Goldenflame Dragon spent some time, toward the end of June, working on dialogue in The Dark Unknown:

Worked on dialogue some, also added some data to my spreadsheets to help me track dialogue stuff.

Implemented reading books/journals/etc. Here’s hoping this didn’t increase my writing load too much.

He also implemented a new feature that should help players obtain more of the game’s spells:

Jharden, the King’s advisor and court magician, now teaches you a new spell each time you level up. This helps get all the extra spells into the game. I think I’ll make Asharden do the same- this will highlight a difference between them and their confidence in you. Jharden, who thinks you should be taking it slower than you are, teaches you a spell of the previous level when you level up. Ash will teach one of the same or a higher level. So far I’ve only added Jharden’s instruction, though.

Additionally — you’ll want to click on through to read the rest of the update — the just-implemented books and journals inspired Goldenflame to, ultimately, implement a limit on when Illusion monsters in the game can and can’t appear. (Hint: the Peer spell is also involved.)

Much of the rest of June was devoted to fixing various bugs and cleaning up the game’s code:

Cleaned up some merchant code, and found some <s that should have been <=, so, um, you can now buy something if you have exactly that much gold. Also fixed some display errors- the prices weren’t lining up properly, and your gold didn’t get redrawn after you spent some.
Now that my towns are mostly populated or at least planned I have a list of all merchants, so I now have complete sale lists for each merchant. But that’s on paper right now, I’ll punch it in tomorrow.

And thus far in July, Goldenflame’s focus has been on merchants in the game:

Punched in the items for sale for 6 of my merchants, and added a field for thing they say if they sell it to you. This varies by item. For weapon and armor merchants they don’t vary, but I plan to have the people selling spells have little things they’ll say for each one. Buy the Distract spell from the vendor across the street from the casino and she’ll note that it’s useful when you want to make a bluff. Stuff like that.

Even on Independence Day!

Mostly finished adding the thing merchants say when you buy from them, but now am strongly considering adding an “Are you sure?” step to purchasing (possibly a “quantity” step when purchasing potions/scrolls) and giving the merchants something to say before and after you finalize your choice. This makes the most sense to me but it’s more code. 😛 Will work on it tomorrow.

And apparently, the merchants of the land are just a wee bit skeptical of would-be adventurers:

Added the “Are you sure” step when merchanting. Done lots of testing, but still have more to do. Fixed a bunch of little bugs, wrote some dialogue.

In other words, Goldenflame is very much back into the swing of things.