Goldenflame Dragon has, of course, been hard at work on The Dark Unknown in recent weeks. Soon after the game’s Kickstarter campaign wrapped up, he made some changes to the Underworld area of…ah…the world:

Greatly increased the role of the Underworld. Added lieutenants to the big bad which will need to be slain to get into the final dungeon. (Also astonished myself by being able to spell ‘lieutenants’ without needing to look it up. Bizarrely enough I think I can blame that on my LARP character.)

* Plotted some more dynamic plot points. This may or may not count as feature creep, but I really do think they might make the game stand out.

* Came up with a straightforward way to get around a limitation in my conversation system. It will now be possible to have more than two possible responses to a single keyword, based on flags set.

* Code tightened and “use strict” implemented.

* Added one more book and three more keys to the items and graphics.

Am debating changing the inventory/use system to show images as well as text in the player’s list of stuff. Partially because there are some items that have unique graphics but are given directly to the player by NPCs and so will never otherwise be seen.

Soon thereafter, he also wrapped up work on the romantic subplot:

Finished coding the AIs for the scripted sequences in the love tangle sideplot. Started to test them, ran into some other AI bugs, and am now reworking the system I have for logging debugging information to make it more granular. But, stopping now because I have to get up in the morning to get on a plane. Holidays, ahoy! Have a good one, everyone! (Though I’ll hopefully get some stuff done on the plane, and will be working on stuff during my time visiting family, never fear.)

Or, well, almost:

Finished refactoring debug mode. Started testing the AI parts of the love tangle- one worked surprisingly flawlessly, the other needed some tweaks but now I’m trying to figure out why he’s meleeing me with his missile weapon. So that’s tomorrow’s project.

And on Christmas Eve, Goldenflame squashed what was — to him — a rather amusing bug:

…there was an error in the code an NPC used to check to see if there was a door in the way of a move it wanted to make. It therefore would (U)se the door… whether or not the door was actually closed. This led an NPC who was otherwise very determined to follow his path to just sit in front of a doorway, opening and closing the door repeatedly. And thereby trapping the PC in the room, to boot.

Today was family time, so not a whole lot of progress, but fixed a bunch of things in some AIs, and the door problem.

Post-Christmas, he turned his attention to music:

No coding, but over the last couple days in the studio, there are six, count ’em, six new songs. (Ok, 4 totally new ones, and 2 that are variations on two of the other ones.) Hoping to get at least one more tomorrow, and then I head home on Wednesday.

And to ring in the new year, he even released a sample track:

If you’re a kickstarter backer, I’ve just sent you sneak previews of two of the new pieces composed this week: “Among the Ruins” and “Dungeon”. In a week or so I’ll put up a page with a jukebox of some kind, but for now I wanted to give some previews, so here’s one for my Facebook followers. This song is called “Shelaria’s Lament”.

And now at the dawn of 2016, Goldenflame has focused his efforts on the game’s AI:

Combat AI pathfinding refactoring, which worked shockingly well, and finished testing the love tangle, which showed me a minor conversation bug, which is now fixed.dialogue:

Rewrote some dialogue to take advantage of some additional flexibility I coded in recently.

Started dialogue on Asharden, the hidden wizard who can get you a better spellbook and teach you a few spells. There’s enough there that he can send you on a quest first. Also did more decorating in his tower.

Started building the dungeon Death Unending, where Asharden’s quest takes you.

Converted all of the new versions of game music to files the game can use, including the incredibly tedious process of shaving tenths of a second off of the ends of songs to make them loop on the beat.

Townsfolk will no longer randomly walk into Fields. This was unlikely, but it was theoretically possible for Asharden (or a couple of other, mostly mage, NPCs) to poison himself to death by wandering.

That’s it for now, but no doubt Goldenflame will be posting many more updates to The Dark Unknown’s Facebook page over the coming days and weeks. Do check out the song, above; it’s a beautiful track.