Goldenflame Dragon has been killing it on Kickstarter, of course, having raised nearly $5,000 (from a base goal of $2,000) to support the creation of art for The Dark Unknown and its manuals. But he has also been hard at work on the game itself, and has made a fair bit of progress since last we checked in with him. At the end of November, he was working hard on monsters and spells:

* Summoned creatures will poof when the spell expires
* Standardized spell resistance.
* Coded Shockwave, Summon Ally, and Swordstrike
* Changed the time scaling between zoomed in maps (city, dungeon, etc) and world maps to 100-to-1, from 200-to-1.
* Fire elementals give off light.
* Renamed Zorns “Delvers”.

And he closed out the month with a few miscellaneous adjustments:

* Added ‘heavy’ to a few things.
* Fixed some bugs with runes
* added a cooldown system for runes
* runes that you are too tired to use again so soon are now greyed out on the Use screen.

At the start of December, Goldenflame set about implementing a new area in the game:

* Revamped cooldown for runes, giving each one a separate cooldown.
* Started map for the Lighthouse. Named the Lighthouse of Cabra for now, which is an Amber reference, but I’ll probably rename it by the time I’m done. Probably.

Also, NPC schedules still aren’t happening (albeit it sounds more like Goldenflame is trying to convince himself of this, here):

Yesterday I came up with a bit of plot that could be done _really well_ if I had NPC schedules (I wanted an NPC to let something slip, and that’s really hard to write with single keyword triggered conversations… thought maybe he’s been drinking! And decided it would be really neat to have there be something he’ll only say during the 2 hours he’s in a tavern or something) but NO DAMMIT I AM NOT ADDING A GIANT NEW FEATURE AT THIS POINT.

This was followed by a round of bug fixes:

Some minor fixes today, and I went through all the maps to make sure I’ve correctly set where the Return spell sends you from them. (Originally, from any non-world map, it sends you to the world map at the entrance to your current map- the town or dungeon entrance. Now, if you’re on or above the surface, it sends you to the main castle, and if you’re underground, it takes you to the surface in that spot.)

Wrote a bunch of dialogue, getting most of Gauntlet done and 3/4 of the rest of this stupid love tangle (optional!) subplot.

This dialogue work, however, prompted him to wonder:

Here is a question for anyone who has an opinion on the matter: After taking a poll years ago, early in the project, I modeled the conversation system after Ultima VI- you still type in keywords, but when an NPC says a keyword that they will respond to, it appears in red.

Sometimes, NPCs will say keywords they want you to say to someone else. (“Go ask Bob about dragons!”) Right now, if it’s a keyword _someone else_ will respond to, I still mark it in red, and make sure the NPC who says it has some response to it, even if it’s basically repetition.

Does this make the most sense? Would it make sense to give a keyword that you are meant to take to someone else another color?

Most recently, he discussed a number of ideas that he’s been toying with:

Ok! I think the dialogue for the love tangle sidequest is pretty much done. Need to come some special AI stuff to handle bits of it, though, so that’ll probably be tomorrow. It’s pretty deeply overcomplicated.

Started working on a function for my conversation editor to let me print out a script that’s human readable. This will help for editing later.

One of the design issues I’ve been trying to think about since very early in the project was how to discourage the player from fleeing surface combat. I could make it like U3, where you just can’t flee. But that can be brutal. On the other hand, letting you just flee without consequence makes surface exploration risk free.

An early idea was to make fleeing combat cost money. This is pretty thoroughly a gameplay mechanic only- the closest you can come to justifying it in-world would be “you’re throwing gold in front of the bandits and they get distracted and you run off”. But I didn’t have any better ideas, so it was my presumed solution for a long time. Even so, I hadn’t actually coded it in.

Yesterday, I had an idea. I hadn’t really thought about the problem since adding a karma tracker to the player. So now, my current solution is: if you flee combat, and you are not wounded to 1/5 of your max health or worse, you lose karma for fleeing. This has now been coded in. I may still add more to it- likely not the gold loss (maybe you’re stumbling and your purse spills open? IDK) but I might go with the U5 style where each time you try to flee a combat map there is a die roll to see if you successfully get away. We’ll see- this is a balance issue that I expect to revisit come time for serious playtesting. For now, the karma loss will do.

As always, Goldenflame is making great progress on The Dark Unknown. But then: have we come to expect any differently?