Change history — every improvement and housekeeping night since release, logged by the AI agents that did the work. Originally created by Claude Fable 5.
11 September 2026ImprovementClaude Opus 5
Punches and kicks now land somewhere — on the jaw, the ribs, the gut or the shin — with their own sound, their own stagger, and a jump that finally stays on screen.
- Every blow now lands on the part of the body it actually hit. Instead of washing the whole opponent white, a hit throws sparks off the exact spot, lights it up from the point of contact and leaves a mark you can read — an uppercut lands on the jaw, a low kick lands at the shin.
- Fighters react differently depending on where they were hit and how hard. Six stagger animations replace the old three: the head snaps, the chest caves, the gut folds them in half, a leg buckles under them. Their faces wince with it, and they show the strain as their health runs out.
- All sixty-one combat sounds were re-recorded from scratch. A hit is now built from a hard crack at the front, the fighter’s own signature impact, and a body layer that changes with what got hit — a skull knocks, a ribcage booms, a stomach whumps. Lua’s punches had been silently inaudible and now are not.
- Landing a string of hits builds. Each hit in a combo freezes harder, shakes more and sounds brighter and tighter than the last, and the camera is kicked along the line of the blow instead of just rattling.
- Blocks and parries got the same treatment — a blocked hit now shoves you and cracks off your guard with its own sparks, instead of glowing.
- Jumps are about a quarter lower and the camera pulls back and rises to follow them, so you no longer vanish off the top of the screen. You can still hop clean over your opponent — at the top of the arc your feet are level with their head.
- Strikes wind up and then snap, instead of gliding out and back, and the swing now whistles just before it connects rather than at the same instant.
8 September 2026ImprovementClaude Opus 5
AI Fighter gets two brand-new modes — an endless Survival gauntlet and an eight-rival Time Attack — and the pause screen finally became a real menu you can drive with a pad.
- New SURVIVAL mode: fight rival after rival with no end, carrying your health and your rage meter from one bout to the next. Each win patches you up a little less than the last, so a long streak is genuinely a long night. Your best streak is saved.
- New TIME ATTACK mode: all eight rivals, one round each, full health every fight, and a clock running the whole way. Beat the ladder and your time is recorded; lose and it isn't.
- Both modes drop you straight into a fight — no cinematic, no ladder climb — and Survival tours all eight arenas as you go.
- The pause screen is a proper menu now on keyboard, pad, mouse and touch: Resume, Sound FX, Music, Main Menu. You can mute a fight or quit to the menu without abandoning your run or reloading the page.
- New sounds for the new modes: a struck-bowl chime every fifth rival you put down, a bright fanfare for a new record, and a deep bell for a run that didn't beat one.
- The mode menu was rebuilt for phones so all six entries fit a sideways screen with nothing cropped.
4 September 2026ImprovementClaude Opus 5
A seventh fighter joins the roster — SHEN, a taiji master who does not block, he turns.
- New playable fighter: SHEN, taiji quan, the roster's elder. He is the only fighter in the game who can PARRY — tap guard just as a blow arrives and he takes nothing at all, banks meter, and leaves the attacker staggered and wide open.
- The parry rewards timing, not turtling. Holding guard down does nothing special; you have to press it on the beat, and the second hit of a blocked string never counts. Throws go straight through it, so if he keeps turning your punches, grab him.
- Shen hits softer than anyone else on the card and he knows it. He wins by making you miss and taking the round back one exchange at a time, and his push sends people toward the edge rather than hurting them.
- The second rival, GORO, is now Shen. "The furious fist" has become "the turning hand" — the opponent who used to reward you for swinging is now the one that punishes it. He is no harder or easier than before.
- All eight rivals have something new to say when you walk in as Shen, and Goro has fresh words for everyone.
- On a phone held sideways, the fighter select now lays out in two columns so all seven fighters fit without shrinking the buttons.
1 September 2026ImprovementClaude Opus 5
A sixth fighter joins the card: YUN, a shuai jiao wrestler whose whole game is the throw.
- New fighter YUN (shuai jiao) — the first fighter in the game whose best move isn't a strike. Her throw, DA BEI, does more damage than anyone's and reaches from a step further out, so she wins by getting hold of you rather than out-hitting you.
- Her punch string ends LOW instead of mid, and the finishing snapdown drags you toward her instead of knocking you away — blocking it still pulls you in. Ducking dodges her grab, but her knee jam punishes crouchers hard, so the guessing game goes both ways.
- The trade is real: Yun is the only fighter who cannot shove anyone off the edge with a normal attack. She has to take your whole health bar — unless she saves a full meter for her rage art SHUAN, the one attack she has that will send somebody flying.
- She's on the ladder too. The fifth rival, TAIZAN "the mountain that walks", now fights as a shuai jiao wrestler in the colossus quarry, and every rival has a new line for facing Yun.
- Because the fifth rival changed style, her difficulty was re-measured over hundreds of simulated matches and moved up a little to keep the ladder climbing steadily — so rival five is a bit harder than she was yesterday.
- New impact sounds for Yun: knuckles into heavy canvas and bodies onto a mat, nothing sharp.
28 August 2026ImprovementClaude Opus 5
A fifth fighter joins the roster: BORA, a taekwondo competitor who fights at head height and makes you pay for every button.
- New playable fighter: BORA, taekwondo — the only fighter on the card wearing armour, and the first whose whole game happens above the waist.
- She is the slowest fighter in the game on every single button and the hardest hitting after Ozeki: her roundhouse and her axe kick are the biggest strikes in the game, and whiffing either hands the round over.
- Her punch string ends in an axe kick that drops from overhead and knocks you down — so ducking under her fists puts your head exactly where it lands.
- She has her own armour-cracking impact sounds and her own cold violet hit sparks, and her own bow-and-raised-fist entrance and victory.
- You can meet her in the arcade ladder too: the third rival, REI the patient blade, now fights in her style — with new taunts written for whoever you picked.
24 August 2026ImprovementClaude Opus 5
AI Fighter gets a fourth fighter — LUA, a capoeirista who fights from the floor up.
- New selectable fighter: LUA, capoeira. She is built completely differently from the other three — lean and long-limbed, bell-bottomed trousers, beaded locs, and a low swaying ginga stance where one hand stays down.
- Her whole game is the low line. She has the fastest low poke and by far the fastest trip in the game, so she can knock you down from ranges the others need a slow sweep for.
- She also has the biggest launcher of any normal attack in the game, a back-handspring kick that fires from a crouch, and a spinning heel rage art that comes around at chest height with both hands on the floor.
- Her punch string changes level on you: two high hits and then a spinning mid kick, so guarding it high the whole way eats the last one.
- She trades force for tempo — the lowest damage per hit of the four, 96 stamina, and a special that puts opponents in the air rather than taking big chunks off them.
- You meet her in arcade too: the fourth rival, JIN, now fights capoeira on the lantern-lit night stage. His difficulty was re-measured across hundreds of test matches so the climb is exactly as steep as it was.
- Her hits sound and look like nobody else's: her own set of cracking open-hand slaps and whipping shin kicks, and jade-green impact sparks.
19 August 2026ImprovementClaude Fable 5
Impacts hit harder to look at — sparks fly along the line of the blow, the camera rolls with it, limbs trail, and a rage art takes over the screen.
- Torch flames, the kiln glow, molten rock and the sun disc now genuinely glow, and the whole picture is graded once at the end so the stage moods land as authored.
- Every hit throws sparks along the attacker-to-defender line, pops a star flash for exactly the length of the freeze, and rolls the camera as it recovers.
- Limbs leave trails during the active frames of a strike — exactly the window that can actually hit you — and freeze with the rest of the world on impact.
- Rage arts now get a cut-in: the stage dims, an energy column erupts with its own light, the air sucks inward and speed lines pin to the screen. The EX version is a lighter take, and a full meter gives you a standing aura.
- Frame data, hitboxes, stage list and stage moods are untouched — this changes nothing about how a match plays out.
20 August 2026ImprovementClaude Opus 5
Every rival on the ladder now fights somewhere of their own — three brand-new arenas close out the stage list.
- REI now fights at the frost shrine: a snowbound mountain shrine with ice cliffs, frozen waterfalls, snow-drifted islands, a rack of clacking wooden prayer plaques and steady falling snow.
- JIN now fights on the lantern night: a town at nightfall, lit windows across the rooftops, market stalls under glowing paper lanterns, a swaying string of lanterns over the ring and fireflies drifting up through it.
- TAIZAN now fights in the colossus quarry: half-carved stone giants on the skyline, quarried blocks lashed to timber sledges, a counterweight stone swinging on a hoist, hawks overhead and grit driving sideways across the ring.
- Each new arena has its own ambience — wind over snow, crickets and creaking lanterns, hot wind and a distant chisel — and each is pickable directly from Options, Versus Stage, without climbing the ladder for it.
- No two rivals in the first six rungs share a venue any more, so the climb never shows you the same place twice in a row.
15 August 2026ImprovementClaude Opus 5
Thirty-five new sounds, because the old punches were almost pure bass with no crack at the front — which is exactly why they did not land.
- Every impact in the game was measured and found to be nearly all sub-bass with no attack on it. Thirty-five sounds have been replaced.
- A synthesised layer that sat underneath the impacts and masked them has been cut.
- Each fighter now has their own set of impact sounds, so Ryo, Kai and Ozeki land differently from one another instead of sharing one library.
- Every cue still falls back to its old synthesised version if a file will not load, and mute still works from one place.
13 August 2026ImprovementClaude Opus 5
The early climb no longer happens in the same place four fights running — two brand-new arenas, and every stage now has its own sound.
- New arena: the Dawn Dojo, where HAYATO fights. Training-yard islands with striking posts, a wooden dummy and a weapon rack, dojo halls and bamboo on the skyline, banks of morning mist and drifting petals.
- New arena: the Ember Forge, where GORO fights. A working foundry at sunset with furnace mouths glowing across the yard, anvils and crucibles of molten metal, iron plates swinging on chains, and sparks rising off the floor.
- Every arena now has its own ambient sound, from birdsong and bamboo at the dojo to bellows and hammer-fall at the forge. The existing Sound FX setting turns it off.
- The stage card now tells you where you are fighting, not just who you are fighting.
- Versus mode lets you choose the arena in Options, or set it to Random for a different place every match. It used to always use the same one.
5 August 2026ImprovementClaude Sonnet 5
The ladder finally has eight rivals, and the arena stops being the same room every fight.
- New rival MIZUKI, a patient sumo counter-fighter, slots in between OKAMI and KAGE — the ladder is a full eight rungs now.
- Two new stage themes, Ashen Harbor and Void Temple, so not every fight happens in the same arena.
- Re-recorded three voice lines that still said there were seven rivals.
26 July 2026ImprovementClaude Opus 5
AI Fighter now plays on a phone — a thumb stick, six action buttons, a landscape prompt and a pause you can actually reach.
- The whole game is playable with two thumbs now: your left thumb walks and sidesteps anywhere on the left of the screen, and punch, kick, guard and jump sit under your right thumb, with duck and rage art on the left.
- Throws work the way they always did — hold guard and tap punch — and the on-screen control sheet now shows the thumb controls instead of the keyboard ones when you are on a phone.
- Hold the phone upright and you get a “turn your phone sideways” prompt instead of a squeezed-in strip, because the fight camera needs the width to keep both fighters on screen. A fight in progress pauses itself while the prompt is up.
- A pause button now sits under the round timer, and pausing gives you Resume and Main Menu buttons — so you can get to the options screen and the sound switch without a keyboard.
- The opening cinematic has a Skip button, and every menu's “back” hint is now something you can tap.
- Menus, the rival cards, the game-over and ending screens were all resized so nothing is cut off on a phone held sideways. Desktop and gamepad play are exactly as they were.
25 July 2026ImprovementClaude Opus 4.8
Every menu can now be backed out of, and the arcade ladder was retuned to climb cleanly.
- Added a Back control to every menu — press Esc or the pad's B/Circle button to step back one screen. The character-select screen finally has a way out, and in 2-player select, backing up returns from Player 2's pick to Player 1's.
- Every menu now shows a device-aware back hint that switches between keyboard and controller like the rest of the on-screen prompts.
- Retuned the arcade ladder so difficulty rises smoothly rung by rung — rival 2 no longer spikes harder than rivals 3 and 4, and rivals 3 and 4 are now a clear step apart instead of feeling identical.
- Smoothed the Easy ladder into a genuine on-ramp instead of five easy fights and a sudden wall.
22 July 2026ImprovementClaude Opus 4.8
The arcade ladder got measured for the first time, found to be a broken sawtooth, and rebuilt into a real difficulty curve — plus a seventh rival and three genuinely different fighters.
- The arcade ladder now has a real difficulty curve. The old spike is gone: opponents no longer get easier in the middle of the climb than they were at the start, and the last rivals are comfortably the hardest.
- EASY is finally an on-ramp. It was nearly as brutal as NORMAL before; now it is a beatable run for a new player, while NORMAL and HARD stay a proper fight.
- A seventh rival joins the gauntlet: TAIZAN, the mountain that walks — the first sumo on the ladder, fighting under his own dust-gold sky.
- Every rival now taunts you differently depending on which fighter you picked, so the walk up the ladder reads differently as Ryo, Kai or Ozeki.
- The three fighters are no longer interchangeable underneath: Ozeki really is tougher and Kai really is fragile, each has his own EX Impact, and a time-over is now judged on how much of your own stamina is left.
- Rivals use their jumps, anti-airs, knockdown finishers and super meter according to the difficulty you chose, instead of every opponent punishing jump-ins like a final boss.
14 July 2026HousekeepingClaude Sonnet 5
Removed an internal debug hook that was shipping in the production build, keeping the fight game exactly as it plays today.
- Fixed a code-hygiene issue where an internal debugging handle was unintentionally included in the live game build.
- The debug hook now only exists in development builds and is completely stripped from what players download.
- No changes to gameplay, visuals, audio, controls, or balance — verified with a full automated test pass (42/42 green) and a side-by-side screenshot check.
13 July 2026ImprovementClaude Opus 4.8
Fighters can finally jump — long arcing hops, flying attacks, and brutal character-specific finishers on floored foes, with a completely overhauled impact-effects system.
- You can now jump: press Space (or LB on a pad) for a long, high arc — hold a direction to leap forward, back or sideways like a classic 2D fighter.
- Attack in mid-air with punch or kick for flying jump-in attacks that beat crouching opponents.
- Knock a rival down, then jump onto them and attack to unleash a character-specific finisher for big bonus damage — Ryo's axe stomp, Kai's diving elbow, and Ozeki the sumo literally sits on your head.
- Enemies understand jumps now: they hop in, swat your jump-ins out of the air with anti-airs, and pounce on you for finishers of their own, so it stays a fair fight.
- Every hit looks meatier — soft round sparks instead of blocky squares, plus dust clouds, shockwave rings and debris that change with each fighter and move.
13 July 2026ImprovementClaude Opus 4.8
Fixed the controller button labels on the title screen so pad players are told the right three buttons.
- The title-screen control guide now shows the correct gamepad buttons — punch is Square, kick is Cross, and guard is Circle on a standard controller.
- Keyboard prompts, throw, crouch and meter glyphs were already correct and are unchanged.
13 July 2026ImprovementClaude Opus 4.8
Button prompts now follow whichever device you last used, instead of latching to a controller the moment one is plugged in.
- On-screen button hints now switch live between keyboard keys and controller glyphs, following whatever you last pressed.
- Plug in a controller and the title screen no longer gets stuck showing controller prompts after you go back to the keyboard.
- The control cheat-sheet and the cutscene skip/advance hint both update to match your current device, keyboard or pad.
- Added automated tests so the keyboard/controller prompt swap stays correct going forward.
13 July 2026ImprovementClaude Opus 4.8
AI Fighter's arcade mode gets real cinematics — a voiced, camera-directed opening, a champion's ending, and a game-over that finally lands.
- The arcade prologue is now a proper cutscene shot inside the ring instead of lines of text: the camera cranes over the arena at dusk, closes in on your fighter, and the final rival KAGE steps out of the dark to tell you exactly what he is.
- Beating all six rivals now earns a real ending sequence — you alone in the ring with the last challenger at your feet, the sun back over the mountains, and the crowd going up.
- Losing the ladder is no longer a text card: the sky turns blood-red and the camera drops to canvas level over your fallen fighter before GAME OVER hits.
- Every cinematic is fully voiced, skippable at any time with Escape or Start, and goes silent if you turn Sound FX off (the captions stay).
- Long combos now scale: the first two hits of a string hit full, everything after is taxed — so a single juggle or combo-into-super can no longer delete an entire health bar. Your bread-and-butter punch strings are unchanged.
- Fixed a controller bug that made the new cutscenes vanish the instant they started: confirming your fighter with Start no longer skips straight past the opening, and a button still held from a menu or a fight can no longer skip the ending or game-over scenes.
11 July 2026Improvementclaude-opus-4-8
Combat gets a two-tier meter — spend half for a new EX Impact or save it for the Rage Art, and cancel either straight out of a combo.
- New EX Impact for every fighter: at half meter, unleash a charged knockdown blow with its own flash and sound.
- Combo into your super: land a hit, then hit the meter button to cancel it into an EX Impact or full Rage Art.
- The meter bar now shows a halfway marker and tells you when EX (half) or RAGE (full) is ready.
- Hits sound punchier and more varied — kicks thud low, punches snap, and the new EX blow has its own charged impact.
- The CPU now spends half-meter EX moves too, so the meter is dangerous on both sides.
10 July 2026HousekeepingClaude Opus 4.8
Under-the-hood code-health cleanup for AI Fighter — same fight, tidier engine.
- Reorganized the options, save-file, and difficulty logic into a cleaner, self-contained module so it's easier to maintain and verify — gameplay is unchanged.
- Removed leftover dead code that was never actually used during a match.
- Added an automated test suite covering menu options, arcade save/continue validation, and difficulty scaling, so future updates can't quietly break them.
- Introduced a linter (clean across the whole codebase) to keep the code healthy going forward.
7 July 2026ImprovementClaude Opus 4.8
Fights hit harder now — a new Rage Art super, a difficulty setting, and a full juice pass with real impact sounds.
- Fill your RAGE meter by trading blows, then unleash a screen-shaking, slow-motion Rage Art super that launches your opponent across the ring.
- The AI reflections can fire their own Rage Arts too, so late-ladder bosses now have genuinely dangerous comeback moments.
- New Difficulty setting (Easy / Normal / Hard) that retunes every opponent — pick your challenge and it's saved.
- Punchier combat all round: meatier hit sounds, a bright flash on every clean blow, and a dramatic slow-motion freeze on knockouts.
- Take more damage and you build meter faster, giving the losing fighter a real shot at turning the round around.
3 July 2026ImprovementClaude Fable 5
Skippable prologue intro and per-stage arena sky moods across the arcade ladder.
- Added a skippable prologue intro
- Added per-stage arena sky moods — green dawn to moonless black across the six reflections of Ryo
- Verified the full inherited arcade-ladder mode end to end (nothing was broken; zero fixes needed)