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[notquitethere]

Not sure I want to touch a Roguelike / Interactive fiction hybrid.

Afterall navigation in parser has always been a nightmare.

Kerkerkruip implements some nice user-friendly features to get around traditional navigation problems. For instance, at any point you can type "go to [room name]" to retrace your steps to any previously visited room. Obviously, direction shortcuts (n, e, s, w, u, d) also work as usual.

[VictorGijsbers]

Not sure I want to touch a Roguelike / Interactive fiction hybrid.

Afterall navigation in parser has always been a nightmare.

I certainly hope that this is not the case for Kerkerkruip. As far as I know, nobody has ever had "guess the verb" problems, because the game (a) uses a simple list of commands that you can look up in the help files, and (b) any special commands needed to use items and powers and so on are made explicit in the description of those items and powers.

If you're talking about navigating the map, Kerkerkruip has several features that make this easy: (a) a small dungeon; (b) explicit exit lists, which include the name of the location these exits lead to (if you've already visited them); (c) a "remember" commands that shows you which rooms you've visited, and which exits you haven't explored yet; and (d) a "go to [room name]" command that makes the game figure out the fastest route from your current location to wherever you want to go. In the next release, there will also be a "go to [monster]" command that takes you to the place you last saw that monster; and there are plans for a dynamically updated graphical map, but that might take a little longer to get implemented.

By the way, I'd like to point out that the post in this topic that says "I only wish it was still maintained and developed." was written three weeks after the original release! Kerkerkruip has been actively maintained throughout its one-year history, though development has definitely picked up pace in the last few months. (It is now a multi-developer project with a nice github code repository.)

Anyway, I hope you guys have fun with it! I'll be checking out this thread, so if you have any comments, you can leave them here as well as on the more "official" places.

[notquitethere]

Release 8 is now available

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.

Looks pretty sweet, right? I'm not sure what foul monstrosities the development team prayed to in order to make the presentation look so snazzy given what I know of Inform7, the language it's written in.

[Roundabout Lout]

I've been having so much fun with this game.
My stories will definitely be going into the How did you last die thread. 

[VictorGijsbers]

Good to hear that you're enjoying it!

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

* 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)

[VictorGijsbers]

Looks pretty sweet, right? I'm not sure what foul monstrosities the development team prayed to in order to make the presentation look so snazzy given what I know of Inform7, the language it's written in.

By the way, that foul monstrosity is called Erik Temple. He has authored the Glimmr suit of graphical extensions for Inform 7, and has then joined the Kerkerkruip team to deliver the graphical goodness that you see in this release.

[VictorGijsbers]

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.

[Carrion]

Awesome.  I'm looking forward to trying it.