@flash slams the stage (or a single sprite) to a solid color and lets it fade back, giving you a hard visual punctuation mark for a single frame in time. Reach for it on impacts, camera-flash bulbs, magic bursts, lightning, screen-clearing transitions, or anywhere you want the eye to register a jolt before the scene resumes underneath.

Because it defaults to white at full alpha over a third of a second, the out-of-the-box call reads as a classic photo-flash or explosion beat. Swap color and alpha for softer or thematic hits - a dim red flash for a gunshot, a pale blue flash for a spell - and keep duration short; anything past half a second starts to feel like a fade rather than a flash.

Leave target empty for whole-frame flashes tied to big story beats. Set target to a sprite tag when you want the hit to read as belonging to one character or object - a portrait flashing white on a slap, for instance - without blowing out the rest of the scene.

wait true is the common case, since a flash usually anchors a beat you want the player to sit with before dialogue continues, as in the canonical example. Set wait false when you're layering @flash with other effects, such as a @shake at the same moment, so the two overlap instead of running back to back.

Alpha below 1 tints rather than replaces the scene, which is useful for a lighter gut-punch than a full whiteout. Very low alpha values paired with a long duration can end up looking like a color grade shift instead of a flash, so keep the two parameters in tension with each other.