This update to Fantasy Strike is available on Steam right now.

This month has lots of bug fixes as we polish things up during this beta period. The biggest fix is to a problem we had with spectating online matches. Sometimes, spectating a match would cause a disconnect for the players actually playing the match. That should be fixed now. Also, there’s a spiffy new energy background on the two-player character select screen now.

ONLINE

We have great UI for watching a match online. Just click the eyeball icon next to any friend in your in-game friends list to watch them play. (You even automatically follow them as they play online games across casual, ranked, and friend-match modes.) This is great for streamers because you can easily do commentary on other people’s matches.

Unfortunately this feature has been somewhat crippled by a technical problem that sometimes blew up the match you were trying to spectate. We believe this is fixed. Please give us feedback if you still encounter this problem.

--Fixed an occasional crash when clicking "Leave Queue" on the ranked score screen.

--When you get an online match while in the “local versus” mode character select screen, we now show the correct characters for your match in the VS screen, not the two characters you happened to have selected on the character select screen.

--Fixed incorrect handling of facial animation during rollbacks in online play. This would notably leave DeGrey's win pose with a bad facial state after doing a Yomi Counter, then winning.

UI

--There’s a new purplish energy background behind the two-player character select screen. It has neato colors and a bit of oomph once you pick the characters. This replaces the old orange lights background.

--On the Daily Challenge score screen, "Retry" and "Change Character" buttons were invisible, but they were still accessible by navigating with a keyboard’s arrow keys. The buttons are now correctly deleted from that screen.

--You can no longer call the gamepad setup overlay (hold 2 buttons) on the “versus screen” (which is for loading the match) or the "roulette" team battle screen. In each case, we’re just moments from starting a match and it causes too many problems to setup a controller right at that moment. Even worse, players often accidentally summoned this screen just before their matches started.

--After playing Survival Mode, then returning to the mode select screen, “back” would wrongly take you “back” to the score screen from your previous survival run. Now it correctly takes you “back” to the main menu.

--Fixed an issue where the character on the main menu would sometimes have accidentally too-dark lighting after playing an online match.

CHARACTERS

JAINA

--Fixed alignment on her ground super’s hit reaction. Some characters appeared much too high or too low during the cinematic, but now are at the correct heights. (This probably looks simple but it was a lot of work to fix these alignments.)

VALERIE

--Fixed a slight checkerboard pattern on her skin that was happening on some computer hardware.

--Valerie’s practice routine animation (where she does pushups) no longer wrongly shows the shadow of her paintbrush going through the floor.

MIDORI

--In Dragon Form, you can no longer "reversal jump" out of the human form revert when getting up from a knockdown while your dragon meter is empty. You’re now forced to revert before you can jump.

--The Dragon’s Yomi Counter no longer has the graphics for the acid spit going the wrong direction.

ARGAGARG

--Argagarg's C -> back+C goldfish now correctly deals block damage.

--Argagarg’s practice routine animation (where he does pushups) no longer wrongly shows the shadow of his staff. He doesn’t even have a staff during that, so it was pretty weird to show the shadow.

MISC

--Fixed a bug that incorrectly showed blue armor highlights starting on the first frame of any move with armor, even if the armor only actually started on some later frame. (For example, Rook’s C throw.)

--Fixed a bug where 0-damage hits of multi-hitting moves could "break your armor" when you're at 1 hp. For instance, this could cause your Dragon C's armor to fail against multi-hitting Lum Slots, Midori flurry punches, or Lum cartwheel, when you start your Dragon C at 2 hp. The first hit would bring you to 1 hp, then the second hit for 0 dmg would cause your armor to fail.