Fantasystrike.com Relaunch

The new fantasystrike.com is now live! There's several big upgrades we just did, as well as a surprise, so let's check it out.

Yomi

The production values are way up now. The playfield now looks like a side view fighting game. It has fancy life bars, sound effects, and awesome music from OC Remix. The UI in general now helps you understand what's happening more. If your throw wins combat vs a block, we show with gigantic letters and effects that your throw won. When an ability happens, we show the ability box big, in the center of the screen. At the top of the screen, there's an info box telling you what you should be doing.

Here's some before and after screenshots:

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NEW:

Oh and by the way, Yomi is now in German and French, as well as English.

Puzzle Strike

We upgraded the production values a lot in Puzzle Strike as well. There's sound, OC Remix music, and a more puzzle gamey theme to the UI. Puzzle Strike is now a lot easier to watch (and to play) because we added so many elements to help you understand what's happening. When a chip goes somewhere, it's now more clear where exactly it's going. Most importantly, the visuals for the gems in your gem pile make it very clear how close you are to losing. Your gem pile also has little notches that show when the height bonus triggers that allows you to draw more chips. Here's some before and after screenshots:

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Flash Duel

This is the first release of Flash Duel online. All 20 characters plus the Dragon Raid are working. You can play 1v1, 2v2, and up to 4v1 (vs the Dragon). You can even play the Custom Clockwork mode where you build your own 4-ability character out of the abilities of several different characters. The UI is a first pass, but the game is fully functional and features 8-bit animations for all 21 characters by famous pixel artist Conor "BT" Town.

Coin System

There's a new coin system for the site. There's a free character each week in each game and you don't need any coins to play that character. You can play them as much as you want, unlimited times, for free. If you want to play other characters, you are now able to do that for free as well! Every day, you automatically get 10 free purple tokens just for logging in. That's enough to play any character in any game one time for free. This is great because it allows you to try out a new character and see if you like them without actually spending anything.

The first win of the day also gives you 10 free purple tokens, so you could then play a second time that day for free. Once in a while during gameplay, you can get a "critical hit" which gives you purple tokens, too. These purple tokens only last 24 hours though, so you might as well use them when you have them, or you'll lose them.

If you want to play more than that, you can buy gold coins. You can also use gold coins to play any character in any game on game on the site, but they don't go away after 24 hours, you can pile them up all you want. You can even give gold coins to other players as a gift.

Between the free character, all the daily free tokens, and the sheer amount of gold you can buy in a single purchase with rebates for buying in bulk, we're somewhat worried that we are being too generous to maintain a business. We'd like to try it anyway though and see what happens.

(Note that anyone who previously bought characters still owns everything they bought and can play those bought characters all they want. All gold you had from the previous system will be converted to new gold, even if you never *bought* that old gold.)

Subscriptions

There's no change at all to how subscriptions work. Just like before, you can get a monthly subscription and have access to all characters in all games as well as some other perks like more saved replay slots. What's great is that we've been able to offer more and more value for those subscriptions over time. At first, a subscription gave you access to 10 Yomi characters and 10 Puzzle Strike characters. Now, you have access to 20 Flash Duel characters (plus the Dragon and Custom Clockwork mode), as well as 20 Puzzle Strike characters and all expansion puzzle chips as well as...

Surprise: Yomi Expansion is Live Now!

Yomi now has all 10 expansion characters implemented with rules enforcement in addition to the 10 base set characters, bringing the total to 20 characters. The expansion characters do not currently have all their art on the cards, but over the next couple months we'll be filling more and more of it in. In the meantime, they are fully functional to play!

Ladder Reset

We reset the ladder for all the games and are starting a new season. Note that Yomi will have some gameplay changes during this ladder season as the beta characters get updated. We might reset it early or just leave it as an experimental season, with the following season being the more stable competitive one.

Leaderboards Page

Even the leaderboards page got a graphical overhaul too. Here's a before and after of that:

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These upgrades have been in the works for a long time, and we all thank Thelo for his awesome work on getting them implemented. I hope you enjoy! Head on over to the game area on the new site.

Ongoing Development

You probably haven't heard much about what I'm working on, but there are an overwhelming number of things in the works. The Puzzle Strike kickstarter is now behind us, and thankfully shipped on time. If you missed out on the kickstarter, the game will start shipping to everyone else in a couple weeks, and you can get it here. And here's what else is going on:

Flash Duel Online

We're working on the online version of Flash Duel at fantasystrike.com. If you have a star membership, you can see our progress on that right now, actually. We're focusing on functionality first, and we've gotten most of the modes implemented, from 1v1 to 2v2 to even the Dragon Raid. Flash Duel online also has animated 8-bit sprites for every character thanks to pixel artist Conor "BT" Town.

Yomi and Puzzle Strike Online

Yomi and Puzzle Strike have been available to play online for quite some time now on fantasystrike.com. For a while now, we've been working on graphical and UI upgrades that will make both games look a lot more polished. Thanks to everyone who supported the site so far, I just wanted to let you know we've been working hard to keep improving it, even though you haven't seen a lot of what we've been up to yet. We're actually spending far, far more on these upcoming upgrades than the total amount we've ever made, so it's kind of a big deal. We're still 2 or 3 months from getting these enhancements on the live servers.

The Yomi Expansion

There's 10 new characters in development for Yomi, and you can actually play them right now at fantasystrike.com in the non-rules-enforced mode if you're a star member. I'm drowning in graphic design tasks on the physical version, as I'm making 10 new card backs, way too many boxes, a totally rewritten rulebook, and other various supplements that need graphic design. Not to mention art directing a hundred pieces of character art (bad news: that part is going disastrously slowly and is delaying the whole project). As for the gameplay, the new characters are pretty varied, with several interesting new mechanics and styles. They are pretty balanced and working well overall right now, though tuning will be ongoing for a long time.

There will also be a 2v2 mode, a 2v1 mode, and a solo mode. I'm really excited about the 2v2 mode. It's been a lot of work to figure out how to make it feel like Marvel vs. Capcom style, be fun, and actually work right (emphasis on the actually work right). I think we got it! I also think 2v2 will knock your socks off someday.

SCG4 is Codex

Sirlin Card Game 4 is actually called Codex. While the Yomi expansion is my main focus now, I'm working on this as well. I recently finished graphic design for all 56 of the game's different card frames (oh my god), and I continue to refine the gameplay here and there over time. It will take years for the card illustrations and hundreds of thousands of dollars just for that probably (no idea how to pay for that btw, kickstarter I assume), and I don't even really want to start on that until Yomi's art is done. So that means even though the gameplay part of this game is actually practically done right now—all cards exist and have been playtested for quite a while—the release is far off. A game this deep and complex needs a lot of balance testing though, so at least we'll have plenty more time for that.

I've also been testing a pretty interesting free-for-all mode for Codex. FFA generally has problems in most games where it's too much about ganging up (make an alliance with your friend before the game starts, even) and eliminating whoever you want. Also why even fight anyone when you can sit back and let the others weaken each other? The unusual FFA mode I've been trying addresses all these problems and is so far working well. You might say it's inspired by the new FFA mode in Puzzle Strike 3rd Edition, but actually that's not quite right. Puzzle Strike 3rd Edition's FFA mode was actually inspired by Codex's, it's just that you got to see the results in reverse chronological order.

If you haven't tried the new FFA mode in Puzzle Strike, I highly recommend it, by the way. There's no player-elimination and there's naturally shifting alliances as the game progresses, because whenever anyone is in a position to win, the rest of the players want to temporarily help each other to prevent that. It usually leads to exciting, close games. And if you have tried it, it would be nice if you rated Puzzle Strike 3rd Edition and/or Puzzle Strike Shadows on boardgamegeek. (Scroll down to "user information, then "rating" to rate a game.)

Not much more info on Codex right now. It's a troublesome situation that explaining the unusual workings of it gives other companies years to do the same kind of thing before I can even release it. I will say that it's inspired by RTS games such as WarCraft 3 and StarCraft, that you have a lot of flexibility available to you during gameplay that you don't have in CCGs, and that there's no randomness in the resource system.

I will now go back to making logos, boxes, rulebooks, more boxes, and more boxes.

Fantasystrike.com is Launching!

Hey everyone, I'm excited to let you all know that after 2 years of development and testing of fantasystrike.com, we'll finally be launching the site on February 17th, a week from this Friday. You'll be able to play Yomi and Puzzle Strike online there, and someday other games too such as Flash Duel and a Fantasy Strike customizable (but not collectable) card game. But let's not get ahead of ourselves!

In case you're new to things, Yomi is a card game that captures the essence of fighting games such as Street Fighter. Each deck is a character, and there are 10 to choose from. The decks resemble poker decks, and that makes them pretty easy to learn. Your numbered cards 2-10 are normal moves, your face cards are special moves, and your aces are super moves. The game focuses on the mind-games that happen in high level play in real fighting games, but extracted into a turn-based form so you don't need any dexterity.

Puzzle Strike is a deckbuilding game, featuring the same characters as in Yomi (plus even more). It simulates a puzzle game such as Puzzle Fighter, where you try to clear out gems from your "gem pile" and send them to your opponents. If your gem pile fills up to 10, you lose, but the closer you are to losing the more you'll be able to draw each turn. You build your deck as you play, so it's the same genre of game as Dominion in case you've heard of that, except it's far more interactive and suited for tournament play. Also it has a pretty interesting 3-player and 4-player mode with no player elimination these days!

Online Features

Puzzle Strike and Yomi both have full rules implementation. They both have an interactive tutorial. We have a guide for both games (check it out!), leaderboards, ranked and unraked matches, and the ability to save replays and watch other people's replays. Even League of Legends didn't launch with that, ha!

Rankings

We're going to reset all the beta rankings when we launch. As you play, you'll level up through the "student" ranks at first. During this period, you can't lose any points, so you'll be sure to progress eventually. Also any character you play contributes to your student points, so it's up to you if you want to play several characters or stick to just one. Once you graduate to the "master" ranks, you'll have a separate ranking for every character though, and losses will make you lose points. Eventually this rank system actually converges to 100% skill-based elo ranking, but everyone gets to make progress along the way.

Tabletop vs Online Versions

The online version of Yomi is exactly the same as the physical one in the real world with cardboard cards. Same abilities, same 10 characters, and so on. For Puzzle Strike though, we've evolved the game and actually rebalanced it based on months (or now years, actually) of tournament play AND we've put up the full expansion that hasn't even been released yet in the tabletop world. So you have access to all 20 characters and all the puzzle chips from the base + the expansion in the online version!

Tuned for Serious Competition

Both Puzzle Strike and Yomi are fun on a casual level, but they each also have a ton of depth and strategy if you really get into them. Those years spent on balancing ensure that you can play them for years and still find them strategically interesting. There's a growing competitive scene and frequent online tournaments, so join in! (Casual fun is also allowed!)

Free To Play with Options to Pay

Each week there will be two different free characters in each game, on a rotating basis. As you play, you earn gold that you can spend to unlock your favorite characters permanently. Or you can just buy characters directly, and avoid any kind of grind. Remember that all characters are at full power instantly, and there is no painful period of playing a gimped character until you get runes or something like in other games. Anyway, you'll also have the third option of getting a subscription, which unlocks ALL the characters in all our games, as well as some other perks and access to beta features and even beta games at some point.

The Road to Launch

Over the next 10 business days, I'll introduce one new Fantasy Strike character per day, ending with the exciting launch of Fantasystrike.com a week from this Friday. These are the 10 characters from the upcoming Puzzle Strike Shadows expansion, which you'll be able to play at launch. First up will be head man at Flagstone, Sirus Quince!

Yomi Season 2 Ends, Season 3 Begins

I posted here a while ago about the Season 1 results for Yomi, and how the ranking system works. While Puzzle Strike is also available on fantasystrike.com and now has all TWENTY characters with ranked matches, this post is about Yomi's ranking stats.

Season 2 just ended, and these results are in ranked matches from June 20th to December 6th, 2011.

DeGrey	786 / 1430	55.0%
Midori	712 / 1329	53.5%
Argagarg651 / 1220	53.4%
Rook	836 / 1613	51.8%
Geiger	702 / 1405	50.0%
Grave	833 / 1672	49.8%
Lum	482 / 992	48.6%
Setsuki	1066 / 2253	47.3%
Valerie	706 / 1483	47.6%
Jaina	920 / 1986	46.3%

Again, the balance has held up remarkably well, and is closer than any known fighting game. In season 1, the surprise was that Midori was claimed to be the worst, yet he had the highest win rate in the end. DeGrey is the other character clamed to be worst, and this time he posted the highest win rate, with Midori at #2. It's important to keep some perspective though, as these are razor thin differences anyway.

Now let's look at those stats ranked by popularity instead by win-rate:

Setsuki	1066 / 2253	47.3%
Jaina	920 / 1986	46.3%
Grave	833 / 1672	49.8%
Rook		836 / 1613	51.8%
Valerie	706 / 1483	47.6%
DeGrey	786 / 1430	55.0%
Geiger	702 / 1405	50.0%
Midori	712 / 1329	53.5%
Argagarg	651 / 1220	53.4%
Lum		482 / 992	48.6%

Just like in season 1, Setsuki is the most popular and has the worst win-rate. All those noobs dragging down the stats! Jaina has the same effect. She's believed to be very strong, though she's showing the same signs, given that she's #2 in popularity yet last in win-rate. I think her last place here will surprise to a lot of people. Lum is still hard and still less popular, Midori is still strong but less popular. Characters shuffled around the win-rate list a fair bit, which is what we'd expect for a game where characters are very close in power level.

Some people correctly pointed out last time that the matchmaking system would make even really imbalanced characters appear 50-50. While that's true, it's only true for a perfect matchmaking system. Ours is so far from perfect right now, that it hardly matters. You're basically matched with whoever most of the time. Speaking of that, how about we make it a whole lot easier to get a match? Read on....

Best of 3 Matches vs. Best of 1 Matches

Season 2 was a best of 3 format, meaning when you quckmatch, you play more than one game until someone has two wins total. Season 3 will revert back to best of 1 format (just one game), because the players are asking for that change, and the data supports it.

One thing in favor of best of 3 matches is that the more games you play in a match, the more fair the result is (less swings from randomness.) During the Dreamhack Starcraft 2 tournament, they mentioned that 85% of best of 5 matches were won by the player who won the first game. I thought that was pretty interesting. Here is Yomi, we'd expect the best of 3 format to magnify any character imbalances...but it didn't. It's a tight spread either way.

Another effect we'd expect is that characters who have higher variance in their gameplay (like Makoto in Street Fighter 3s) would do "unfairly" good in a best of 1 format. Best of 3 would "fix" that by making them get lucky twice to win a match. DeGrey is such a character, and yet he managed to top the win rates in best of 3 anyway while not topping them in the best of 1 season!

Really all that stuff about fairness of best of 1 vs best of 3 doesn't add up to much. In both formats, the best players are rising to the top and the character balance is holding. But there is something that matters A LOT. And that's the length of time that a match takes. There were fewer quickmatches this season, even correcting for it being shorter than season1. Many players complained that they would use quickmatch more if only it was a shorter time commitment. Well now it is. Season 3 started last night, and it's best of 1 format. Matches are fast and quickmatch will be more popular.

Gold Testing

Quickmatches also give you "gold" now. The exact amounts are being adjusted and the gain rate is way high right now just for testing purposes. All this gold is just fake anyway and it will be completely reset when this (short) season ends when we go to an actual launch. At that point, the gold will be an option for you to buy decks without using real money. You will also be able to buy decks directly, you'll be able to subscribe to unlock all characters in all games, and there will always be two different free characters available to everyone each week.

Fantasystrike.com

The site itself has going through a lot of upgrades recently. It now has much more "real" art for headers and interface. The forums have been completely upgraded recently as well. We've added the ability to record and playback matches. There will be another round of major graphical upgrades to the "play" page--the place where you quickmatch, see lists of available matches and so on. This will also include graphical upgrades to the pre-match "versus" screen, profile pages, and various popup windows. I'm really looking forward to this, and to your continued support after our launch that will allow us to improve the site more and more, keep the games updated, and to add new games like Flash Duel and our customizable card game someday. Oh by the way, Flash Duel is now in stock and ships starting tomorrow and monday, depending on when you ordered!

Oh, and congratulations to friiik, the Yomi Season 2 winner. Note that he didn't *just* place #1 on the leaderboard, but also dominated in tournaments. Top skills!

Yomi version 8.1

Yomi: Fighting Card Game is now up to version 8.1 (more like version 800, maybe I should have numbered these differently). You can get the pdfs to print all 10 decks here: www.sirlin.net/yomi
(There's a link at the bottom of that page to download all 10 at once, too, if you want.)

The game is getting pretty close to final, but remember that this is still a beta version.

Knockdown

This new version adds a bunch of new artwork, some balance changes, and a system-wide change with how Knockdown is handled. Before, knocking the opponent down disabled their dodge and their innate ability next turn. Now, it disables their dodge and weakens their block next turn. Argagarg's innate is rewritten so it still gets disabled if he's knocked down, and Rook's innate was changed slightly to compensate as well.

What does "weakened" blocks mean? It means you can't block odd-numbered normal attacks with even-numbered blocks, and vice versa. You can think of it like the opponent doing a high/low mixup or crossup as you get up from a knockdown.

The effect this has on gameplay is actually remarkably similar to how it works in a real fighting game. The opponent knows his block is more risky than usual, but he can avoid the entire bad situation by doing a reversal, like a dragon punch or a flash kick (Dragonheart or Flash Gear in Yomi). Those will beat out any normal move, and remember that only normal moves become harder to block in this knock down situation, not specials or supers. But you know the opponent wants to do a reversal. A predictable, bad opponent will reversal every time here, and you can either block it (to gain card advantage) or dodge it (to hit back with a single powerful move). A more skilled player knows he can't reversal every time, and he will sometimes block...but that means he is susceptible to getting hit by a normal attack into a full combo.

There's also strategy surrounding whether to use an odd or an even in these situations. Some characters prefer one or the other, so matchup knowledge will help you here. Also, the fastest normal attack is a 2, and attackers will want to use that against a knocked down opponent, but the knocked down opponent knows that and is probably more likely to block with an even numbered card. You can use this tendency against him by attacking with a 3 or a 5 instead.

Setsuki

On another note, Setsuki also got a pretty interesting change in this version. Usually, if she starts a turn with 1 or 0 cards in hand, she gets to draw 4 extra cards. That's still true, but now she also gets to hit back with a full combo if she dodges an attack that turn. Characters can usually only hit back with a single move after a dodge, but Setsuki has a full six combo points to work with here. Remember, it's only on turns where she activated her Speed of the Fox innate (by starting the turn with 0 or 1 cards), though.

Unity

We're testing the Unity version of Yomi right now, and it still needs a bit of work before all of you can join in, but it's getting close. It still has no rules, so you have to know how to play the game already, but it's a nice virtual card table suited specifically to play Yomi, so even in these early stages, it's pretty useful. Stay tuned for more info on that.

T-shirts and Prints

In the meantime, check out the the pics in the sidebar of the various Fantasy Strike / Yomi prints and t-shirts you can now buy. Available immediately, shipping worldwide. Enjoy a classy, framed print of DeGrey's Pilebunker or a simple Yomi t-shirt. Those who like to throw and hold down/back a lot might enjoy the Final Dragon Buster hoodie.