A sixth item in a 14-item list
On Sunday 30 August, two days after Legacy of the Bloodmoon launched, Poncle posted the 1.16.107 hotfix notes for Vampire Survivors. The list runs to 14 items and the sixth sits between a fix for Prestige skin stat bonuses and a fix for low-res stage icons: 'Fixed FlashingVFX and Screenshake options for Descent Into Misery, Shimmering Sands, Damnation, LunarFlight'.
Nothing in the note describes the failure. Our reading is that the two options exist and that, on those four stages, they weren't reaching everything they were meant to. One plain line, and it's the one that touches our own settings menu.
October 2023, April 2025, August 2026
The notes have had to say this before. The 1.7.0 Whiteout patch in October 2023 lists 'Removed various flashes if Flashing VFX is disabled', and the Emerald Diorama notes in April 2025 list 'Fixed Intermittent flashing light on OTC stage when Flashing VFX are disabled'. With the 2026 hotfix that is three notes in under three years in which the switch is mended to reach something it had missed.
We don't read that as carelessness. A note that names the stages is what makes the pattern visible at all, and it gives every other team building this kind of game a worked example to learn from.
Every addition either asks or it doesn't
Our guess is that the cause is structural rather than anybody's mistake. The Bloodmoon launch post lists 16+ new weapons and evolutions and 1 new very large stage, and each of them brings effects of its own. A toggle in the options menu protects only the effects that consult it.
The Epilepsy Society puts epilepsy at around 1 in 100 people and photosensitive epilepsy at around 3% of those, and adds that flashing or patterned effects can make people with or without epilepsy feel disorientated, uncomfortable or unwell. In a genre where the screen fills with overlapping effects by design, the options menu carries more weight than a toggle looks like it should.
Where the risk sits for us
FOXFIRE has its own pair in the accessibility settings. Screen Motion (full, reduced or off) reduces or removes camera shake and non-essential motion punch, and Flash Intensity (standard, reduced or off) does the same for non-essential full-screen and impact flashes. Both sit behind one policy that is written to be presentation only: nothing in it changes simulation, difficulty, rewards or progression. The July build notes cover the first slice of that work, including the photosensitivity notice the game opens on at every launch.
The difference between the two is where a new effect can slip through. Shake is routed through the camera rig, which applies Screen Motion to the shake, the roll punch and the zoom punch at the point it builds the final view, so an effect that raises a shake through the rig doesn't need to know the setting exists. Scripted camera moves, like the shudder when you die, run in a separate lane the setting doesn't reach yet. Flashes have no single choke point like that: more than a dozen separate files read the Flash Intensity scale for themselves, each deciding how to apply it, which is the setup that lets a new effect go out unscaled.
The camera is doing more work for us than it would in a game that mostly holds still. We put our bet this way in June, in the survivor-likes we tune ours against:
Vampire Survivors works because movement is a stale machine as old as Snake; FOXFIRE is the bet that survivor-like fans want the version where movement is an immersive part of the challenge. That bet might be wrong. We won't know until launch.
the FOXFIRE team
If movement is the challenge, the camera is how a player reads it. That makes Screen Motion a bigger dial for us than a comfort setting, because it changes how the ship's movement is presented without touching how the ship moves, and the ship's physics never reads that policy.
What we take from item six is a question for every effect we add from here: does it ask the policy before it draws?
More from Dispatches
- What happens when you hand FOXFIRE to strangers, three days at Supanova Sydney and the 90+ item improvement list that came out of it.
- We made the Viridian Storm fair, the July build notes covering the Stage 2 rework, the Cyrex boss fight and the first slice of our accessibility foundation.