The Dark Unknown: Experience and Karma; Opening Doors


Goldenflame Dragon continues making improvements to The Dark Unknown. It’s worth noting that he was travelling for much of last week, which put a bit of a slowdown on his work on the game:

I’ve been traveling for the past week, thus the silence. Some minor changes-

Making undead and constructs immune to disease and poison

adding a “isHostileTo(who)” function, because while randomwalk checks to stop you from walking into a Field it totally allows the castle’s cook to wander into a fireplace and die.

However, having returned from his voyages, he has been back to his usual aggressive work schedule:

Back from traveling. Stuff done since last post:

* XP gain now affected by karma. This was the original purpose of karma but I hadn’t fully implemented it yet.
* Enemies now correctly pathfind through closed doors if they can open them while looking for new targets in combat.
* Added XP_MAX of 9999.
* Taking a fractional amount of damage that doesn’t change your visible HP total now reports the damage as “scratched” rather than the usual damage reports.
* You already couldn’t move onto the castle entrance tile _from_ the north, now you also can’t move north from the castle entrance.
* Maps have short forms of their names for the save screen.
* Started implementing “Move Opens Doors”.

That last point, by the way, has since been finished:

The option “Move opens doors” is now implemented. I made the executive decision that it doesn’t work on secret doors.

Also, the game now only grabs the keystrokes it actually responds to. Primarily this allows F5 to work (which is a mixed blessing, in as much as it might cause loss of progress) and allows laptop buttons that adjust volume or brightness or the like to work while the game has focus.

I’m going to try and stay more on top of these updates, because (as you can see) they accumulate rather quickly. Goldenflame puts a lot of work into The Dark Unknown, but he also documents his progress on it quite frequently. If you want to stay as current as possible on that, you should really like The Dark Unknown on Facebook.