Goldenflame Dragon posted some significant news to The Dark Unknown’s Facebook page (which was later added to the News page on the game’s website proper):

A few minor bugfixes, one new map, and the Demo version on the website is now up to date and no longer blatantly doesn’t work.

The version under this site’s Demo tab has been broken for… a while, now, presumably. This is what I get for the overly cute method I had been using for keeping it up to date up here. I’ve replaced it with the current (as of today) development version, and it appears to work… though since it now has sound and music, it is a little slow to initially load.

You can click on over to the game’s website to play The Dark Unknown right in your browser.

Additionally, Goldenflame has also made more progress with the game’s conversation editor:

Tonight’s progress: fleshed out the conversation validator, so it checks for more things. That’s good. Then discovered that the way I was now storing conversations (I had changed it to make working in the editor more straightforward) had actually broken something. Fixed that, but realized that the implication is that I cannot just use JSON to solve my save game issues. Save/Load is going to be a lot more complicated than I was hoping. Ah well. Still progress.

And his early use of the tool seems promising:

For the first time, actually used the conversation editor to expand the game’s dialogue, and in doing so found and fixed a couple of bugs.

Also, there are now sound effects for (a) trying to move but bumping into something (wall, mountain, dragon), (b) opening a door, (c) closing a door, and (d) trying but failing to open a locked door. Thank the virtues for freesound.org.

Oh, and now once you learn a person’s name, the game will remember that you know it and you’ll see that when you (L)ook at them.

But really, it’s the updated game demo that you should all be sure to check out.