Goldenflame Dragon has kicked off the new year with a number of updates about his progress on creating The Dark Unknown. For example, he spent some time…getting distracted from working on NPC schedules:

Happy new year, everyone!
I’m home and getting back in the swing of things. I’ve finished another tool to help me deal with NPC schedules and have started working on the main castle.
I’ve unfortunately also been distracted by Gloomhaven. It’s so good. I had to turn down a game of it tonight to get back to work. 😛
Anyway, been a lot of back end work lately, and work on physical goods, but hopefully I’ll start having some game progress again soon as well!

He has also spent some time working on the art book for the the game, which he recently had to port from Microsoft Publisher to Adobe InDesign. And on NPC schedules as well:

Fixed a minor bug in a schedule. There’s at least one other one. I don’t know why Warren is trying to move chairs. Shouldn’t be happening. But I hit it while looking into something else so it’s for tomorrow.
There’s some kind of bug in the map editor for hitting second floor tiles that let you see the floor beneath. Presumably I introduced it when I rewrote the renderer. Will fix tomorrow.

Added a graphic for a shield on a rack, with the intention of having Nyrani display the shield in her room once you’ve given it to her.

I figured out how one of the level 8 spells is going to work. It (like all L8 spells) is completely optional but will allow you to modify the world in a small way. I’ve added graphics for the components you’ll need to cast it but haven’t given them game objects yet.

The Art Book: I added a background for all the pages, and added some neat light detailing to it, and have realized that I may have to redo all of the layout work that I’ve so far done in Publisher in InDesign to make this work properly. I am currently downloading the trial of InDesign. We’ll see how long that will take. I don’t have to make any decisions, at least- the layout is laid out, and the text is all written.

As always, you can follow The Dark Unknown on Facebook for any and all updates on the project.