Fantasystrike.com Relaunch
Saturday, June 15, 2013 at 6:05PM 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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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.
