Kerkerkruip

Of course, I’d love to tell you about all the cool things we’re making for Kerkerkruip 10. But the truth is that development had been very slow in the past few months, due to technical difficulties. Shortly after Kerkerkruip 9 was released, the Inform 7 team released a massive update of that programming language, which is the language that Kerkerkruip is written in. There were some very good reasons for us to embrace this update, so we committed ourselves to it even though the new Inform 7 version was not backwards compatible with all old code.

The update process has been hard. It took us quite a while to get Kerkerkruip to compile again; and we now have it compiling, but the game crashes on the window drawing code as soon as you start it. Obviously, we’re working on fixing this, but it has been hard to continue development in the meantime!

Don’t worry, though. There are some good plans for Kerkerkruip 10, and we’ll be full of new creative energy once development gets up to speed again.

Well-known interactive fiction authoress Emily Short (Galatea, Savoir Faire, City of Secrets, Bee, Counterfeit Monkey, and many others) has revisited Kerkerkruip. She reviewed it for the Interactive Fiction competition 2011, back when the game was first released, and finds the new version 9 much better:

I really recommend trying this thing if you haven’t. It pushes in interesting ways on the boundaries of what IF normally does, by having large elements of randomness and systematic play. It is one of the few IF games to make a serious shot at interesting combat that is not puzzle-based, and it shows off UI effects that most Glulx games never attempt.

It also yields some surprisingly entertaining moments that capitalize on the juxtaposition of procedurally generated situations with narrative text — for instance, I was being attacked by four enemies and thought my goose was probably cooked, but then I sprouted four tentacles from my torso, my enemies went mad and started licking their own weapons, and I was able to clean up.

Emily Short also mentioned Kerkerkruip in a list that shows of the variety of recent interactive fiction.

Kerkerkruip is precisely the kind of game that needs to have a wiki. Whether you want to see a list of all the scrolls, review how Isra and Fell work together, or check our strategies for using the dagger of double strike, a wiki could be an indispensable source of information. And having one is common for roguelikes; I myself am an avid user of the Brogue wiki, the Binding of Isaac wiki, and especially the Crawl wiki.

Well, Kerkerkruip now has a wiki too! I’m not perfectly happy with Wikia, since the number of ads is quite distracting. But it is certainly functional.

At the moment, the wiki is still quite empty. I added a few weapons, but we’ve maybe got 1% of all the information we need. So if you feel up to it, go and contribute! You might want to get your information from the source code. It’s Inform 7 source, so don’t worry.