Goldenflame Dragon has been incredibly busy, and has made some impressive progress on The Dark Unknown over the last week or so. For example, it would seem that his attempt to implement a system whereby inanimate objects could engage in conversation was a success:

There is now a door that talks to you if you try to use it. I’d written most of the code a few days ago but hadn’t had the chance to test it until last night- there were some bugs, which have now been worked out. Had to add a bunch of special cases to things to handle an inanimate object with a conversation path, but it turns out to actually be kinda cool.

Conversations in the game can now also handle “yes/no”-type questions:

Added the ability for conversations to handle yes/no questions. Wrote some dialogue. Saw Guardians of the Galaxy instead of making some new tile art like I planned. No regrets.

And he’s also working to ensure that the player’s character will always be unique on screen, by means of variable colour palettes:

Tonight’s project: Making palette swaps of the various PC class graphics. On character creation, I’ll give the PC options that are the standard Avatar graphic (unique to the PC) and the palette swapped versions of other classes, which might not be unique (would be a shame to not make use of them if I make a whole set!) but would be rarer than the normal ones, and would never be used on monsters, so the PC will always be unique on any combat screen unless s/he starts slaughtering civilians.

Sadly, he did forget one important detail:

I don’t remember where the Magic Axe was going to come from. Time to see if I can find some old notes.

In other news, I have a list of ‘adventure sites’- mostly dungeons, but a few towers and ruins and the like. I was starting to feel like it was going to be hard to fill them all, so I just now made a list of all the quest objects in the game.

…I need a few more dungeons.

The game’s walkthrough also saw some updates made:

Did some walkthrough work, came up with a really cool adventure location idea. The Lost Castle and the Key of Shadows. Might try to make those maps over the weekend.

The trap disarmament system was also tweaked a bit:

Tonight: modified the odds of disarming a trap, made it so if you find the trap you get a hint as to how difficult it is (“simple” “complex” “challenging”).

Added sound effects to drinking a potion and walking on water.

Added graphics: Ring of Mana and Key of Shadows.

Finally, last Friday, Goldenflame uploaded a cryptic image to the Ultima Dragons Facebook group:

The outer symbols appear to correspond to the four classic alchemical elements, though I’m not quite sure what the fifth element (heh) depicted might be.