May 1, 2013: Disease and screenshots

I've updated the screenshots- you can find them in the Media tab above.

Also, you can now get diseased from walking in swamps. This may not sound like much but it means that now a lot of the underlying systems required for ongoing spells are in place and working!

Beyond that, at some point while editing/updating the graphics files I broke some frames in the little header animation. I'll look into fixing that.

Mar 7, 2013: Spellbook preview

I've typed up the current draft of the spells that will be in the game. You can see them here: Dark Unknown Spellbook.

Jan 3, 2013: New music

While visiting family for the holidays I spent some time in the studio and recording some more music. I've revamped the Combat song, and added another song for a different tone of combat. You can check them out here:

In other news I'm going to revamp the demo version on the website so that it's easier to keep up to date when I make changes. Hopefully this will be invisible to the users. Both of them.

Nov 27, 2012: Light and mobile

That took way longer than I expected, but light sources now seem to work fine. The demo is thusly updated- if you want to check out a dark area with some torches, head into the castle and from there down to the basement.

Additionally, I've been talked into looking into supporting mobile devices. They didn't even really exist when I started this project, and so I was tickled to be able to go for a retro feel and make the game fully playable by the keyboard. Problem is, this doesn't work so well on tablets at the moment, so at some point I'm going to have to take some time I add an optional UI that will work on mobile devices. I'll admit that I was kind of hoping to just ignore them, but it's true that by the time this is finished, adding such support will greatly increase the number of people interested in playing.

September 4, 2012: More combat!

There was a bit of a lull there for a bit, but I'm back into things again. FF is up to version 15 and the OSX redraw bug is still going strong, though I don't have a version with the latest OSX versions (Snow Leopard? Snow Lion? Snow Badger?) to test it on.

That said, there are now combat animations, missile weapons fire the appropriate ammo in the right directions, etc. I hope to redo the hit/miss animations but these placeholders'll do for now. I've started coding the magic system and just added another 8 spells to the game. Well, to the design. Individual spells aren't coded but the framework is coming into existence. Sometime soon I'll hopefully update the demo with the version with animating ammo.

February 5, 2012: More combat

You can now actually leave the combat map after a fight. Seemed like a useful thing.

The OSX FF draw bug is still present in FF10.0. Will keep an eye on it.

The version of the game and editor under the DEMOS tab is now up to date!

January 17, 2012: Death and loot

I did in fact take Nov mostly off, and got some writing done. Dec had the holidays and let's be honest, Jan has The Old Republic, but I'm still getting some work done.

Stuff can be fought in combat and can die. Check out this screenshot for a look at it. And now as of last night the Search command is implemented and monsters can drop loot. I'd call that pretty important!

One new browser issue- FF on some OSX installs has a redraw issue that manifests pretty badly in DU. Seems to replace my black tiles (for places with no LOS, for instance) with whatever it last saw there. Since sometimes that is the contents of another tab in the browser, I'm going to assume that the problem here isn't in my code and just hope it fixes itself like the FF6 issue did.

October 31, 2011: Combat, Firefox, and a short break

FF7 fixes the problem I descibed below with FF6, so all is well there again.

I've made progress in implementing combat and combat maps- I'd say it's about halfway there. I've also done some more dungeoning. I suspect that in some months I will have a complete engine and be bogging down in mapping out the remaining dungeons and towns, but we'll see. Trying to come up with ways to make the dungeons interesting is, well, interesting and a fun challenge.

I am, however, going to take November off from Dark Unknown (well, mostly) in order to make a half-assed go at NaNoWriMo. Hopefully after getting into the groove of putting some work in on something every day for a month I'll apply that to this project and start steaming on ahead!

August 18, 2011: Firefox 6 warning

Since upgrading to FF6, I'm finding that loading DU is occasionally causing the browser to crash and close. No idea what's up, it's fine on FF5 and Chrome. Hopefully it's just me but I figured I should put up a warning.

August 17, 2011: Stats and Demo update

Work continues to hammer me, but I've finally found some time to get back to work on this. Inventory, as stated below, works; code is in place for equipping weapons and armor, and that works too, though there is not yet a player command to equip/(R)eady something. I think that's the next goal. And, there is a (Z)tats screen. It's not complete but it shows what there is to show so far.

The version under the Demo tab is now updated to my current working version. Currently available commands are:
(E)nter: works on cities/castles/villages and also ladders. Anything that causes you to change maps.
 (D)escend: Same as Enter but only works on down ladders.
 (K)limb: Same as Enter but only works on up ladders. I basically only put these commands in for the nostalgia value.
(G)et (though there isn't much to get at the moment).
(L)ook.
(U)se: at this point it mostly opens and closes doors.
(Y)ell: only thing current yellable is "ETHERBUNNY", which turns the PC ethereal for testing purposes.
(Z)tats: Stats screen.

July 5, 2011: Inventory

Character (and NPC) inventory now works. There's code in place for equipping armor and weapons, but it's as yet untested. None of this is up on the site yet, but I'll get there once I finish the stats screen, I think.

June 23, 2011: Progress

Progress has been slow lately, as work has been steamrolling me. But I whipped up a script that generates a page with summary info on the game's objects: Dark Unknown Objects. And I finished adding some animations to the magic weapons and armor, and most importantly I assigned armor and damage values to the weapons and armor. So next up is the (Z)tats screen, because I'll want that to be able to test the next real project, adding an inventory system.

April 7, 2011: Doors!

Doors now open and close by way of the (U)se command. Time to decide what to work on next...

Mar 31, 2011: Animations, doors

I'm done with the animation work I was doing, and am back to coding. Realizing I have a bunch of underlying code fiddly bits to change, but soon doors will be open and closable. Which makes testing out the towns a lot easier, let me tell you.

Mar 7, 2011: Animations

I've restructured some of the animations so they sync up better. Some photoshop work is still required to get the rest of the coasts and rivers to sync up but it should be done soon.

Feb 20, 2011: WEBSITE

A new website has launched. I'm not going to be all excited about it, as I know it's still kinda shabby, but hey, it's a website. Now I can start putting stuff here as I go. Stay tuned!