After killing the reaper, I absorbed his soul. Later, the Blood Ape was impaled by a sword (from praying to Aite?) and I absorbed the soul of the Reaper again! I suspect this is a bug with setting the current soul to be absorbed when Aite kills someone, but I might be wrong.
I think those bugs have been fixed, so try the beta of version 6 that Victor attached on the previous page.
Ah, I followed the link from the roguebasin page to the most recent stable release: maybe that link should be changed now?
Well, it is the most stable recent release… but not for long! I’m thinking of releasing version 6 within the next couple of days.
I have released Kerkerkruip version 6! So this is the time to find and report bugs. 
IFDB link.
Website link.
Direct link to version 6 game file.
Direct link to latest version of the game file.
Congrats!
Unfortunately, I’m still seeing as I pull up a new game in this new version that I have 1 victory but am somehow at Novice level even so.
[code]SCORES:
Current level : NOVICE (0)
Highest level achieved : NOVICE (0)
Your total victories : 1
[/code]
For those who are following this thread, let me point out that a lot of discussion about the next release is now going on on github, which makes it easy to discuss specific issues and plans. You don’t need anything fancy (like knowing how to use git) to join them, just an account on the website.
In the last three days, Kerkerkruip seems to have been downloaded about 230 times from my web server. I find that number rather amazing.
That’s great! It’s very good to know that the changes we’ve been working on aren’t just for a handful of people.
I have announced the new release on Roguebasin, and (just now) on audiogames.net. I’m planning to also announce it on the Temple of the Roguelike forum, but I need to write up a slightly more sophisticated announcement for that, because I assume that the users of that forum would appreciate to know where Kerkerkruip fits into the roguelike landscape. I’ll make that happen sometime later this week.
Most of the development discussion lately has moved to the github Issues pages, as Victor mentioned above. I wanted to raise this here, though, since it might benefit from a somewhat wider audience’s input.
I’ve only played a few games of the most recent release (release 6), but it seems to me that Normal mode has gotten too easy. Specifically, enemies below level 4 have gotten way too easy. I just played a game in which I used no special items, but neither Level 1 or Level 2 enemies even was able to land a blow on me, and even a Level 3 enemy was defeated easily, with only a couple of hits.
Is this something that anyone else has experienced? I realize I’ve played only a few games and will need to play a lot more to see if this feeling shakes out, but if other people perceive it as well…
(Background note on my thinking: Normal is the setting on which the vast majority of players are going to play the game. I regard the higher difficulty levels as a place that only a very small sliver of players will go. Therefore, I think the game needs to be challenging and interesting on Normal, and that it needs to be the place at which the game is optimally balanced.)
–Erik
Very good point, and any input will be appreciated.
(Let me also stress that this topic is still a good place for Kerkerkruip discussions.)
Scroll identification
I find that I almost never use scrolls because I don’t like to simply read them blindly in combat. Is the scroll analyzer the only way to ID scrolls without reading them? If so, I’d like to suggest that we offer some other ways to find out what a scroll does before using it: a scroll doesn’t add any interesting choices to the game if you don’t have some idea what it’ll do. The only choice becomes, “Am I desperate enough to read this scroll now?” (Personally, when I do try to read one as a hail-mary pass, it much more often than not kills me or otherwise ruins me. So I rarely bother even in desperate situations.)
P.S. I know that Release 6 has a cheating backdoor for IDing scrolls, but I’m not interested in cheating!
–Erik
There is also the scroll of knowledge, which means that at some point during the reading of scrolls, you’ll identify all of them.
Plus, most scrolls are good, so reading them shouldn’t be too bad. The only negative ones are the scroll of death (which deals only a few HP of damage), the scroll of summoning (which is no problem by the time you have defeated a level 3 enemy), and the scroll of ghoulification (which isn’t bad when combined with the previous two scrolls). On the positive side, there is a lot of powerful stuff, like the scroll of protection and the scroll of the blade.
In other words: I generally do use-ID scrolls, and I believe it is smart to do so.
But, that doesn’t mean I’m opposed to adding more means of scroll identification, as long as it doesn’t become trivial to identify them.
(Here’s an unorthodox idea, which might be a bad idea: you can see all the real scroll names when you are under the influence of ment.)
Could be an additional effect of one of the Essences? Something mind enhancing? Or your percentage chance to identify a new scroll could increase with your mind score? Or the ability to know, say, a quarter of all scrolls could be a perk on reaching a certain mind level (with similarly powered perks coming with raising other stats)?
I like to read a few scrolls early in the game. It’s uncommon to get a bad one, and even the bad ones aren’t that bad. And if I happen to summon something that kills me, if I did so early in the game then I haven’t lost much.
Keep in mind that you can generally get 2-3 scrolls from the pile of body parts. The first one will be an unhealthy one, but the others are probably good.
Thanks, guys. I didn’t realize that there were so few bad ones. Roguelike habits die hard, I’m used to more balance between good and bad items, as well as bad items being really dangerous. It seems I’ve also just been really unlucky in using scrolls as desperate ploys. (Even a teleport scroll can be pretty bad scroll when your hit points are low–you can easily end up teleported someplace where a powerful monster awaits you, with no safe path to a weaker one that you can harvest for healing.) Better to ID before things get bad, as Dannii suggests.
I think that’s cool, especially if the ment sometimes misleads.
I also like Joey’s idea of higher mind scores sometimes revealing a scroll’s purpose.
–Erik
How about using ment will identify the scrolls you hold, but if a 3 in mind chance succeeds then it is identified wrongly.
So when under the influence of ment, IDed scrolls just show up as normal, but un-IDed scrolls show up as “a scroll your sharpened senses tell you might be a scroll of teleportation”. Something like that? Not too elegant, but I’m trying to think of a way to make it clear to the playing what is happening and why.
I had been thinking they would be displayed like any other identified scrolls in your inventory, but when you use the scroll, if your ment guess was wrong it tells you that you get a big surprise. When you first use ment it would also tell you that “you have divined the identity of the scrolls you are carrying! You are sure you are correct… 90% sure… approximately!”
Or something to that effect 