The Gaming Philosopher

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 behal...

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.

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...

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 sp...