Monster Ambassador Postmortem

While Monster Ambassador will still be receiving updates for extra species & biomes, the plot is finished! After almost a year of monthly updates as a solo dev, it's bittersweet to have reached such a big milestone.
And new games are on the horizon!

Now it's time for a look back on the good, the bad, and the ugly of producing my largest game to-date!

The Beginning

Monster Ambassador: Redux is a sequel / reboot of the first Monster Ambassador game created in 2017. With that came some structure; there were species in the world, a general game-flow I wanted to recreate, and characters I could reference.

The code for the original Monster Ambassador was very rickety, held together with some old string and a lot of ifs and but(t)s. None of it was usable, so I was faced with the opportunity to change up a lot of the old mechanics.

No More Violent Diplomacy

One of the biggest changes in Redux was the introduction of dialogue-based combat.

I knew early on that I wanted a emotion-based system, where the player would choose a tone to interact with the monster, and the monster would react positively or negatively.

Why the change?

The old battle system was classic 'attack the monster, monster attack you'- but as an ambassador, it didn't make a lot of sense to be attacking the monsters you're befriending! In the new system, you gain the monster's respect until they stop attacking you, and when you've befriended enough members of a species they send two ambassadors to your embassy.

More Improvements

The original actions were labelled as 'talk', 'seduce', and 'intimidate'. Each monster species was labelled internally as social, sexual, or strong respectively. These actions slowly proved to be limiting as far as dialogue went; I wanted to write interactions that fell vaguely outside of seduction, for example, but still involved a similar feeling.

Generally as well, I like to minimize the amount of text in my games for greater accessibility, so the actions were changed to simplified faces instead:

Easing Up on the Art Load

Monster Ambassador games focus on allowing the player to choose what gender(s) they want to encounter and be. In the original Monster Ambassador, every monster species had a male and female ambassador, and the player could engage in a NSFW scene with them as either a boy or a girl.
In terms of art, this translated into four art pieces for each species- MxM, MxF, FxM, and FxF. It was a ton of work, and to save on time we had to make the scenes for each species mirrors of each other- so if you had a scene with both the male and female Lamia ambassador, they'd look almost exactly the same.
It also meant that most positions had to be achievable by both males and females, to make the iterating of the scenes easier.

I also wanted to include a choice of skin color for the player, which I hadn't included in the original game but had in a follow-up title, Courtship. Unfortunately, my system in Courtship was to create four variations of each scene for each available skin choice- an unrealistic art load again for Redux.

The Changes

To me, this felt like a lot of effort going into work that generally didn't benefit the player. For Redux, I made some changes. When the game was first released, the player could choose a gender, and then only specific characters would engage in scenes. So the Taural girl might be interested in a romp, but the Taural boy would take a pass. However, this still meant that I was creating two scenes for each in-game interaction; one where the player was male, the other female. The problem of positioning the player in the art remained; they still had to be in a place that would look good for a guy or girl. 

To make it easier to position the player, all choices involved a penis, and there was no true 'female' option:

You can see how that's not ideal.

Mid-game Switchup

I fixed this halfway through development by introducing the Gender Pendant; the player's gender would automatically swap to the labelled gender when engaging in a NSFW scene, so they could choose to engage or not as their own decision. Each monster would have a preferred gender to engage with, and I was only creating one, higher-quality scene for each engagement.

The Collection

The original game had only 7 monster species you could encounter; with my new streamlined code and processes, the player can encounter just under 30 different species as of this devlog.

Each monster species has two ambassadors, a male and female character that can be spoken to at the Embassy after befriending their species. Additionally, there are 8+ variations that the player can encounter in the wild!

Stuck on Stickers and Statues

Each species has a page in a guidebook that is unlocked after collecting all 5 stickers for that species- this also unlocks a statue that can be purchased in the shop. Certain monsters have extra content and dialogue after you buy their statues!


While I did enjoy doing this part, and I will continue to put out content for it, in retrospect this increased the potential for content to a level I couldn't quite achieve. Monsters feel incomplete if they don't have content unlocked with their statues, but only a few have it.

Adventures in Advertising

The original Monster Ambassador was posted on only a few external sites, and found most of its audience simply by existing on Newgrounds.
Redux is available on both Newgrounds and itch, and in the beginning of development I didn't really advertise anywhere.
I realized after a few months that it was something I should be doing, and I advertised on a number of sites, including:

• Furaffinity (art)
• F95Zone
• Forum.fenexo
• e621
• Reddit

Of these, Reddit quickly rose to the top for engagement. The other sites gave little returns at best, and at worst put my game up for pirates to distribute over the rest of the web. 

F95 in particular is advertised on a lot of forums, but actively discourages even free games from posting the original download link to itch.io. 

The Best and The Less Best

If I were to go back, there are some things I'd do differently:

• Advertise on Reddit from day one
• Avoid F95zone and other sites that encourage 3rd party uploads over creator download links
• Minimize content quantity over quality design (no statues  + statue content)
• Add juice from the beginning! (most was added mid-game)
• More side / discoverable content in areas (most biomes only have one extra scene of interest)

And there are things that worked really well!

• Color variations for monster species (easy to make, reduce grind fatigue in-game)
• Updating old art (to an extent: remaking the worst quality pieces = good, over-focusing on old content instead of new = bad)
• Fun characters- a wide variety of personalities to interact with
• Lots of discoverables (monster species / colors, extra scenes, stickers, new biomes)

Art Updates

Here are some of the art updates that were implemented over development! I tried not to over-focus on remaking old art, but there were some cases where I felt it was worth taking the time out of development of new content to refresh the old.

The Future of Monster Ambassador Games

Monster Ambassador: Redux was an incredible adventure. I'm looking forward to the final updates for the game, which will add in new monster species, biomes, and character engagements.

For a future revamp of Redux, I'd like to focus on three big features:

1.  The Save feature
   Saving was implemented very close to the beginning of Monster Ambassador as a beta feature. Due to limitations of Unity's WebGL software, I likely won't ever be able to implement saving for the web version of the game. 
   Up to now, I've left the original code for the save system alone, as new features were constantly being added that would need to be implemented into the save system. This meant that it only saves the player's gold, and which monster's they've befriended. It has a couple glitches, like removing the ambassadors from the embassy until you encounter them again. For a future version, I'd like to make a save system that's 100%!
2. Android Build
   The most-requested feature, but one I couldn't implement until the end. Like the save system, a mobile build will require a full rework that would need to be redone with each new release. For a future version I'd like to develop with android in mind from day one!
3. SFW version
   Redux has a lot of content that doesn't involve getting under the pants of monster ambassadors. The entire main plot of the game involves no sex by design; it's completely optional if you engage with the ambassadors at the Embassy. A future version I'd love to be able to cleanly separate out the adult content to have an optional SFW version! 

Until then, I'll see you at the next update- and in future games!

Best farewells,
~ Kiwi