Fantasy Strike is a fighting game in development now by David Sirlin, a former Street Fighter dev.
- Easy to play—no really, actually easy to play.
- Features the Fantasy Strike characters from Yomi and other tabletop games.
- Excellent online play with best-in-class networking tech: GGPO.
Fighting games have added a huge amount of complexity over the years in ways have created more and more of a physical execution barrier. Fantasy Strike is about getting to the strategy part of the game immediately, in the first minute you play it. No complex motions for special moves and no need to practice combos in training mode. Emphasizing player-decisions over difficult dexterity is a much deeper commitment than simply letting you do special moves easily—it's a commitment to avoid fiddly, unintuitive, difficult-to-execute techniques throughout the game. If you don't know what plinking, kara cancels, option selects, charge partitioning, FADCs, or crouch techs are, you don't have to. Instead you can focus on the fundamentals of fighting games: distancing, timing, zoning, setups, reads, and strategy.
Fantasy Strike's Controls
GGPO networking
Most fighting games use traditional, input-lag-based networking. That means when you press a button to punch, you won't see your punch on the screen until you receive your opponent's input, even if your opponent is across the country. So you'll press punch, then some time will pass, then you'll see your punch. It feels like playing underwater.
GGPO's lag-hiding technology allows your punch to come out instantly on your screen when you press the button. It feels responsive, just like local play with little or no input lag. Your opponent's inputs get synced up when you receive them, and very often things go on just fine that way. Occasionally, you receive an input from your opponent that doesn't jive with how things happened on your screen. In that case, GGPO magic re-jives everything and gets you both back in sync. The trade-off is that occasionally you see choppy gameplay, but you never have to deal with that playing-in-molasses feel.
Help Fund This Game
If you'd like to help fund the development of this game and receive new playable builds as development progresses, become a patron at the $25 level. Game development costs six or seven figures, so we greatly appreciate your contribution. If you'd like to make a substantial contribution or investment, please contact Sirlin.
