It has been a while since we last checked in with Goldenflame Dragon to see what progress he has made on The Dark Unknown. And as it happens, he has made quite a bit of progress on the game in the intervening month-and-a-bit!

For starters, he has two excellent pieces of artwork to show off, which will grace the bestiary in the game’s manual. The first is a giant rat, and the second is a truly fearsome-looking giant bat, both of which were drawn by Indi Martin of Tortoise & Hare Creations. (Indi’s own comments on each image are included below.)

So, I landed an awesome opportunity to do the full bestiary for an upcoming game called “Dark Unknown,” and I’m really excited because it’s all b/w linework. That’s something I wanted to improve this year, so the timing is beyond perfect. This is my first piece for the game, enjoy!

“Giant Rat” – painted for The Dark Unknown, shared with permission here. Copyright Tapestry of Ages Games 2015 – check them out at darkunknown.org

Giant Bat! – 2015 – Indi Martin, Painted for The Dark Unknown, shared with permission. smile emoticon Really loving this project, can’t wait until I can finish a lot of these other projects and focus a bit more on this one!

About a week into March, Goldenflame — after taking a brief hiatus from the project — jumped back into development by adding a new keyboard command to The Dark Unknown, thus enabling a useful feature:

Back in the saddle. Added a new keyboard command: (O)ptions. This is a second interface within which you can toggle the sound and music, and also a place where you can enable or disable tablet UI and, in an idea I didn’t even have until I started working on the options page, an autosave. Means I’ll have to write the autosave but that’s actually not too bad. Will try to do that and continue working on the tablet UI tomorrow.

Since on a tablet you can’t _hit_ O until you already have the tablet UI, there will be a second way to enable it- swiping downward across the play area. This will cause the tablet UI to come out under the existing game space. Once it’s out, clicking on the play area will be taken as commands to move in that direction.

The tablet UI proved a bit more frustrating than intended, which resulted in a design change. But along the way, another keyboard command was implemented in mid-March:

Some progress over the past week: swiping down turned out to not work well for enabling tablet UI, for reasons which are unclear, so for the moment it is changed to double-tap. Finished the maps for the undersea dungeon, including some fun mini-puzzles. Added a (Z)stats page to show what spell effects and other afflictions are currently affecting the player. Added a (Z)stats page for how many R_____s you have acquired, which only shows up once you have at least one so the existence of that screen doesn’t spoil the fact that there are R_____S to be acquired.

I’m assuming that R_____s is meant to mean Runes, because hey…this is an Ultima fan game after all. Whatever they are, they also received some attention as March’s days dwindled:

Working on being able to use R____s, and in the meantime, fixed a bug with trying to use an item from your inventory when you have no usable items in your inventory. This is now handled… more gracefully.

And sadly, Goldenflame ended up scrapping much of his work on the R____s:

Sometimes, you have to kill your darlings.

It was a cool idea. It was a mechanic I would love to do more with. But, it was complex, it was unrelated to the rest of the game, the UI was really obnoxious, and I didn’t want to spoil the existence of it by teaching you how to use the UI in the manual. So I’m ripping it out.

There are still R______s, and everything I’ve said below is still in the game, but a mechanic by which you could utilize them in combinations is being removed for now. So it goes.

There’s been a small flurry of updates posted to the project’s Facebook page in the last 24 hours, by the way. The Undersea Grotto — which we saw a screenshot of, sort of, previously — received some attention:

Fair amount of progress today. If you have the right stuff you can open the entrance to the Undersea Grotto; added code to do an earthquake effect, shaking the screen back and forth, which is used in the aforementioned opening; remembered belatedly that terrain can’t give off light and had to convert all of the glowing coral in the Grotto into features, which was tedious but is now done. Next up is allowing you to open the Palace of the Skies and Lava Tubes dungeons, which should be easy now that the groundwork is laid.

As did the Palace of the Skies:

Opening the path to the Palace of the Skies is done, and I’ve discovered but not fixed a bug in the Return spell. That and opening the Lava Tubes, up next tomorrow.

And yes, as promised, Goldenflame did indeed work on the Lava Tubes:

Fixed a bug in trying to load when there is no saved game; opening the entrance to Lava Tubes done; Return spell finished; Spell list very slightly revamped.

As always, impressive progress from Goldenflame…and, in this case, from Indi Martin as well! I’m looking forward to exploring the world of The Dark Unknown, and I’d very much enjoy doing so if the entirety of its manual is as well-illustrated as the critters above.