Kerkerkruip release 8

[VictorGijsbers]

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.

[Ex]

Very cool! I like the concept of an interactive fiction roguelike. Keep up the great work!

[Rickton]

Neat. I played an earlier version a few months ago, I'll have to spend some time checking this one out too.

[VictorGijsbers]

I hope you'll enjoy it!

If I recall correctly, both the new combat reactions and the always-visible inventory/status windows were developed in response to suggestions made on this very forum. So we apparently listen to feedback.

[george]

wow, the polish has really gone up on this one! Nice work!

Now all you need is intro music .

(is there a minimap?)

[VictorGijsbers]

We're working on music. Might happen in Kerkerkruip 9, though I make no promises. (Mostly because I'm not the one who's going to compose it. Luckily for all of us. )

If you play in graphical mode, the 'map' command will give you the automap. There's no 'minimap' in the sense of a smaller map than the full map.

[VictorGijsbers]

We've made a minor but significant update of Kerkerkruip 8, which you therefore might want to redownload.

* An optimisation of the windows drawing code makes some of the graphical operations *much* faster. This is especially notable when returning from the map to the main game window.
* Fixed a bug with how the psycholocation scroll worked in non-graphical mode.

Note that due to the nature of the Glulx virtual machine, this will break existing saved games; so if you're in the middle of a game, you might want to finish that first.

Have fun!

The Kerkerkruip team (Victor Gijsbers, Dannii Willis, Erik Temple, Remko van der Pluijm)