It has been a while since we last checked in with Goldenflame Dragon’s The Dark Unknown…and, as one might expect, he has made a fair bit of progress on the game since the beginning of September. (Yes, it has been that long).

Of course, Goldenflame himself took a bit of a hiatus from the project in September, but resumed working on it in the last ten days of the month:

I’ve greatly upgraded the loading screen, and now the words “The Dark Unknown” appear just as the main theme starts playing and it’s really cool and I should find a way to record it and post it.

I also realized I’m going to need art for the actual intro sequence. Thinking about what I’d like to do about that.

Started working on populating more spawners. Finishing that is a project for tomorrow, but tonight I finished making the definitions for the various groups of monsters that it is possible to find on the surface (anywhere where fighting them will take you to a separate screen with multiple enemies). For the record, there are currently 35 possible “groups”. This includes slight changes like a small pack of Headlesses (1-3) and a larger pack of Headlesses (5-8 with an optional Ettin), which will replace the former later in the game.

Monster spawners continued to be his focus for another day:

Started adding more spawners to the world. Realized that if there are actually monsters wandering around, and actually fight back, players will probably expect to die if they hit 0 hp. So, added that. Isn’t currently tested but it’s pretty simple. Had to make a new map for the land of the dead, basically, but aside from that, straightforward. Got all the spawners on the mainland planned now, and about half implemented.

Goldenflame then shifted to working on conversations:

Added a conversation to Nassau, probably going to go back through my existing conversations and (a) provide more of a description when the conversation begins, and (b) add the LOOK keyword to repeat the physical description.

He even added a familiar keyword to them:

Added a “look” response to all the currently existing conversations, and modified them to all start with a brief description of who you’re talking to.
Added the rest of the main map spawners.

Came to the conclusion that my Player Reference Card will not fit on a card and so it will have to be another small booklet. Ah well.

I’m just going to say, for the record, that “more feelies” isn’t really a liability for anything that takes its inspiration from Ultima.

Anyhow, Goldenflame then turned his attention back to monsters:

Made it so you have to get closer to monsters/animals before they’ll notice/start chasing you- I was afraid my initial values would have the entire map running after you pretty quickly. Also, made a map with spawn points and what they spawn, which was basically me sanity checking myself. But if you want to see it, it can be found here:

http://darkunknown.org/map_with_spawns.png

Warning: contains mild spoilers.

Max is how many groups a given spawner can have in the world at a time, and Leash is SoftLeash/HardLeash, meaning they won’t go outside of the SoftLeash radius unless they are chasing a target, and will never go outside the HardLeash. Most of the leashes get relaxed as the player levels up.

Tomorrow I’m going to go through and do some tweaking of how often spawners will check to see if they can spawn another monster. Then I’ll call it a day on spawners for now, unless I get inspired to populate the Distant Island and Volcano maps.

Can I just say that that map is both huge…and gorgeous?

As September drew near to its end, dialogue saw a bit more work:

Finished dialogue for Nassau (well, I’m sure I will add responses to some of the NPCs there, but they all have dialogue now). Finished and tested another spell, made some potions. And, acquired a large library of sound effects- mostly urban and scifi, but I will hopefully find some good stuff in it.

As did potions:

Finished coding the potions, one more spell (had to stop at one because I didn’t have my notes for how the next one is supposed to behave!) added a little bit of dialogue, decided that there will be multiple organizations you can join (how Skyrim!), populated some chests and decorated some rooms in the castle. Also, put up a poll in the UDIC FB page about fountains in Ultimas- would people like to hear an ambient fountain noise when adjacent to one in DU, or was that annoying? Feel free to comment and weigh in

#HowSkyrim sounds like the sort of thing that could become a popular hashtag. And continued to be Goldenflame’s focus into mid-October:

More dialogue, finished but am going to bed without testing a quest sequence that has you rescue someone from a dungeon. Oh, it isn’t done, now that I think about it, I need to write the AI for the rescued kid so she actually gets up and leaves, and then I need to test that she can tell when you clear the monsters.

He also showed The Dark Unknown off a bit:

Naturally, when sitting down to show DU to a friend who is a big Ultima fan, I find some major bugs. Today I fixed a large bug with the light system and a minor one with the world creature AI. Also listened to many, many sound effects and found a few I’ll use.

Sound effects for the game also got some attention:

Finished going through a large sound effects collection I got access to a little while back. 6G of sound effects. If I do give fountains (and/or fires, coastlines, etc) ambient noise, I know what it’ll be now. I think at this point I may only need one or two more sound effects, though there are a bunch I still wouldn’t mind improving.

And then it was back to dialogue…and sleeping at inns:

I tripped and coded sleeping at an inn, just to get around the awkward conversational situations where an innkeeper would ask if you wanted a room for the night. So, fine, ok, you can sleep for the night, and get healed this way.

Some dialogue fleshed out, some dialogue UI updated, and a bug in closing doors that had been opened during a previous game session fixed.

The inn scripting needed another day of work, however:

A good day. Fixed sleeping at an inn such that you actually spent the gold; was able to play and finish two quests (including a subquest required to finish one of them), which was a major milestone goal. Also, was randomly playing along and discovered that there were drakes out in the world who were flying over the ocean and then drowning, because code meant to punish you for letting the Waterwalk spell wear off while you are over water didn’t take flying NPCs into account. I am just _so pleased_ that the game is at a point where I can learn things are going on that I am totally not interacting with.

Just made a graphic for a training dummy- just wanted something to put in barracks and such, but I will probably wind up modifying the attack code to let you perform attacks on it just because. Won’t do you any good, though.

And now, in November, after fixing a few bugs, Goldenflame has…again turned his attention to dialogue:

Added dialogue to several people in the castle, fleshed out a couple other dialogue bits. Also, fixed a bug wherein NPCs could step onto the PC’s space.

Oh, and he built some new graphics, too:

…a couple of new graphics (mostly mods of existing ones) to flesh out the towns a bit, and 2/3 of a system to let you export saved games so you can save them in a file, move them between computers/browsers, and, for those who like that sort of thing, edit them. (Granted, that’s partially so I can more easily playtest. I _could_ make them harder to edit deliberately, but… why? If people want a 300 strength, more power to them.)

As usual, a pretty impressive body of progress by Goldenflame.