Game Update: April 2017

A new build of Fantasy Strike is available to our patrons on Patreon.
v9028.

The biggest new thing is that Midori's dragon form now has correctly working animation. This was a very big task for us, see the notes below. Valerie also has new visual effects, the clock tower stage is even more polished, and there are lots of new sound effects in the game. We also polished the menus more, fixing several bugs and implementing new features such as dropdown menus for screen resolution, improved highlight states for tabbed menu headings, and adding the ABCS notation to the move list.

CHARACTERS

MIDORI
--Dragon form (super) is now has fully implemented animations for all moves.
--New transform animations (air and ground) for turning into dragon and for reverting to human.
--Fixed NUMEROUS animation bugs having to do with the dragon reacting to hits, throws, and supers.

Developer’s note: Midori’s dragon form was a major development effort. Even though it’s just his super move, dragon form took longer to implement than TWO entire characters would. The dragon has the moveset of an entire character, but it was much more work than just that. The dragon uses a different type of skeleton than the other characters, and it was a major technical hurdle for us to be able to support this properly. The good news is two-fold: first we did it, and second, the same tech will make it easier to implement Argagarg later on.

Note that while the dragon’s animations are now complete, he still only has placeholder visual effects and sound effects.

ROOK
--Camera tweaked at the start of C throw to be smoother.

VALERIE
--New visual effects for lots of moves:
neutral A, back+A, forward+A, air A, air B, air C, and yomi counter.
--Ground super, new visual effects and animation changed to be shorter.
--On the character select screen, her brush has some new visual effects.

SETSUKI
--New visual effects for B teleport kick.

GEIGER
--Lots more new sound effects.
--There is now a sound for attempting to do ground B or C when you don't have full gear meter.
--Time Stop super now has 4 vulnerable frames at the end, like it used to (was accidentally removed a few builds ago).

DEGREY
--Ghost can no longer hit victims who are ground/wall bouncing. This means after counterhit back+A or counterhit pilebunker, you can just do another pilebunker and be “playing correctly” rather than needing to do the combo: ghost -> air B -> A,A.
--Lots of new sound effects.

STAGES

--Clock tower stage has more modeling and texture work on numerous background objects.
--Thumbnail image of clock tower stage updated to be more representative of what the stage now looks like.

MENUS

--In video options, the settings for resolution and for graphics quality now use dropdown menus. This is helpful in that it lets you see all possible choices at once.
--Move list shows keyboard or gamepad buttons depending on which input device called it
--Move list now shows A B C S buttons in addition to which keyboard or controller button you actually push. This makes it easier to refer to moves regardless of what your personal button setup is (e.g. Valerie’s rainbow stroke is her “C attack”.)
--Button config: keyboard and gamepad input always tries to access their own column
--How to play shows keyboard or gamepad controls depending on which input device called it
--New background on character select screen
--Slightly adjusted character shadows on character select screen. This fixes black splotches on Jaina’s headband and Rook’s overly dark chest.
--The tabs at the top of the training mode pause screen have been updated. They now light up yellow if you move up to them, whereas before they gave no visual indication in this case. Also, in controller-mode of our UI, these tabs now show L1/R1 help text. (It’s possible to change tabs with these triggers OR by moving up to the tab itself and going left/right on d-pad or keyboard.)
--The tabs at the top of the options screen (video / audio / debug) have been updated to match the same style as the training mode pause screen tabs. They too light up yellow when you move up to them, so that you can see the difference between a tab that’s active and a tab heading that you’ve moved the selection cursor to.
--In mouse control mode, if you use the keyboard to arrive at a new screen, the mouse will no longer cause a mouseover state on whatever it happened to be resting on until you actually move the mouse.

MISC

--Fixed a bug that caused characters to clip through each other if they were close together while one was getting up from a throw.
--Fixed a bug introduced in last month’s build where juggle combos involving projectiles would not deal damage from the projectile hits.
--AI characters now sometimes do button-hold moves. Grave can do his big fireball, Jaina can charge to level 2 and 3 with her arrows, and Setsuki can hold-B teleport throw.
--Fixed a bug that made shadows too prominent on characters any time the camera moved away from standard side view. This was especially apparent during Midori’s throw, as we saw his shadows pop from one state to another as the camera moved at the end.
--Fixed a bug that prevented you from yomi countering if you were pressing trigger buttons (L and R) used in menus in cases where those buttons were NOT mapped to any gameplay action.
--Fixed a bug that caused the Ready button to not always appear on the arcade character select screen while in mouse-mode.
--When your lifebar is flashing from potential block damage, the timer until it reverts back to normal now pauses while you’re in blockstun.