- Version 1.5.0: Bug fixes - 6 September 2026
I’ve honestly not much to write, this is a medium version upgrade because internally the code has changed quite a lot (new toolchain - compiler, assembler, linker) which is something that can always bring some unwanted glitches. I tried my best testing the game, and I found quite a few small issues which hopefully are now fixed for good. The main reason for this version is that I finally managed to fix the “teleport to market place” that a couple of people experienced! The reason was simple: If you did not skip the startup cut scene, then pressing space at some specific location of the game would trigger the “skip cut scene”, effectively changing the currently running script to the one that shows the market place.
- What's next? - 22 June 2026
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. T…
- Games of Norway - 9 May 2026
Next week we will be celebrating the "Games of Norway", and of course Encounter will be part of it, after all it was made in Norway! For the occasion I updated the Encounter demo with the latest changes made to the game Please check the homepage to see the list of featured games, as well as some links to articles about the Norwegian game scene. The list includes old games like Anarchy Online (2001) or The Longest Journey (2000) and some that are not even yet released like Kioku or Moomintroll, and covers everything from big studio games running Unreal Engine 5 to pixel art indie games running on custom engines. There should be something for everybody's taste! Do you have a favorite game in that list? (Myself I'm waiting for the Steam version of Roguecraft)
- Version 1.4: Faster and smoother - 2 May 2026
When Encounter was released in December 2024, the priority was to make sure the game was playable and did not have any critical defects. Most reports have been positive, but I knew there were a few things that could have been done better. This update focuses on polishing the experience. Performance issues For a game running on a 1MHz 6502, the game runs quite smoothly overall. However the intro and especially the typewriter sequence became painfully slow toward the end. This has now been significantly improved. Screen Refresh Some scene descriptions were flickering (disappearing and reappearing) when picking up items. A new "bubble" handling system has been implemented to fix this. It took longer than expected due to cutscene complications. Non-Visual Items Many more items are now properly visible on screen: cardboard box, net, hose, protection suit, knife, snooker cue, handheld device,…
- Version 1.3.1: So many fixes! - 12 April 2026
Version 1.3.1 I was quite happy with version 1.3.0, it had quite a few significant changes and felt overall like a much sleeker experience. Then recently the game was reviewed by the famous MathBrush on the IFDB website. "One nice part was finding an old electronic game of a sort I had recently been thinking about and talking to my son about. It was one of those retro ones that has the images literally baked into the screen and all the game does is choose which one lights up." About the same time YagmanX played Encounter on Twitch. Both these events revealed a few issues, ranging from serious game-breaking bugs to missing features, so I spent a bit of time preparing this new version of the game. Bug Fixes Throwing a container instead of dropping it would permanently lose its contents (game-breaking issue) Taking the protection suit no longer fails to refresh the scene Fixed cellar windo…
- Version 1.3: The Big One - 18 March 2026
So, version 1.3.0 is out, and it's kind of a big one. Actually, scratch that — it's the biggest update since the game launched back in December 2024. A new voice This is probably the change you'll notice first: the game now has a consistent narrative voice. The top window (the scene description) acts as a narrator — neutral, descriptive, setting the stage. But the text area where you interact? That's now firmly from the perspective of your character, a British private investigator who's seen a few things and has opinions about most of them. Previously the texts were a bit all over the place — sometimes "you", sometimes "I", sometimes just neutral descriptions. Now it's consistent throughout, and it makes a surprising difference. Item descriptions went from utilitarian ("a roll of tape") to something with a bit more personality. Error messages went from generic ("I can't do that") to the…
- Version 1.2.6: Small fixes! - 5 February 2026
I got feedback from a few players who suggested some quality of life improvements as well as found a few bugs, so I spent a bit of time testing and fixing, the main change being the order of the words in the selection menu. Here is the full list of changes: Reordered the list of words in the menu so most commonly used words are faster to access Trying to open or close the trashcan now shows the disgusting content scene instead of saying "can't do" Improved the handling of the net to reduce the number of "can't do that" Fixed some issues regarding the selection of containers and using ESCape to cancel the operation Hopefully fixed an issue regarding counting the number of items in the inventory when trying to fetch something that requires a container Optimisation: Rewrote ParseInputBuffer to assembler to reduce the size of the code The optimisation was not really necessary, but it gave m…
- Version 1.2.5: Better Controller Support! - 31 December 2025
The main change in this version is an update to the emulator (Oricutron), which now provides much better support for modern controllers with analog sticks and additional buttons. In particular: All extra buttons on the Competition Pro joystick are now usable as action buttons. On Xbox and PlayStation controllers, both analog sticks and the D-pad are now fully supported. Other minor changes in the game itself: Fixed a typo in the French word “Inaccessible”. Added a message when attempting to use the bucket to reach something too high. Happy New Year!
- One Year Anniversary - 21 December 2025
Encounter was released on December 20th 2024. That was my first 100% indie launch, and there were quite many things to learn, not only about making a game, but also how to put it on Steam, get people to know about it, etc... Ultimately, only about 300 people bought the game, less than half launched it, and one tenth finished it, but it got good reviews so I'm satisfied. If you want to know more, I wrote a quite long blog post detailing the entire project timeline, including graphs, numbers, plenty of screenshots and links: Encounter: One Year Later And have a nice winter break everybody, take care!
- Version 1.2.4: Quality of life fixes - 4 December 2025
Encounter is mostly "finished". There are plenty of things I wish I could add, but the floppy disk is full, and despite all of my efforts I can't win against the laws of physics! So anyway, here is this new version 1.2.4 which solves a few issues: To make it easier to produce and test physical versions of the game on the real hardware, the "Game" folder now contains .HFE and .IMD versions of the game. You can use the .HFE versions with a Gotek or HxC Floppy emulator, and the .IMD versions are ideal to make real floppy versions using a Greaseweazle! Also to make testing easier, pressing any of the SHIFT key when quitting the splash sequence now resets the achievements, so players don't get a version that already have unlocked achievements! To make Steamdeck (and joystick) players happy, the option menu now have an additional "Cancel" option Added UP and DOWN as valid inputs to exit the i…
- Nominate Encounter for the Steam Awards! - 24 November 2025
Nominate Encounter for the "Outstanding Visual Style" Award! There’ve been an incredibly large number of fabulous games released this past year, so the probability Encounter can get any award of any kind is so close to zero that you’d need an electron microscope to see that it’s not actually zero! Anyway, I’m using Encounter as a way to learn about parts of the game-dev process I hadn’t touched before, so I’m basically role-playing “indie developer”! Why did I choose “Outstanding Visual Style”? Well, Encounter is clearly not a Game of the Year candidate. It plays nicely on Steam Deck but is probably far from the best game on it (that being said, I’m quite certain it’s not the worst either). Being a single-player game, it can’t possibly fit in “Friends Forever.” The gameplay is certainly not the Most Innovative either, and since it’s not a tough game, it can’t be “Best Game You Suck At.”…
- Physical Edition DLC! - 21 November 2025
Modern games have grown so huge that proper boxed releases have become something of a lost art. It doesn’t help that many titles ship unfinished or buggy and need day-one patches just to run properly. Encounter has now been out for a full year, the biggest wrinkles are ironed out, and it finally feels ready for a real physical edition. So I made a very limited run—just 10 hand-crafted copies. By the time you’re reading this, they’re almost certainly all gone. But there’s good news: I’ve just released a free DLC that contains everything I used to create those physical copies! Inside you’ll find: - A 20-page full-color manual (PDF) - All printable case files and inserts - High-res box art and inlay A handful of step-by-step assembly videos Even if you don’t own a real Oric computer to run the original tape, you can still print the manual, assemble the inlay, and proudly display a gorgeous…
- Version 1.2.3: New Demo! - 31 August 2025
Last Friday I attended an Oslo Gamedev Meetup and some of the people there tried my game, and it quickly became obvious there were two big issues! The first one was problematic, quite a few of the players actually skipped the intro sequence completely without really noticing, which meant they did not actually get to read the instructions! The second one is that the demo version was old. Quite old, it was actually based on the version 1.1.0 from March this year, which means it was missing quite a few quality of life improvements, item descriptions, interactions and images as well. Plus also the fact the demo was quite short so one of the players actually found the back of the house in just a couple minutes and reached the end. So this version 1.2.3 solves these three issues: The intro sequence is now skipped by pressing ESCape instead of SPACE or ENTER (but a text tells you if you bash t…
- Version 1.2.2: We have Clafoutis! - 17 August 2025
This version 1.2.2 was not originally planned, but during the summer holidays, I observed family members playing the game and noted a few minor issues. Not all are resolved in this new version, but I’m committed to addressing them in future updates, as I dislike leaving bugs in my programs. Additionally, the Atari ST demoscene community sparked a lively discussion about “clafoutis” - a French dessert traditionally made with cherries - thanks to the recently released game Galactic Panic. This led to requests to incorporate clafoutis in Encounter. Fortunately, the game’s unused orchard with previously useless (yet tasty) apples provided the perfect opportunity: Players can now eat, chop, and use apples, potentially for gameplay purposes, such as solving an enigma. Here’s the full list of changes: Shifted the achievement list to the left to prevent French achievements from corrupting the s…
- Achievements in French. - 5 August 2025
The downside of developing on a machine set to one language is that you don’t always notice issues in others! This summer, while on vacation, I installed the game on my parents’ computer and realized the achievements were in English on Steam’s interface (but correctly in French in *Encounter*). This issue should now be fixed. Sorry for the inconvenience!
- Strategy tips for new adventurers - 4 August 2025
When I presented the game to people who had never played a classic adventure game before, it quickly became clear that they were unsure how to proceed. They would either wander aimlessly and get lost, collect every item they saw until their inventory was full, or fail to pick up items and forget where they had been. To assist new players, I wrote this article , which covers topics like making a map, managing items, and more. Hopefully, this will help you all!
- CAAD review - 25 June 2025
Encounter was reviewed in the issue 68 of the spanish magazine CAAD ("Magazine for adventurers"). This issue dives deep into Encounter, first with an interview/analysis from page 26 to 33 that unveils the game's origins and how it was built, then with a detailed review spanning pages 110 to 113. The game received a 9/10 "Very Good" score, with the following conclusion: Dbug has managed to extract the maximum from this story, enhancing it with everything needed to make it unique and squeezing every bit of potential out of the Oric, possibly creating the best adventure for this system. Atmosphere: 9 Gameplay: 9 Graphics: 9 Story: 7 Difficulty: 8 Sound: 9 If you are interested, you can get the magazine in digital or physical form on the CAAD website Also, the game will be 75% off during the Summer Sales starting tomorrow, that should make it at less than 1 euro/usd/pound, so if you were lo…
- Final version! - 8 June 2025
We are reaching the end of the project! Encounter was released in December 2024, and since then, there has been a steady stream of improvements and tweaks. However, I've reached the point where the disk is completely full, and so is the game's memory. For those who haven't followed the project, this is not a typical PC game. It's a game running on a 1984 computer called the Oric, with a 1 MHz 6502 processor, 64 kilobytes of memory, and 380 kilobytes of storage on a 3" floppy disk, all running in an emulator called Oricutron. As a result, the game cannot expand indefinitely: there are very real physical limits. For this final version (though I may release a couple more updates if bugs are found, this is considered "feature complete" in terms of content), I've added a few images: Now, when investigating the well, you get a proper picture: You also get an image when investigating the trash…
- Version 1.2: Monkey King! - 31 May 2025
This version 1.2.0 finally brings in a playable Monkey King minigame! If you played the game before, you may have found a handheld device in one of the rooms, but unfortunately it was not playable because it was out of batteries. Fortunately, after exploring the mansion a bit more, our investigator finally found some compatible batteries! Some assembly is required, but you'll be rewarded with a fully playable Monkey King game, complete with normal and fast modes, and saved scores (and your best score for the session will be added to the final in-game Encounter score). This version 1.2.0 will most likely be the last big update: If I can fit a few more images on the disk I may push a couple minor versions, possibly the QR Code generator will be inserted so games can be shared on the Defence Force website on some online leaderboard, but that's about it. If you bought the game, thank you, a…
- BrewOtaku review - 25 May 2025
Encounter was reviewed in the issue #006 of BrewOtaku ("The Homebrew Gaming Magazine" covering new games for old consoles, handhelds and computers). The game received a 85% "BrewScore", with the following conclusion: Encounter HD is a standout homage to the golden age of gaming, crafted with care and precision for the Oric Atmos. With a captivating plot, clever design, and plenty of classic charm, it’s an irresistible trip down memory lane. Adventurers, prepare for an unforgettable journey. If you are interested, you can get the magazine in digital or physical form on the BrewOtaku website. If you haven't yet posted your review of the game on Steam, I encourage you to do so, because at least 10 reviews are needed for Steam to consider the score valid!" Thanks!
