Back in the days I played a british game called “Encounter” (1983 - Severn Software) on my Oric Atmos, one of the many BASIC adventure games that uses a bunch of IF statements instead of using any kind of data driven system.
I really liked the game but I really wished it had graphics, so I tried and failed because I was 14 at the time and simply did not know enough to achieve that
40 years later and with a lot more experience under my belt, I tried that again, and end up actually releasing the game commercially (it’s on Itch and Steam with a free demo, but also available for free if you have an Oric dot org account), and made the entire project available on github (but I can’t link it, so you’ll have to search for “Encounter” by “Dhebug” on github).
Basically at this point it has a bit of C, quite a bit of 6502 assembler, but pretty much the entire game logic is in some home-made scripting system.
The documentation folder has a few markdown files with explanations on how the script works, so if anyone is interested and has questions, just ask
Is there a simple Oric disk image without needing to download all the Windows bloat? (I’m assuming it can run on a real Oric or Oric emulator.) That might also be of interest to non-Windows users.
EDIT: Forget it. I answered my own question. The Oric disk images can be downloaded at Oric International.
So for a bit of history, the game was not originally supposed to be commercial, there are quite a few more Oric games and demos that are made purely for free, but when I started sharing screenshots of Encounter on social medias, that hit out of the Oric community and people asked “where can I play that”, and when I started explaining that they could get an emulator… they zoned out saying it was too difficult for them, and to just “make it playable on Itch or Steam”, which is what I did.
So the members of the Oric community that already have an account and are already used to .DSK files and oric emulators (like Oricutron) get the game for free, while the people who prefer to use itch or steam get a launcher that can be used to configure the language, resolution, key-mapping, etc… and automatically launches the proper version of the game (there’s only one language per floppy, could not fit otherwise).
For the people interested I’ve also a very long post mortem blog post about the entire process of publishing a 8bit game on modern PC plateforms
(just search for “dbug’s blog - Encounter - One year later”)
Well, if I were to make a native modern version, sure, but the current ”PC version” is literally the 1983 computer running in an emulator, so the maximum resolution is 240x224.
Technically I guess we could add fancy GPU shaders to achieve this type of thing on the emulator
