Spooky Scary Halloween-Unrelated Flash FS Update

Greetings again, from Blue Bishop!

If you’re on our Patreon, then you’ll soon find a new version of our “Flash FS” alpha available for download. The focus for this iteration is primarily on re-introducing and refining character creation.

Now, I don’t plan to write up a blog post every single step of the way; I think we’d all enjoy discovering new things on our own, rather than being told them outright. That being said, there’s a key change here that I think is worth highlighting to avoid potential confusion or misinformation.

Specifically, this relates to us phasing out banning in favour of a more robust version of warding.  With this, you’ll still be able to avoid random encounters with selected monster types, but they’ll still remain available for some events and quests. We’re also reassessing a couple of the ward categories to be more concise. Finally, sexual content rules (such as anal level) also still remain.

Quite honestly, the old method of outright monster banning has been a lot of trouble from a design standpoint.  This was especially prevalent when a banned creature was integral for a key quest or for NPC progression, basically making that task unwinnable.  This cut out a lot of potential storytelling options and kept you, the player, from the desirable content that would otherwise follow that task.

Here’s what you can expect to come (in time) from the improvements to warding.  Some of these will appear as those mechanics are built and others are guidelines for the devs to keep in mind.

• Warded creatures will never be randomly encountered. The exception to this rule is where you go overboard and ward everything in a given zone. At which point the wards are suspended for that encounter roll.
• This is mostly the case for random events, as well. The exception may be events where the monster doesn’t really “do” anything; I think players will abide the game acknowledging the mere existence of a warded monster, for the sake of keeping event lists relatively plentiful.
• Players will (almost) never be forced to have sex with a monster for player victory. Way back in ye olde times, this would happen a lot. It should happen less now, but moving forward, we want to avoid these instances (almost) entirely... I say almost, because there may be some rare or extreme cases where we may break this rule, but only when it’s sufficiently justified and, overall, we want to make these the exception rather than the rule.
• Quests which require you to fight a certain -- potentially warded -- monster will point you in their direction so you can hunt for them, which won’t be affected by warding. Some quests already make compromises in the game when it comes to warding (such as by changing the target), so we’re likely to carry those forward -- but this, by no means, suggests that a writer is obligated to provide a compromise for every time a ward conflicts with a task.
• Additionally, we have no intention of entirely suspending sexual content for the warded monster, which includes player loss (should you lose fair and square to them) or during certain narrative-driven moments.  For the latter, there will often be an indication as to what you’re getting into, so you need not be completely blind-sided.
• Chances are, any monster part of the “Humorous” ward list (now called “Silly”) will never be a part of the main storyline, so you can avoid them to your heart’s content.

Now, that being said, as much as we want to make an effort to appeal to the tastes of our players, there’s going to be a point where we, as the developers of this game, have to draw the line. I won’t patronize you by going on a rote diatribe over ownership, rather I’d underline that we can only go so far before the entire endeavour becomes absurd.

After one too many compromises, it then becomes a question of whether or not we should have sex in the game at all, which isn’t what anybody’s signed up for here. It’s as simple as that.

I understand that, if you’re really into banning, it might be a bummer for you to lose this functionality, but it ended up going too far with what we were willing to let the player modify regarding their experience.  This improved warding method should provide what you were looking for without preventing you from partaking in quests and storylines you might otherwise have enjoyed.

Anyways, while you can expect to see a lot of changes to existing mechanics as things progress, this should hopefully be the only significant mechanic you’ll see removed outright. In either case, the goal is to greatly improve upon the old version while still being “Flexibile Survival” as we know it. And with that, I return one more to my coding cave!