It has been too long since we last checked in with Goldenflame Dragon’s work on The Dark Unknown. But, as it happens, Goldenflame himself took a bit of a break from the project, from about mid-May to mid-June. Much of the reason for this had to do with the fact that Goldenflame was participating in the recent HoBLotH event, and was actually running a quest thereat (which necessitated a significant amount of preparation and planning).

But, as of about a week or so ago, work on The Dark Unknown has resumed in earnest:

You can hit a key now to skip the animations during the loading screens.

Started a new game to make sure everything works on the path to launching a demo.

And: Recorded a video of me making a new map in my map editor. This was a long process of finding and redownloading the video capture program I had used during the kickstarter, then redownloading Windows Movie Maker, then finding a program to convert from one to the other… plus actually doing the recording, which took two takes. So, editing will happen tomorrow- all the rest of that took too long. Hopefully I’ll get useful results in the end.

In addition to technical progress, Goldenflame has also been adding to the game’s story:

Added some dialogue, and now I can gate responses based on whether the player has enough money. This lets me have people say “I can do that, for 500g” without you needing to go into the merchant menus.

Did some work on the map editor demo video- did minimal editing, now trying to see if I can save it such that the text on my screen is readable on youtube. We’ll see. More on that tomorrow.

The above was posted on June 16th. As promised, Goldenflame did give us a look at the map editor on the 17th:

Also, and for what it’s worth, the Tapestry of Ages Games forums have been taken offline:

Not that anyone was using it, but I have now disabled the forum on the tapestryofages.com website. I was getting 100+ spam account signups per day and since there’s no real person activity yet I am going to take the opportunity to try to find a better solution. I am open to suggestions!

Unfortunately I’m hosting the site on wordpress (to better make sure it keeps up with security updates), so I can’t use a forum plugin the way the Codex does unless I move it.

I may be working with Goldenflame on a revamped website and forum setup later in the summer; stay tuned!