Goldenflame Dragon hasn’t been too active on The Dark Unknown’s Facebook page of late, owing to the fact that after the Ultima Dragons 25th Anniversary Bash he evidently went on a bit of a cruise. However, before and since the Bash, he has posted a few notes about how well the demo of The Dark Unknown went thereat…beginning with his own pre-Bash testing of it:

I’ve played a character all the way through the demo. I think it’s ready to be unveiled at the UD25 Bash. Had to fix a few bugs with the first mini-dungeon, which I hadn’t really tested yet, but I’ve got that pretty squared away now. Pretty pleased.

And yes, people actually played The Dark Unknown at the Bash:

Demo running at the Ultima Dragon 25th Anniversary Bash has actually had players! So far, everyone has died to rats. To be fair there are ways to get better gear that no one has really done because they’re just noodling around, but I am going to nerf Disease as a result of the feedback so far.

Here’s the complete post-Bash report, by the way:

At the UD25 Bash, The Dark Unknown had at least a dozen players! After I nerfed disease the deaths started being more split between rats and headlesses, which made sense as they were the only monsters in the demo. Oh, and one death to the trap on a chest.

Some crash bugs did surface (they didn’t crash the browser, which shouldn’t really be possible, but I define any bug that locks up the game and won’t return control to the player as the equivalent to a “crash bug”), but I was able to get enough feedback to be pretty sure I know how to squash two of them. Which may be all of them, I don’t know.

People seemed to actually enjoy it! Nearly every one of them wound up going into the Options menu by accident when they meant to Use a door, though. I’m debating what to do about that. Similarly most of the ones I actively watched play at some point took a step to attack in a cardinal direction despite the fact that you can attack diagonally. I think my use of the U4 upgrade project’s tileset is hampering me there. I’m pretty sure I’m going to need a tutorial segment.

One person even played the game all the way to the demo’s content boundary (and a little beyond- I hadn’t expected anyone to actually get enough XP to _level_! It requires some grinding of the one mini-dungeon, but she’d been forced to flee it a couple times.) She left me with most of a page of notes. Very, very helpful.

Goldenflame being who he is, of course, he also poked away at The Dark Unknown whilst on the cruise:

I’m back from the Cruise! I did get some work done there, fixing all of the bugs that were reported during the Bash and then a few more. Gonna sleep for a few days but then it’ll be back on the horse!

And seeing as Goldenflame was active in the Spam Spam Spam Humbug Discord channel yesterday, it’s probably safe to say he’s back up on said horse.