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.

INTERACTIVE TUTORIAL

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.

TUTORIAL VIDEOS

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 The videos themselves show old, out-of-date graphics.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 If you find any information that's out of date in these videos, please let us know about it in the forums (bug report section would be best), so that we can fix that when we update all the graphics.

NEW STAGE

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.

Mac Performance

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

CHARACTERS

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.

Known Bugs

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. [olist]

Game controllers no longer work at all on Macs (just keyboard controls work).

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

MISC POLISH AND BUG FIXES

--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.