us, but this optimization improved framerates by *20* fps when she’s on screen. Yes, really. 20fps in our tests.

--Other optimizations. We did a few more optimizations too. The bottom line is that all characters on all stages and at all graphics quality settings should run faster than before. We hope you reach 60fps!

VSYNC
We’d also like to remind you about the vsync option. It’s in options -> debug options for now. Ideally, you set that to “on.” Setting it to off makes the game (and any video game with this setting) slightly more jittery with some screen tearing. But if you set it to “on,” framerates that are just below 60fps can round all the way down to 30fps, which is horrible. Try “on” and see if you get 60fps. If yes, then great. If no, then try “off”. Try to avoid playing at 30fps as it will feel bad.

MISC
--Hit stop increased by 3 frames on almost all moves. Hit stop is the short game-wide pause whenever a hit happens, and is separate from hitstun, which is the time that a victim is stunned from a hit. Hit stop makes hits feel more powerful.
--Lots of new sound effects for almost all characters. This includes lots of sounds for whiffs and whooshes that were silent before, as well as more variation on hits. Most hits sound more powerful now. These are still placeholder sounds.
--When you do a combo, the text message on-screen now says how much damage it did, in addition to how many hits.
--Mapping directions in button config is now done in this order: up, down, left, right
--Fixed a bug that allowed hits to work at the very beginning of throws, when they should not. For example, Geiger could time his delayed gear to hit at almost the same moment he did a throw and they would somehow combo, but shouldn’t.

GRAVE
--New pose/animations when he blocks attacks
--The hit spark when you hit with his sword attack now correctly renders in front of the victim.

JAINA
--Flame arrows have new visual effects. These effects now work better in 3D if we ever need her to shoot an arrow from a non-side view angle, such as (eventually) on the character select screen.
--Magical bow string made of fire now appears when she shoots an arrow.
--New pose/animations when she blocks attacks.

ROOK
--New pose/animations when he blocks attacks.
--C throw is now highlighted blue for super armor, rather than white for strike invuln. No functional change, but the highlight implying strike invulnerability was incorrect before.
--The hitspark when you hit with thunderclap and the hits of his ground super now correctly render in front of the victim.
--Ground super’s camera behavior has been revised to be smoother and much less jarring.

VALERIE
--New pose/animations when she blocks attacks.
--Yomi counter replaced with a new concept. Now paints a red “X”.

SETSUKI
--Slight polish on her animation when she lands from doing moves that have a ground recovery pose.
--Ground super updated. Now has blue trails, is much faster, and has animation tweaks to Setsuki and the victim.
--Air super updated. Makes more sense what’s happening now, but it’s still not complete.
--Polished turn around animation (when she turns from side to side, for example if someone jumps over her)
--New pose/animations when she blocks attacks.
--Fixed a bug with her hold-B special throw against a cornered opponent that could cause her to face the wrong way and whiff the throw when initiating it from point-blank range.

GEIGER
--A huge number of new animations for Geiger including: air super, jump forward, jump back, jump up, walk b, yomi counter, turn around, knockdown, getup, A (punch), f+A (backfist), and air B (adjusted pose). 
--Ground super and yomi counter now stop the game’s clock when they stop time.
--Jump A kick has smoother motion; it no longer sucks Geiger downward in the air when he does it.
--New pose/animations when he blocks attacks.

DEGREY
--Enhanced the physics of his cape (no gameplay effect).

MIDORI
--Fixed a bug where Midori’s parry would make his costume colors change to green, even when you were playing a different color Midori.

MIDORI DRAGON
--New character model for the dragon (it’s a higher resolution version of the previous model). The rendering style of the model is still not finished.
--Fixed a bug that made him appear mirrored incorrectly (left/right) after some reactions. (There could be other cases still in the game where he becomes incorrectly mirrored though.

STAGES
--Snow stage. Minor lighting adjustments.
--Tavern stage. Technical cleanup resulting in slightly better framerate with no visual difference.
--Dojo stage. We did a lot of work on this stage. Numerous improvements, much more built out than before. Waterfall, grass, rocks, dirt, lighting, and more have been improved. The lighting is overall slightly brighter, to convey that it’s a sunny happy day. Here's a pic of the dojo stage so far:

EDIT: BUG FIX

We have done an emergency from version 6956 to 6963. The purpose of the update is to fix a bug that made it impossible to map the d-pad/joystick for some controllers. Please download new builds at the patreon link at the top of this post.

Though the d-pad fix is the reason for the update, there also happen to be these changes too:

-- Adjusted Setsuki ground super to feel slightly slower (more hit pause on 1st/2nd hits), delayed final hit 1f, and also brought blue clones closer to her. We're still working on this.

-- Geiger's step kick (back+A) now causes hit reactions for getting hit lower on the body, so it makes more sense.

-- Fixed a bug where combo damage was still counted after hitting and armored move (e.g.: hit Rook during B special move, then after that move just combo him.)

-- Jaina's throw. Removed fire effects.

-- Dojo stage. More detailed modeling on the dojo's roof.

Podcast about Fantasy Strike

Sirlin and crew go into lots of detail about the design of Fantasy Strike, how it works, and what kind of gameplay results from the game mechanics. They also briefly discuss crowdfunding on Patreon and make the case why people should support the game there.

Listen to the podcast here.

This podcast is part of of the Sirlin on Game Design series, and you can find the rest of the episodes here.

PlayStation Experience 2016

We're exhibiting Fantasy Strike at the huge Sony PlayStation event in Anaheim, California on December 3rd and 4th, 2016. Come to our booth and check out the game!

Get tickets for the show.
List of Developers who will be at the show.

This is also our announcement that Fantasy Strike is headed to PlayStation 4. That said, it's a struggle for our small team to support more than just Mac and PC, so please support our project on Patreon to help make sure we can do it.

One great thing about our focus on ease-of-play is that it's great for trade shows! In just a few minutes, you can already be playing the "real game" and focusing on decisions and strategy, rather than how to do moves and basic combos. So stop by our booth, take a minute to train up (we can help you!) and see what it's all about.