Goldenflame Dragon hasn’t been slacking off from working on The Dark Unknown while its Kickstarter campaign is underway. But before we get into his progress since then, we should loop back and quickly look at what he accomplished in the days leading up to the campaign’s launch; our last news update about the project was from before that happened.

In early November, whilst preparing for the Kickstarter campaign, Goldenflame found and fixed a few notable bugs:

Fixed bug with being attacked by a monster group on the world map: you weren’t properly being put back in the timeline so the monsters were all getting turns and beating you up.

Modified some NPC stats to make their behavior on the map (in re seeking out and attacking the player) make more sense.

…fixed a bug where sometimes a monster group on the world map would not move when it was within 5 tiles of the PC.

Fixed a bug where when a monster on the world map attacks you, it wasn’t properly taken out of the game after you finished the fight.

Fixed a few minor bugs. Have at least one major AI bug left, which I’ll be looking at this week.

And a few days later, even as he celebrated reaching his base goal on Kickstater, he kept hard at work on the game:

…the KS going doesn’t mean I should take a break from actually working on the game itself. Today I mostly did but I wrote one character’s dialogue, bringing me up to 28 dialogue trees written (some are for the same character at various points, so 24 actual characters have dialogue- and that includes some boring ones like guards), which is probably a little under 1/4 of the total I need to write.

Also on the fly invented another organization in the world, and added a section to the Almanac where I will describe some of them.

In fact, he ended up adding a fair bit of new content:

* Added loot to the chests in Palace of the Skies
* Character creation no longer automatically saves over the existing saved game.
* Added “Shadow” versions of many of the terrain tiles. You’ll see what those are for later. smile emoticon
* Started the map for Tharock’s castle

Earlier this week, Goldenflame made a bunch of changes & additions to the magic system in the game:

Worked on magic today. Intended to try to finish the L5 spells, made one (Paralyze), then discovered that one L4 spell wasn’t done yet, got halfway through that, and decided I needed to standardize some things about the spells, so I spent the evening making a spreadsheet and run-on sentences. Spell resistance is currently case by case, which is pretty stupid, so that’ll be standardized but it isn’t done yet. Did some minor fixes though-

* Cure now tells you what it has cured; Cure infused now heals you a little bit as well. (There was a time when Cure only removed Poison, and you needed to Infuse Cure to heal Disease, but that was contrary to even my own expectations, so now normal Cure gets rid of both and Infused cure gets rid of both and heals you.)
* Distract now correctly reduces the target’s chance to hit and no longer makes it negative.
* Poison Cloud now actually checks the distance from the chosen center when determining what to poison; Infused Poison Cloud adds a little up front damage to the poison.
* The slow effect from Iceball no longer has a duration based on the world map scale rather than a combat map scale.
* Telekinesis now will not work on usable items that are labeled as “heavy” unless you Infuse it. I still need to actually label things “heavy”.
* Firefields from Wall of Fire now have a duration. (They used to just last until the map left memory. I don’t think that was particularly abusable, but it is contrary to expectation.)

More recently, in addition to adding the Smite spell, he also launched a new website:

New website!

darkunknown.org is currently deprecated while I decide how to integrate it, and tapestryofages.com is my new website. I spent all day yesterday setting up a forum (by which I mean, 5 hours trying to set up a weird forum that required a ton of tweaking, then I threw out all the work and spent 15 minutes setting up phpBB), so feel free to register and say hi!

Indeed, you can head on over to the new Tapestry of Ages Games website, and check out its forum. And if you haven’t yet, consider chipping in for The Dark Unknown’s Kickstarter campaign, the proceeds from which will be used to pay the lovely and talented Indi Martin for more art for the game’s manual.