Goldenflame Dragon has been working on The Dark Unknown very consistently over the last couple of weeks, and has made numerous updates to the game. Some of the changes aren’t so visible; refactored magic system code won’t be evident to players, after all. Other changes, however, will be a bit more noticeable…including changes to the soundtrack:

Did a bunch of work on the wander song I’m working on, which currently I hate because I’ve been listening to it all day. Will get back to it tomorrow.
Also, went through all of the world spawns and turned them down at first level- it was too deadly getting to any more distant towns, and I was worried that people would flee from combat too much at low level. So the world should be a little less dangerous at the very start. Will continue to tweak with playtesting.

Changes to the map will also be quite evident to players:

Modified Swainhil’s map some, adding the Bardic HQ (name TBD). Started working on the new version of the Player Reference Guide. Added a new graphic (minor modification of an existing one).

Goldenflame has also been squashing a number of bugs in his code, and has even had help from the wider community with this; someone else has downloaded the code and has been submitting bug reports.

Fixed a bug with walkontiles not having their attached functions connected when they are loaded from a saved game.
Fixed a bug that made it impossible to flee from an empty battlefield.
Added a song for an easter egg.
Fixed some problems with my depowering of early game spawns.
Fixed the fact that the world map switched Beldskae and Swainhil.
Fixed some sundry other minor issues.

Additionally, Goldenflame has (finally!) treated us to a new screenshot (visible above), this one of a merchant plying her wares:

Bunch of work on merchants again- this time, to the type that sells things that you might want to buy in bulk. (There’s never a reason to have multiple suits of armor, but potions, for example…) Now the prompt for how many you want to buy works properly, and the merchant now has a response for if they sell out.

One of tomorrow’s projects will be to include how many of each thing in their stock each merchant has left- once someone sells out, they’re sold out! Some merchants may acquire more stock as the game goes on, though.

Tomorrow I’ll also need to test selling things back to the merchants- it worked when I first wrote it, but I’ve done a lot of changing since then.

Merchants, actually, received quite a bit of work:

Merchant stocks are now part of the save/load routine, so merchants can permanently sell out of things.
Wrote some more unit tests for spells. Well, spell. But it includes infrastructure for the other ranged combat spells. 🙂
NPCs that are trying to flee the map will now be deleted if they were going to exit onto the world map.

Most recently, Goldenflame has been working on dialogue:

Also added some more dialogue. I have a sidequest where you take a thing from person A to person B (which is basically an excuse to point you in the direction of Clear Lake, where person B lives). I found in my notes that person B was then to give you a “small rock” to bring back to person A.
I had NO IDEA why I wanted to do this.

So… I did it anyway. And now it’s funny! I hope.

As always, you can — and should! — follow The Dark Unknown on Facebook for all of the development updates that Goldenflame posts.