Kerkerkruip 9 released

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!

Kerkerkruip - looking for testers

Kerkerkruip has entered beta, and I'm looking for a few testers. If you are interested, please send me an email at victor@cc.lilith -- except that I have cunningly switched "lilith" and "cc" to confuse the spam bots!

Even if you don't have time to really test the game, you can still help me out in a few minutes if you have access to (a) OS X, or (b) older hardware. I need to know how the game runs on the OS X interepreters, and I need to know what the minumum hardware requirements are. (Kerkerkruip runs without noticable delays on my own system, but turns take a noticable, though not irritating, amount of time on an EEE-PC netbook.)

Also, I will post no more updates about the game on this blog until the competition is over. I do not want to build "hype", or even raise the suspicion that I am trying to do so.

So radio silence starts now.

Kerkerkruip design journal #8: an update on progress

You may think my not posting about Kerkerkruip means that I haven't been working on it. Nothing could be further from the truth, however. In fact, I am very rapidly approaching the first beta: a feature-complete game with documentation, cover art, and hundreds of bugs!

Talking about documentation, I am planning on recording a short introduction video. You will see me playing the game in gargoyle (the video captures a part of my desktop), and you will hear me explaining the basics of the Kerkerkruip system. Technically, this is very easy (using gtk-recordmydesktop); and I suspect a tutorial video can be a lot more fun than a written tutorial. There will also be written help, of course, for those who prefer it and those who wish to look something up.

I just got permission to use the photograph I found on Flickr, so let me share the cover art with you:

Perhaps the text on the right should be a bit more orange? Let me know what you think.

I'm really looking forward to the IF competition. And it is still so far away...

Kerkerkruip design journal #7: progress and plans

Thinking up cool things and then implementing them is of course a mode of programming that is a lot of fun. In interactive fiction, it is also generally unproductive: you have a story to tell, and "cool things" are often mere side attractions that decrease the time you have to develop the core game. Luckily, for Kerkerkruip this is not the case. The core game is simple, and adding cool things to it is exactly what I should be doing.

Of course, some thought needs to go into the kind of cool thing one develops: having several hundred weapons with different cool stuff isn't much good if the player can only fight an identical goblin over and over. (Be assured: Kerkerkruip does not have a goblin. It does not have a giant rat or an orc either, and the skeleton is a temporary standard monsters slated for removal.) And although I believe it is important and cool to have "special" situations that only occur in a small percentage of the games, it would be unwise to spend most of your coding time on such rare situations and neglect the more common ones.

In the last few days, I have made a heat system and a rust system. The former developed from the thought that it would be cool to be able to heat up weapons, having them do more damage to enemies, but at the price of weakening them -- a heated weapon has a small chance of being destroyed whenever it is used in combat. But if you can heat up weapons -- by holding them into a forge, say -- you must also think about what happens to other items when you heat them up -- some might be immediately destroyed, others might melt, others might burn... thus was born my simulation-heavy heat system. Objects can be heated, and hurt the people who carry or wear them; objects can heat up other obects in their vicinity; and so on. A huge amount of applications suggests itself; and the system ties in nicely with the materials system I had already developed in order to make the difference between iron and silver weapons. The forge that turns an iron weapon into a deadly if somewhat weakened blade will immediately melt the silver weapon.

If there is one system I truly hate seeing in an RPG, it is equipment degrading through use. Training up my "repair" skill in order to repair my weapons and armour is not my idea of fun. But equipment degrading for a specific reason, that is something different, and this is where the rust spores come in. Once the spores of this obnoxious fungus enter a room, they start rusting everything in the room that is made of iron. Worse, rust spores spread through the dungeon: every turn, there is a small chance of them spreading to any adjacent rooms. I am planning on three sources for rust spores:

• With a very small chance, one of the rooms of the dungeon may start out containing rust spores.
• With a small chance, an unconnected room full of rust spores is generated somewhere in the dungeon. If the player digs into this room using the magical spade (or another means of creating new tunnels) the rust spores are out. (Other unconnected rooms that are sometimes placed in the dungeon are the Hidden Treasury, which it would be good to find, and the Eternal Prison, which it would be not so good to find.)
• With a very small chance, a closed container in the dungeon may contain rust spores. Opening the container sets them free.

So this is a feature meant to come up only in about, say, 5% of the games. Rust spores degrade weapons, but there are several things the player can do to stop this from happening -- turning them into silver, for instance, or heating them up. (At a later point, I'll probably add a way to close of passages, giving the player the ability to contain the rust spores.) And rust spores can be a boon as well as a bane: iron weapons used by monsters rust just as easily as those used by the player, and monsters made of iron... well, they won't be too happy.

I have drawn up a preliminary plan for the development of Kerkerkruip:

• Now - first week of august: go on implementing whatever sounds cool.
• Second week of august - last week of august: implement whatever the game needs most in order to give a complete and rounded experience.
• September: testing.
• September 30: upload Kerkerkruip to the IF Competition.

That's right, I'm planning to enter the IF Comp, for the first time. I find it hard to predict how the IF crowd will react to an IF/rogue-like hybrid, but, well, one doesn't need to win to make it worthwhile.

If you would like to see an alpha version of the game and perhaps give me some feedback on it, let me know at victor-lilith-cc (only those who can guess where the @ and the . go, i.e. humans, need apply!). But be warned that the game is in alpha state: there will not just be bugs but also unfinished features, no attempt at balance has as yet been made, and so on.