Goldenflame Dragon has posted a couple of news updates to the website of his online-playable, Ultima 4-like game: The Dark Unknown. The first concerns death and loot, systems he was able to implement within the game:

January 17, 2012: Death and loot

I did in fact take Nov mostly off, and got some writing done. Dec had the holidays and let’s be honest, Jan has The Old Republic, but I’m still getting some work done.

Stuff can be fought in combat and can die. Check out this screenshot for a look at it. And now as of last night the Search command is implemented and monsters can drop loot. I’d call that pretty important!

One new browser issue- FF on some OSX installs has a redraw issue that manifests pretty badly in DU. Seems to replace my black tiles (for places with no LOS, for instance) with whatever it last saw there. Since sometimes that is the contents of another tab in the browser, I’m going to assume that the problem here isn’t in my code and just hope it fixes itself like the FF6 issue did.

More recently (just this month, in fact), he put some more work into the how the game handles combat:

February 5, 2012: More combat

You can now actually leave the combat map after a fight. Seemed like a useful thing.

The OSX FF draw bug is still present in FF10.0. Will keep an eye on it.

The version of the game and editor under the DEMOS tab is now up to date!

You can find a web-only playable demo of the game, in its alpha state, here (along with its map editor). Though at present The Dark Unknown is only playable in a browser, it’s worth noting that (as is stated in the project entry) Goldenflame’s ultimate goal is “to give players the option to either play the game online, via his website, or download and play it on their own computers. Whether that latter goal will be realized by means of a client or an actual standalone game is not yet clear.”