Kerkerkruip

Kerkerkruip
Stable game
Developer	Victor Gijsbers
Theme	Sword and sorcery
Influences	interactive fiction and roguelikes
Released	Oct 01, 2011 (1)
Updated	May 11, 2013 (8)
Licensing	GNU General Public License v3 or later
P. Language	Inform 7
Platforms	Mac OS X, Windows, Linux
Interface	English prose
Game Length	about 1 hour
Official site of Kerkerkruip

General information

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. You take on the role of an adventurer in a randomly generated dungeon, whose only hope of escape is to destroy the mighty wizard Malygris. The game has been designed to offer a diverse array of meaningful tactical and strategical options, and combines the thrill of random combat with the skill of complex puzzle solving.

Visit the official site for complete information and downloads. Or check out the code repository and bug tracker at the Github page.

Release notes for version 9

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!

Release notes for version 8

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:

• 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.
• 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!
• Open the game file Kerkerkruip.gblorb with gargoyle, and you're ready to go.