Ex-Street Fighter Developer Working On “Simple” Tournament Style Fighting Game

The Street Fighter legacy has created a number of development superstars that have plenty of great products that speak volumes to the fighting community, and now we've got one more – and this one could cater quite well to those looking for an easier experience.

The developers at Sirlin Games (led by former Street Fighter dev David Sirlin) recently launched a Patreon for a new game called Fantasy Strike, and it utilizes a great new control scheme that makes it easy for newcomers to adapt to the game, just as well as hardcore fanatics could. It's basically based upon single-button presses, where you can utilize the system to execute counter moves for incoming attacks, in the form of a Yomi Counter. However, doing this at the wrong time can leave you wide open for any wind of non-throw attack.

"You also don't have to worry about doing moves with 1/60th of a second accuracy, as is common in fighting games. In Fantasy Strike, anytime you try to do a move, we automatically repeat your input for 8/60ths of a second to make sure it comes out, every time. The hard part should be deciding if you want to do a move, not in getting it to happen once you've decided," the development team noted.

"We're boiling down the genre to the fundamentals and cutting out everything that we don't need. Our game is so simple to play that even if you don't normally play fighting games, you still might love Fantasy Strike. And for fighting game veterans: this is a tournament, esport game."

The game has the following features:

• 8 playable characters
• Gameplay is representative of the final product, and is already tuned and balanced reasonably well.
• Game modes in our build right now: local versus, training, arcade
• Online play testing will start in July
• Animations are non-placeholder for 8 characters.
• Visual effects are non-placeholder for Grave, Jaina, Rook, and Valerie. We're working on new visual effects every month for the rest of the characters.
• We have four stages in the game, still under development, with more in the works.
• Controller support. We support just about any input device. Just hold down any two buttons on your gamepad/joystick/guitar/etc and a screen will come up that lets you map the buttons to a PS4 scheme that the game understands.

Right now, the game is only being planned for Mac and Windows, but with enough funding, who knows, it could come to consoles.

For now, check out the attached gallery. There's a lot of fighting action here! You can find even more on the Patreon page, too.