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 latest version of the Gargoyle interactive fiction interpreter: 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.
Just played and won my first game of the new Kerk. Wow, I haven’t played since the last comp version, and there are so many neat tweaks that have happened, plus major content additions, plus the beaut new presentation. Great work all.
The map definitely looks cool, though this is a game where I rarely felt I needed one. The design where you tend to probe new directions, retreat, etc. always exapnding your explored area outward – plus the remember command – usually covered me. That said, maybe others have a totally different feel about that.
I’m also slightly jealous you got a game with a pretty Glimmr map and title page out before what I’m working on
There’s stuff I can learn from here, like including your own Gargoyle init file just for the game that the player doesn’t have to touch. That to me is a good solve for some things that make me bash my head (having to ask players to embiggen their screen before they play, etc.)
Btw, if you’re interested in getting some original music to go with your new animated titles, etc., I’m interested in providing some.
I’m horribly irked that I can’t play the beautiful version in my iPod Touch, but without graphics or features, I can play it fine, and saved games are portable between iFrotz and WinGit, so… well done, sah!
And Wade, don’t feel bad about that fact that I have a pretty Glimmr map and title page before you do – I had unfair help in the form of the guy who wrote Glimmr. Basically all the graphics and windows stuff in Kerkerkruip was done by Erik Temple.
Which reminds me. Playing in iFrotz, it reports that the interpreter “does not have the full graphic support the game needs” - for graphics, anyway. Do you think you could share some info re exactly what the game requests? Because iFrotz DOES have support for Glulx graphics, and it would be useful, I think, to see what it is Kerkerkruip is asking that iFrotz can’t do.
So that, in the future, it might - who knows? - start doing it.
Well – that’s something Erik would need to tell you, I am completely in the dark about the graphics code. I believe he’s away for a few days, though, but I’ll point him to this thread when he returns.
You guys have outdone yourselves. I didn’t know it was even possible to do some of things you’ve done with Glulx and the game is smarter than ever.
I defeated Kerkerkruip for the first time! (Admittedly on easy.) The map really helped my strategising, allowing me to better plan which enemies to fight in what order (Golem-Tentacle-Ape-Bodmall-Hound-Daggers-Malygris).
Congratulations! On a higher difficulty level, I’d recommend starting with a first level monster: daggers - golem - tentacle - ape - Bodmall - hound - Malygris, for instance. (Though it also depends on who you find where, how the fights go, and so on.)
Yeah I actually almost killed Bodmall before I took out the ape, but the tentacle power was no good against her and I was losing loads of health so I teleported out and killed the ape to heal up for a second shot. I found two magic books so I was able to make good use of the scrolls I had, and I wasn’t stingy with the ment in the Bodmall fight.
I think that iOS Frotz can do everything that Kerkerkruip requests–I’ve seen it do so with other projects–though I would also anticipate abysmal performance and likely crashing! Here are the gestalts the game tests for:
gestalt_Graphics
gestalt_GraphicsTransparency
gestalt_MouseInput (tests specifically whether mouse input works in a graphics window)
gestalt_Timer
It’s possible that the author of iOS Frotz has turned some of these off to avoid performance issues, but it’s more likely that the library is simply returning a 0 for one of them when it ought to return a positive value.
We’ve made a minor but significant update of Kerkerkruip 8, which you therefore might want to redownload.
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)
This game is so predictable.
In the sense that, predictably, it got me hooked again.
I have a problem, tho. Due to some tweaks I forgot about, the input text is white on white background, and this gives me a headache when typing… What should I add to K***.ini to make it another color?
Anyway: impressive game. I love the graphics, the map and the card for beaten enemies!
James, an easier option might be to simply delete your garglk.ini file (probably in your home/user folder). Depends on whether you’re attached to the white-on-dark configuration in your other games.
This has been an issue for me, as well … and I’m madly in love with my preferred scheme for other games. My hack has just been to create a duplicate, alternate Gargoyle that I use only for this game.
Basically all the graphics and windows stuff in Kerkerkruip was done by Erik Temple.
On a higher difficulty level, I’d recommend starting with a first level monster: daggers - golem - tentacle - ape - Bodmall - hound - Malygris, for instance. (Though it also depends on who you find where, how the fights go, and so on.)