Upgrade Time: Encounter

[jacqu]

When the time has come, I'm volunteering to add my humble contribution to this amazing project.

My most anticipated games in 2024 : Broken Sword 6 and Encounter. If you are looking for beta-testers, don’t hesitate !

I will have a a beta-testing phase when the game is feature complete, no idea when that will happen, but basically I will need testers to check:
- General feeling about how the game feels, if there are things which are not obvious or could be done differently
- Actual game testing: Can the game be finished, are there non working options or combinations of actions, crashes, etc...
- Compatibility testing: Does it run properly on physical machines using specific configurations
- Localization testing: Are all the texts understandable, do they look truncated, are there typos, are some stuff not translated, etc...

[Dbug]

I now do have achievements in the game



The idea is to motivate people to trying playing more, even if they have already "finished" the game, and also promote competition between players.

Obviously, anyone looking at the source code will find them all, but I hope some people will try to find them just by playing, but hey, if people want to ruin their fun, that's their choice

[Chema]

This is getting seriously impressive.

[Sodiumlightbaby]

Bravo! That is such a great idea. I really wish achievements based replay-ability was a bigger thing back in the day, instead of the often applied "difficutly escalation" method of extending the play time.

[Dbug]

Let say that since I was running out of memory, I had to move a lot of the hardcoded code into "data driven scripts", so that indirectly made the game much more of a generic adventure game engine, probably not as flexible as "The Quill", but should be possible to reuse the Encounter HD engine to make other games, so it does not hurt to expand the feature set.

It's also probable that Encounter will be my last serious game for the machine for a while: I had to basically stop doing all my extra stuff, videos, side projects, etc... in order to realistically have a hope to finish it in my life time, so I'm trying to make was is just a "retro text adventure" into something I can feel happy about.

I'm not saying I will never finish Quantum FX or Dungeon Master, but I'll make a pause when I'm done.

[Dbug]

Does this type of documentation seem useful, or is it too/not enough detailed/vague/confusing?

https://github.com/Dhebug/Encounter/blo ... /memory.md

[Chema]

I found it very complete and easy to read. There is a quite big jump in complexity whe you start getting your hands dirty, but it is unavoidable I'm afraid.

I think that section with the 12 largest memory areas is new??

[Sodiumlightbaby]

It's also probable that Encounter will be my last serious game for the machine for a while: I had to basically stop doing all my extra stuff, videos, side projects, etc... in order to realistically have a hope to finish it in my life time, so I'm trying to make was is just a "retro text adventure" into something I can feel happy about.

I'm not saying I will never finish Quantum FX or Dungeon Master, but I'll make a pause when I'm done.

While I'm pretty fresh around these woods, I think I understand and just want to say, I would not at all think less of what you have done here if you switched focus after Encounter. It's looking to be a clsssic but I've also enjoyed your non programming work. Binging your YT channel e.g. was great for getting me excited about this old quirky platform. So thank you, no excuses needed, and let the fun guide us all

[Dbug]

I found it very complete and easy to read. There is a quite big jump in complexity whe you start getting your hands dirty, but it is unavoidable I'm afraid.

I think that section with the 12 largest memory areas is new??

Yeah, I keep updating the documentation over time: I don't have big plans laid out in advance, I write documentation the same way I write my code or do my projects: Iteratively

While I'm pretty fresh around these woods, I think I understand and just want to say, I would not at all think less of what you have done here if you switched focus after Encounter. It's looking to be a clsssic but I've also enjoyed your non programming work. Binging your YT channel e.g. was great for getting me excited about this old quirky platform. So thank you, no excuses needed, and let the fun guide us all

Let say that I realized that with my usual velocity and my number of projects, there's not enough of a remaining life time to be able to finish all the projects with a proper level of quality, so I have to pick my battles (which is why I've put the focus on Encounter), and I also need to keep things entertaining for me. I've quite a few more youtube videos to make, like I've heard of a new Oric Storage device coming one of these days, so it needs to be covered, or how to program on the Oric, the "Periph'Oric" peripherals, I've the series of videos about the Minitel and how it worked with the Oric, etc... so many things, so little time!

[Dbug]

Got a little bit of work done on the audio system, as well as some tweaks on the typewriter.



Obviously not the final music, that one has just a couple patterns, but it shows that there's no particular problem playing a 2 channels music while having sound effects on the side.

[Chema]

When I made my (ugly and simple) sound engine for Oricium, I put in some kind of priority levels on each channel, so that whenever a sfx wanted to play it looked for an empty channel. If none was empty, it looked for one with less priority than his, and stole it. It worked quite well when you had many sfx wanting to play at the same time.

Music usually had the highest priority, but, in theory, it does not need to be that way necessarily. I mean that some scheme such as that, might have a 3 channel tune sounding and only the lowest priority channel being silenced to play SFX from time to time.

Question: Does a song in Arkos tracker need to be at a fixed memory location, or can it be moved around (not while playing, necessarily)?

[Dbug]

Question: Does a song in Arkos tracker need to be at a fixed memory location, or can it be moved around (not while playing, necessarily)?

There are quite a few export formats, the Oric player supports only the AKY format which itself is available as a pre-built binary or as a source code.

For Encouter I chose the source code format, it's easy to automatically export, and of course then you assemble to wherever you want:
https://github.com/Dhebug/Encounter/blo ... ing-musics

After export that's what you get:
https://github.com/Dhebug/Encounter/blo ... pewriter.s

[Dbug]

Not particularly important, but I've put most of my Oric games on itch.io, including Encounter.

https://defenceforce.itch.io

Basically I'm trying to see if I can prepare a bit of buzz out of the Oric sphere, so I can get a chance to get the game reviewed in some if the indie review sites and magazines, one can still dream

[Dbug]

Today's update.

[Sodiumlightbaby]

Very nice artwork! This is so beyond the orignal