What's next?

The reason why there hasn’t been much work done on Encounter in the last couple of months is mainly due to two things:

• The game is mostly “done” in terms of content

• I had promised to release an Oric demo for the Nova demo party and, being a solo developer, I can’t really work on two things at the same time!

The Demo

If you don’t know what a demo is, imagine a mix between a videogame cutscene and a music video, but all done in real time, often on vintage computers that may have very limited resources.

This demo runs on the same hardware (1 MHz 6502, 64 KB RAM) as Encounter and is derived from the disk loading and audio system I made for the game.

The theme is “Cyberpunk” and it basically features a small story with a few effects embedded in it. Most people seem to like it, so feel free to watch it here:

One thing you should notice is that it shows the Oric can display colored pictures. There are huge constraints, and it tends to work better with simplified artwork — which is why I chose a monochrome display for Encounter.

Interestingly, while optimizing the demo I found a few issues in the underlying system that I’ll be able to retrofit into Encounter. This should free up a few bytes here and there that I can use for some of the future changes I had in mind.

Encounter

So as I said, the game is technically “feature complete,” but there are still a few things I can do to make it even better. Some are just nice-to-haves, others are community or player requests. However, I’m very limited in both system memory and disk space, so they may not all be possible to implement.

Here’s the current list:

• Sedoric compatibility: Right now it is not possible to easily copy Encounter using the Sedoric BACKUP command because it’s not a Sedoric format. This is not a protection — it simply allowed me to use as much of the 380 KB storage as possible. One solution is to sacrifice about 3 sectors on the disk to provide a fake table of contents and disk information layout. This would let Sedoric recognize the disk format so the BACKUP command can be used normally (BACKUP A: B:).

• Mix Tape: A few players found the mixtape in the car and really wanted to listen to it. Technically it’s just a matter of making a “best of ’81-’82” music track in Arkos Tracker, adding a tape deck in one of the rooms, and implementing some interaction to play it. The cost is the memory needed for the interaction and items, plus the disk space for the music file.

• Auto-complete: I’ve always been a fan of the parser in Le Diamant de l’île Maudite, which recognizes keywords as you type and auto-completes them. I have a working prototype that colorizes input in red when it’s not a valid word and turns it green when a single possible word matches, letting you press Space to accept the completion. It works, but it doesn’t currently fit in memory, so I would need to do some serious optimization.

• Additional languages: The Spanish-speaking adventure game community is quite large, so I’m considering adding Spanish. Since I don’t have a budget, the base localization would be automated, and I would ask members of the Spanish community to help refine it.

If there’s anything else you wish was addressed, cool ideas, or any feedback really, feel free to comment below. Thanks!