It has been about a month since we last checked in with Goldenflam Dragon regarding his progress in creating The Dark Unknown. And while it would appear that the project experienced a mid-month hiatus of roughly two weeks, Goldenflame still put in a commendable amount of work on the project last month.

At the start of the month, work on a new spell was finished:

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.

Thereafter, Goldenflame shifted his focus to the game’s audio:

Last day or two I’ve been revamping the sound system, using sound.js. This doesn’t actually give me any more options than I used to have, or really do anything new and different for the most part, but I am hoping that it will provide a better fallback situation for linux if nothing else, as FF on linux currently dies due to the sounds not loading properly.

Also converted a bunch of sounds into a single audio sprite. Again, this change should be invisible to the user.

Along the way, he uncovered a rather amusing bug:

Hahahahaha… ok, I finished the conversion to sound.js, and correspondingly the conversion to using an audio sprite for the sound effects. Except… if you walk fast enough, you’ll get random other sounds from the sprite instead of a footstep, now and again. Step step step Light spell step step Open door step Unlock…

Yeah, that’s not tenable. I’ll see if I need to put more space between them, but… it’s not a matter of it running long enough to hit the next sound erroneously, it’s hitting various random other sounds and starting them at the beginning. It’s just plain screwing up which sound to call. So, might have to break this out again. Ah well. It was a good thought.

And shortly before going on hiatus — on April 12th, to be precise — he put a bunch of work into the game:

Lot of work today. First time in a while where I spent the majority of the day just working on DU. Felt good.

Know more about the details of the sound problem- it’s not actually skipping around, it’s just playing sounds for MUCH longer than it should be (sometimes playing through three entire sounds in the sprite). Researching avenues. Not really a big deal, as I can always break it back out again, or possibly just the footsteps, depending.

In any case, basically finished the first level of the dungeon Pit of Despair. Discovered that the code currently can’t support having a key to a specific door (well, neither Ultima IV nor V did!), so I added that, though there are ways around needing it; hooked up a bunch of switches to various jail cell doors, and dropping certain portcullises onto monsters will kill the monsters outright, if you can time it right!

And with that remark, Goldenflame — and The Dark Unknown’s Facebook page — fell silent until the 26th:

Spell coding, this week and so far this weekend. Spell graphics now work as a separate layer of graphics over the main display (I couldn’t just use the code for combat animations because reasons), I finished the Distract spell, and tonight I spent a while writing the spellbook section of the Almanac, getting the first three circles written. More tomorrow.

Work on magic did indeed continue for another day:

More magic progress. I’d hoped to get all the first level spells coded by the end of the weekend, but I hit the unexpected snag that the last 1st level spell is also the first spell I’ve written that targets, and that turned out to need support. I think I’ve finished that, now, so the rest of the spell will be pretty simple.

And a day later, work on the first level of magic was, at least, complete:

Finished the last of the first level spells. Next up, however, is double checking that I didn’t get lazy and assume the caster was the player. I definitely did while coding Vulnerability, which is the one that targets, since monsters will not need to use the game’s target cursor. Got that fixed in that one spell, but I should double check the others. It being 1am, however, I shall do it tomorrow.

Ok!
* All first level spells work
* Return spell now correctly sends you home if you’re already on the surface
* Better handling of stacking spells
* Implemented diminishing returns from stacking spells
* Flame Blade spell now gives off a little bit of light. Pretty much just for flavor.

And he ended the month with still yet more work on…well…one spell in particular:

Not as productive as I’d hoped to be today, but I did fix the fact that all NPCs were getting spawned with 10hp, add the Illusion creature to get summoned by the spell of the same name, and I cleaned the heck out of my work desk today. So I’m ok with it.

As always, this is a great amount of progress that Goldenflame has made. I can’t wait to see what May brings.