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I hope one of these days JiBé will go farther on the project, but at least the source code is available, so who knows, maybe somebody will try their luck at finishing it!

Well, back then it was a relatively low barrier to entry in term of ease of programming, you could make a very simple adventure 100% in BASIC, and most of them were very very badly designed, and by the time proper tools were designed to create proper adventures, with database of items, easy to link rooms, etc… the genre was in the process of being replaced by graphical Point’n Click adventures.

I guess what I’m doing with Encounter is some kind of in-between: It’s still a text adventure game at the core, but I reduced the vocabulary to change the game from a “try to figure out the proper command to use to do what I want” to something more intuitive that let the player experiment and have cool visual and audio feedback in return.

Hopefully people will like my choices :)

Hopefully you will not be disappointed, but at the root it’s still a text adventure game made mostly by a single person, so don’t expect the moon :D

It does indeed! I think Pulsoids is the first game Twilighte made that really nailed it in term of balance between the playability, the technical achievement and how it sounded and looked.

Which reminds me, I forgot to add a link to a video of the game in action!

At some point I considered making my own videos for all the games, but that was already quite an effort to make the custom pages, screenshots, adding the release dates, etc… so I ended up picking-up the most representative YouTube videos when they were available :)

To be fair, I suck at that game, it’s too fast for my old man reflexes!

If you look in the Documentation folder of the archive, the Hnefatafl.pdf document contains some details of what can be done, like page 15 and 16 the description of the “Blood Eagle” and “Berzerker” moves where you can capture two or three opponents at the same time, and page 18 the various conditions on which the King can be captured.

The game of Hnefatafl is relatively well documented, you can search on youtube for “Fetlar Hnefatafl” for plenty of small tutorial videos, just remember that there’s one specific rule which is different, in this Oric version of the game it is allowed to move a piece so it stops between two opponents without being taken.

Well, I’m sure if there’s some Oric programmers with a personal love story for that game, that could happen, but people making games on the Oric are like a fraction of the number of people you can find on Sinclair, Atari or Commodore machines.

Personally I did not know that Exile game, seems quite advanced, with such a scrolling on the Oric it would either had to be done in TEXT mode, or use some page flipping (screen by screen), else that would be way too slow.

It’s also quite a complex game for that time period. When most games could just be played with a joystick with a single fire button, that one has quite a few keyboard commands to learn!

Very cool, there’s quite a few details in the manual about technology that I did not actually know.

Where did these comic illustration come from? Was there some comics about Blake’s 7 as well as the TV series, or is that something that you made?

Btw, a couple weeks ago I added https://defenceforce.itch.io/blakes-7 on this site, it’s a Point’n Click style adventure game based on the first season of the show (also free to download).

I’m basically posting all the games made by Defence Force (most of them by Chema and Twilighte) because out of the Oric world most people never saw them, and that gives some visibility to the plateform in general.

There are a couple other classics to come up next, but no, I fear the ones you mentioned are not among them, but you definitely have heard of them.

Sound wise the Oric is very similar to the Atari ST, Amstrad CPC, MSX, or later generation Sinclair Spectrum machines.

The main difference tends to be the base clock, the Oric’s YM is clocked at 1mhz while the Atari ST’s runs at 2mhz, which influences how low and how high it can get… but on this specific case the shots could have been played higher, I guess it was Chema’s choice :D

And yeah, he wanted to pay homage to all these 80ies songs, so he decided to go with all these classic tunes.

Glad you like it, and thanks for commenting, much appreciated!

I remember Jonathan made a version that had that, but that would have made it a multi-load tape or require a floppy drive, so he discarded the idea.

That would technically not be difficult to add, possibly as a b-side intro :)

Well, I only did the intro of the game, the game itself was written by Chema, and in this version it’s probably 90% 6502 assembler.

That being said, I believe (would have to ask Chema) the original isometric engine was in C, so technically that would be possible to adapt to the ST relatively easily.

One of the biggest problems with the Oric, is that on that machine the minimal “graphic cell” is made of 6 pixels, not 8, that makes conversions to and from the machine to other plateforms quite complicated.

Yes, I made most of the intro sequence code and graphics :)

Glad you like it, it was Chema’s big first almost solo game on the machine, and I think Twilighte did a great job with the rendition of the original music on the Oric soundchip!