How hard can it be

In spirit of what IVAN offers, meeting other instances of yourself, resurrecting them and such i feel that exactly in that spirit would fit the following features:

- modify the storyline telling a bit so that when you go for the first time to deliver the message to Petrus he will also add something like
"There were other worms like you before who tried"
*Ask about those before - and then paste the dead people list

At the end of the game you are being held at Petrus as a champion and you can talk with that character when you create a new game having some humorous lines and of course kill yourself if you feel up to the fight. Story wise we justify that the evil frog just ressurected, if the game was beaten once.

(Or i don't know, even take the place of a ruller or something of that sort i am not too familiar with the hierarchy in IVAN, and then challange yourself)

And add the ability to be female if wanted at game start.

I feel that these features if added are not to affect the original style of IVAN.
Your turn to hit me.

EDIT: And maybe text color? to highlight important stuff.

I don't think Petrus would really care about those who came before you and failed. Maybe a record keeper instead, but then I'm not sure what business it is of theirs to keep track of every banana grower from New Attnam, considering how autonomously it seems to be operated by Decos.

While I guess I could see Elpuri being resurrected, this doesn't really account for the fact that every other monster and character must be resurrected too, and dungeons are not re-randomized every time you enter them, like Nethack. We're meant to assume that there's an infinite number of Genetrixes, Huang Ming Pongs, Rondols, Decoses, and so on and so forth, or that the efforts of the last champion were completely wasted and they're all back to normal again?

The only problem I can think of with a female protagonist player is that having them get ripped and get giant sparkling beards makes a bit less sense.
I can think of one other less tasteful place to put the beard instead...

Although the whole "you're not the first" makes sense for everyone up until Elpuri gets beaten (also accounting for bones) I'm going to have to agree that it seems awful strange that the big baddies you got through before have resurrected. Still, having Petrus say "you're not the first" or some variation thereof would be nice, and I'd be willing to overlook the other small details. Maybe you could work in Oree here - I'll get to that later.
However, having him rattle off a list is going to be a problem - both in-universe and code-wise. I think Somagu's right in that Petrus would likely not give a damn about all the slaves that get sent to him for a suicide mission on Elpuri, and then having to display what is effectively the hi-score board is going to be both a problem to code and perhaps an unneeded distraction.

I do like the idea of a successful high-priest victory replacing Petrus with the previous protagonist, and yeah you could easily resurrect Elpuri under the guise of "Oh he comes back every couple of years". Or perhaps say that it's to do with Oree who gets resurrected every few years (would make more sense) and in turn resurrects Elpuri and all the other baddies. Kinda like Castlevania's Dracula except the protagonist turns into a iron-fist dictator when he wins.
You're right about the hierarchy of Attnam - the High Priest rules over all and is replaced by whoever can beat him. Kinda like that Riddick movie.

As for a Champion Victory you could have the previous champion replace whoever the head-guard was with the illithium armor.
The only problem I see with this is having to code it as you'll have to save the last successful players somewhere. Setting a flag to trip for successful characters will be easy enough, I'm just not entirely sure how to go about loading past character data from a file and then having them replace Petrus/Head Guard.

A female character would be troublesome storywise too because, well, you're a banana grower at the start and all the banana growers are male. Then again, you are said to be an outsider raised by hippos so I can see that working in just fine. If we were lazy we could just make a separate chest sprite with a bra on it and call it a day.

I for one would be in support of gigantic armpit-beards.

Just throwed in some ideas. I was so hasty some of them didn't even make much sense.

But the idea to make a sort of hall of fame where those who succeded are there, and maybe give them a last line amongst other chatty lines would be cool.

And bassed on your alignment when you finish the game you get to be a bad ruller or a good one. Sort of change the story once you restart it and make people talk about the tiranic or good *insert player name here.

Anyway not stressing out this too much. I can't do much with no coding skills, well i do have basic concepts been around C++ a bit but not at the level where i could change much.

Also, what language do you need to know to program ivan?

Unless I'm mistaken, IVAN is coded in C++ which is good considering you know a little.

IVAN is in C.

Warheck's said it's in C++ and the files are .cpp, a C++ extension though...

Then I stand corrected never having looked at the source files myself. Just had the impression based on some age-old thread.

IVAN is so old it might as well be written in C.

Oh, right, I forgot for somebody who just wants to play it's easier to just download the exe.

You can get it here, the downloads were down a few weeks ago but are fixed
http://www.attnam.com/projects/7/IVAN_CVS

Um, Cap, where do we post the latest build of our community development drive?

You should change the date thou if the CVS is the latest, or near latest with the fixes. It says 2009 January

But that's when it was last updated... CVS is the production version, 0.50 is the latest stable release. The 3D variant works identically with the fixed CVS, only you can toggle 1st person mode and sounds on. I think you have to install the sounds yourselves... The other variants add content to the game, making it unbalanced and usually easier.

Strange, even thou i downloaded the indicated CVS it still has the bugs... the one from the download section
http://www.attnam.com/projects/7/IVAN_CVS

Yes, IVAN CVS was the version with the bugs. If you got the GitHub code, you can just copy the "Script" folder into the CVS directory and run the exe, then they will be fixed