Topics

1

Traditional Roguelikes (Turn Based) / Kerkerkruip 9 released

« on: April 13, 2014, 08:55:33 AM »

The Kerkerkruip team is happy to announce the release of Kerkerkruip 9, by far the most extensive update of the game ever made. Kerkerkruip is a short-form roguelike in the interactive fiction medium, featuring meaningful tactical and strategic depth, innovative game play, zero grinding, and a sword & sorcery setting that does not rehash tired clichés.

With over 700 commits to the code repository, the changes made in Kerkerkruip 9 are far too numerous to mention here. But the highlights are:

• Original theme music for the main menu, composed and produced by Wade Clarke.
• An entirely reworked reaction system allows you to dodge, block, parry and roll away from incoming attacks. Successful reactions increase your offensive or defensive flow, adding a new layer of tactical depth to combat.
• An entirely reworked religion system allows you to sacrifice absorbed powers to the gods. Worshipping gods grants lasting benefits, including divine interventions on your behalf; but losing absorbed powers makes you weaker in the short term. Religion thus becomes an important aspect of the player's overall strategy.
• Grenades can now be thrown into adjacent rooms, opening up new tactical options. However, your enemies may sometimes manage to throw them back to you!
• A powerful new grenade is the Morphean grenade, which puts people to sleep. If you become its victim, you'll find yourself drawn into one of several dream sequences: weird and dangerous adventures that have an effect on the real world.
• The hiding system has been streamlined, boosted and made far more transparent. Stealth has now become a viable option.
• The player now starts out with one of several starting kits, necessitating different approaches to the dungeon.
• New content includes the angel of compassion, a radiant being that loses its lustre as people die around it; Israfel, a terrible angel that can split into two smaller beings for increased combat effectiveness before reuniting to heal; and the Arena of the Gods, where you can defend your god's honour against other divine champions.
• A new Menu implementation which is both screen reader friendly and hyperlink enabled.

We are now also offering stand-alone installers for specific operating systems. While it's still possible to download the game file and run it in your favourite Glulx interpreter, there are also installers for Windows and Debian/Ubuntu. We will be supporting OS X in the near future.

Finally, we have a new website at http://kerkerkruip.org. That's where you should go for downloads, more information about the game and how to contribute, and a link to the wiki.

Kerkerkruip is presented to you by the Kerkerkruip team: Victor Gijsbers, Mike Ciul, Dannii Willis, Erik Temple and Remko van der Pluijm. We hope you enjoy the new version. If you've got any comments, or if you'd like to contribute to this free software project, please go the website for details and contact us!

Click here for an in-game screen shot.

2

Programming / Kerkerkruip is looking for a Debian sponsor

« on: May 22, 2013, 12:07:17 PM »

Kerkerkruip is an actively developed interactive fiction Roguelike. (See this topic for the latest release announcement.) While it is still actively improved and extended, it has been a finished, fully playable, non-beta game since October 2011.

We would love to make playing Kerkerkruip easier for Debian/Ubuntu/etc users by having it in the Debian repository. The game is free software (GPLv3 or later) and suitable for inclusion Debian; the gargoyle player, which is needed to run it, is already in Debian (package gargoyle-free).

While we can build the Debian package ourselves, we need a sponsor to get the package into the distribution. We tried finding a sponsor through the usual process (posting a bug report) in November 2012: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=694157 However, this didn't lead to any response. So I'm hoping that perhaps there is a Debian maintainer hanging around on this forum who would like to sponsor us!

3

Traditional Roguelikes (Turn Based) / Kerkerkruip release 8

« on: May 11, 2013, 11:50:12 AM »

The Kerkerkruip team is very pleased to release version 8 of the interactive fiction roguelike Kerkerkruip! This release brings some major interface changes, including:

* Introductory movies.
* A graphical main menu.
* After you defeat a monster, it will be added to your Rogues Gallery, a collection of trading cards with stats that summarize your history with each enemy.
* Side panels that allow you to see your inventory, status and granted powers at all times.
* A graphical map that is automatically updated as you explore the dungeon.

Don't worry: you can also play Kerkerkruip in non-graphical mode if you are using screen reader technology or a slow computer. The game will ask you for your preference when it is first started.

There are of course also many changes to the game itself:

* Several new rooms: the Hall of Raging Banshees, the Columnated Ruins, the Tungausy Sweat Lodge, the Zen Room, and the rare but powerful Arena of the Fallen.
* New items, including the dagger Giantbane; scrolls of mutation, mapping, and psycholocation; magical guides that allow you to identify scrolls; and the crown of the god-king.
* A new level 4 enemy, the overmind. It is weak, but it strengthens all its allies, and can call them to its aid when endangered.
* Two new combat reactions: rolling (a more dangerous but potentially devastating form of dodging) and blocking (a form of parrying in which you use your concentration for extra defence).
* Blood magic, which allows you to feed your own health to items in order to make them more powerful. Are you willing to take the risk? Of course you are. Are you willing to take it a second time, trading more blood for more power? What about a third time?
* A small but very significant tweak to the combat system: you can now snort ment during fights!
* And many other additions, tweaks and bug fixes.

As always, we hope you'll enjoy the new version! To play Kerkerkruip:

1. Download the zip file http://lilith.cc/~victor/kerkerkruip/Kerkerkruip-latest.zip , and unzip it in a location of your choice. It contains the game file and a .ini file for Gargoyle.
2. Download the latest version of the Gargoyle interactive fiction interpreter: http://code.google.com/p/garglk/downloads/list . It is available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux!
3. Open the game file Kerkerkruip.gblorb with gargoyle, and you're ready to go.

4

Traditional Roguelikes (Turn Based) / Kerkerkruip 7

« on: December 29, 2012, 10:53:58 AM »

Hi everyone -- I'm announcing release 7 of Kerkerkruip. Since it is the first release I'm announcing on this forum, perhaps a few words of introduction are in order. Kerkerkruip is a roguelike in the medium of interactive fiction: you'll see prose and type commands just like when you're playing a text adventure, but the gameplay is pure roguelike (random dungeon, RPG-style combat, permadeath, and so on). A lot of design work has been spent on devising a game system that plays to the strengths of the medium, and I do believe that we have some interesting and innovative mechanics.

The current home of the game is my website, which explains where to download the game file and the needed interpreter. I highly recommend reading the beginner's guide PDF (or reading through the, more detailed, in-game help menu).

Kerkerkruip is free software published under the GPL version 3+. It is programmed in the Inform 7 interactive fiction programming language, and the source code lives at github.


Kerkerkruip 7 release notes

In these final days of 2012, we are happy to announce the release of Kerkerkruip 7! It brings you new enemies, new and improved items, a better unlocking system, and bug fixes. Among the highlights are:

* All uninteresting or useless items have been redesigned (or, in a few cases, removed). Your enemies will no longer leave behind identical swords; flash grenades will no longer permanently blind you; and much more! Veteran players will want to examine every item anew to see whether it has changed.
* Several new cursed items have been added, including the singing sword and the fearful axe. And there are rumours that the demon lord's diadem isn't as harmless as it seems either.
* New items have been added, including the gauntlets of grip, the psychedelic cloak, and the epic periapt of prophecy.
* Level 1 and 2 monsters now have more health. This rebalances the early game, which had become a bit too easy over the last few releases.
* Three new enemies will appear: the undead mummified priest; the demonic mistress; and a new level 1 creature, the wisps of pain, which will empower you in a very peculiar way.
* Some fixes and improvements have been made to the unlocking system. Which monsters, rooms and items will appear no longer depends on the difficulty, but only on the number of victories you have won. (More complicated stuff gets unlocked as you win the game more often.) It is also possible to get access to all the goods immediately. From the title screen, go to the options menu and choose the unlock everything option -- this is recommended for Kerkerkruip veterans.

Have fun, and the Kerkerkruip team wishes you a great 2013!