We now have the Oric 1 version of "Jeux et programmes pour l'ordinateur Oric 1", the main difference is the presence of the "Krypton" program from Pascal Pieroni which is missing from the Atmos version.

Over the years I've tried Ubuntu and Mint, what would be the recommended distro now for someone who spent decades using Windows, don't particularly like linux but has reached the point where looking at Windows getting worse and worse is not possible anymore? PS: No MacOS...

A reviewer of the game pointed out that Encounter did not have the "X" (for examine) command, so I added that, and realized also that my help system did not even mention that there was a selection menu. Here is the new layout for English and French, does that work for you?🤔

The protection suit is now visible in the scene :)

I somehow had forgotten to remove this placeholder location I used while developing Encounter... it's now gone so I now have an additional 768 bytes I can use 🥳

Two months before Nova 2026 demo party. 😱 I don't know how far I'm going to go, but at least I've something that kind of work all together. Just don't expect some crazy effects. that one is in my usual "demo-ish story" style! 😅

Important questions indeed, for demoscene productions, but also for games. The whole classification system is becoming tricky.

Perfect code, no bugs, ship it!

The cool thing about making demos is that you learn skills about presentation, delays, keeping people's attention, a lot of things about small details. Then you can use these skills when you make games or other things. I doubt I could have built Encounter without these!

A trivial change can make all the difference: All I did is to move the modem down a little bit and then draw the diagonal lines to connect the front and the back.

Slow progress is better than no progress!

Students kept contacting me with resumes for internships at Arkane Studios... apparently because they found my 20+ years page of the old website. So I did a bit of spring cleaning!

I'm not sure I'll have a full demo for Nova, but at least I'm trying.

Sora, not sorry?

As promised, second part of me documenting how I'm using AI tools to improve my workflow. It's probably going to be hilarious to read that in a few years when the field will have moved so far that these will look like a Neanderthal using a silex. blog.defence-force.org/index.php?pa...

So I tried to register to CASA (The Classic Adventures Solution Archive) to add some of the missing Oric games... but could not register because the phpbb captcha system seems to be broken "This site key is not enabled for the invisible captcha.", sent an email to the admin.⌛️

I started a "small project": Identify all the adventure games on the Oric, add screenshots if they are missing, and then check if they are all present on the various adventure game database sites. The Oric has many high quality games such as Death Satellite!

Been a while since I wrote a blog post... that one is about how I'm using AI tools to improve my workflow when working on "stuff", and how long that actually take (with actual measurements).🤖 blog.defence-force.org/index.php?pa...

It's this time of the year again, the game will be at 33% off on both Itch and Steam until the 26th. There's been quite a few improvements since it launched in December 2024! Thanks to anyone who gave feedback that helped make the game better 🤗

After 5 years waiting, I may finally be able to get my Oric original version of Hibernated! 🥳 Looking forward to try it on my machine!

Version 1.3.0 of Encounter is out on itch.io. I'll get it on Steam in a couple days, but I'd like to make sure everything is working as expecting because that's a new launcher, new language🇳🇴, new loader, room for new bugs and crashes!⤵️ defenceforce.itch.io/encounter/de...

Three days before Steam spring sale... and I still find dumb stuff in my Norwegian version... like the fact that the rest of the newspaper is still in French, only the "FORSVUNNET" was localized...

Coté présentation, c'est quoi qui passe le mieux pour indiquer les flèches de direction et/ou manettes de jeu.

When you can't remember... just ask!

I just discovered that the default $100 "payment holding" could actually be changed. I guess it makes sense for games that don't sell much and will never reach the $100 mark to move it down to $50 at some point.

I took some while, but thanks to mininaller, Chema and Iss, Encounter now runs on the Jasmin disk system 🥳 streamable.com/f152yj

I wonder what's the best score anyone got at the minigame. I had to retest the entire game because I'm adding better support for the Jasmin drives, which required some memory layout changes and some stuff crashed💀 And yes, I do play my own game, I'm my number one tester 😅

I'm still working on the new version of Encounter, hopefully that will bring more personality to the game! www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Q3k...

Spent the day improving the blog: - There's now a RSS feed - OpenGraph support for preview/metadata - Article titles in the URL - Bunch of http/https fixes blog.defence-force.org/index.php?pa...

Just testing if the OpenGraph implementation now works on my blog: blog.defence-force.org/index.php?pa...

A Game Jam was organized my some colleagues this weekend, I took the opportunity to do two things I had not done before: A project where 99% of the code is entirely AI generated, and a PICO-8 game. 😇 You can play in the browser, or watch the video! dhebug.github.io/S.C.R.A.P./

So I wanted to take a look at Pico-8, and their page by default make you use Humble Bundle... and only after I've been through this horrible site and activation system found out I could just have bought it on Itch. *sigh*

Damn, I missed my first curator review! Thanks CSH Picone! I agree that the writing could be better, I guess a combination of me not being a native English speaker plus that constraints of screen size and memory did not really help.

Numbers are not moving fast, but they still do, I'm not going to complain about an additional $169 this month! I hope players will really like the next update, because quite a few minor issues have been fixed, making for a much more polished experience all around!

Sometimes, not touching a project for a few weeks and going back to it with fresh eyes finds a crapton of small things that you had never noticed were bad. Like here the fact there are two spaces on the left... but on the right the text is just aligned against the border!

Small cosmetic improvement: Now the list of items in the scene shows "and" for the last item instead of a ",". This new version 1.3 was supposed to be a minor update... I failed again! 🤣

This video is from the "Norwegian Consumer Council" (an actual governmental agency en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norwegi...). www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4Up...

While working on the #Norwegian version, I realized that the instructions had became completely chaotic with stuff all over the place, so I reorganized all that in a way that's easier to understand, and I'll probably lengthen how long they stay displayed.

Localization takes time (even using automated systems) when you need to take into consideration limited character sets size and screen dimensions... but trying my best to get something decent given the constraints!

Version 1.22 of the Oric SDK (OSDK) is now available for download. osdk.org/index.php?pa...

Small update for the launcher, the "Contact support" option now adds to the email a short section with the important/relevant system information, including the actual options selected in the launcher.

Getting there, the game launcher now supports Norwegian as well🎉

Not sure if that will have any impact on Encounter sales, but my trailer is shown on this video from @yakwaxlips.bsky.social , let's cross fingers! www.youtube.com/watch?v=zA7h...

I realized while doing the Norwegian version that this "Now you die" had not actually be translate to French, not sure if "Nå dør du!" is any correct, but works for now. For French I'm thinking of "Va en enfer !" or "Va au diable !", or something with "Crève" 🤔

Somebody asked me how I did the localization for Encounter, but after explaining I had the nagging feeling that there was probably something missing, so I tried adding a third language (Norwegian) and found out that my system broke, so I had to fix that. Anyway, WIP!

Angers is my birth city, and quite a lot of this area is now flooded by the two local rivers, the "Maine" and the "Loire". www.youtube.com/watch?v=1mB_...

During the interview the other day, I mentioned the job offer for Adeline Software was in one of the magazines I got after TILT stopped, finally found it back: Joystick magazine no 47 from March 1994🥳

I had actually never counted how many games I worked on, so I asked a chatbot to make a list, it was mostly correct but some attribution was wrong, but that ends up with about 18 released commercial games, 12 released retro games, and 4 unreleased retro games. 30 releases 😅