Encounter has reached a threshold: $1000 (before the 30% Valve cut)! 🥳

I hate this crap so much. So WhatsApp (used by some in my family) wants to update... and now the update is on the Microsoft Store, proudly vaunting the AI features: I DON'T WANT AI IN MY CHAT APPLICATIONS!

So I did some experimentation: When I noticed there were only three games in the top sellers list I asked on IRC if anyone had Steam and PayPal so they could buy my game (and I would pay them back later), two persons bought the game, and tada, I'm #4 in the top seller🤣

Version 1.2.6 of Encounter is available on Itch, no new features, just tweaks and minor bug fixes, plus the reordering of the option menu that a few players commented on. defenceforce.itch.io/encounter/de...

For some reason I ended up with a "nul" file, and windows' explorer reporting that this file is "too large" is kind of funny 😅

A player pointed out that he spent more time in Encounter looking at things than taking them and suggested that LOOK should be the first possible action in the menu. 💡 Does any of you think other words should be reordered as well? 🤔

I got my first positive report about Steam Deck compatibility, thank you ThreeSon! (Not sure how many are required to get an actual status)

If you were to suggest a coding assistant (code review, how to use APIs, suggestions of which tech to use to achieve something specific, etc...) what would you recommend?

Not sure why, but I woke up this morning remembering this old PC game.

Sometimes my email client has good news \o/ If you publish a game on Steam, make sure to check the event calendar and submit your game to events if you think it's a good fit. ("Encounter" was not originally auto selected for the Detective and Typing fest)

Has anyone experience adding "Steam Deck" compatibility for software on "Proton db"? Basically I'm wondering if Encounter is now good enough to be validated as playable on the Steam Deck. www.protondb.com/app/3319780?...

Long but very interesting talk by Cory Doctorow about the side effects of Trump destroying trade agreements and the consequences on the anti-circumvention rules worldwide. (among other things) www.youtube.com/watch?v=3C1G...

Good progress on my next demo. Ship it!

I updated the Encounter post mortem with latest numbers from the Steam Detective Fest 2026. blog.defence-force.org/index.php?pa... tldr: $36 from 17 sales for a total of 377 units across all plateforms.

So I've reached 999 wishlists, cool... but I'm confused: I'm wondering why 31 persons added my free DLC as a wishlist, weird, not sure why 🤔

That's more or less what I was exposed to when I was a kid. Nostalgia! www.youtube.com/watch?v=KKhn...

Experiments...

I finally managed to join one of the Steam thematic fests, Encounter is on sale for one week. 🥳 You can get the game at store.steampowered.com/app/3319780/... or defenceforce.itch.io/encounter for about $2.00. #PrivateInvestigator #retrogaming

First time I look at this metrics: Apparently in average 15.3% of wishlists on Steam get converted to an actual sale after one year. With 21.3% I'm significantly above that number, so maybe the low price and deep rebate has been helping with the "impulsive buy"?

Whaou, Steam providing version control for mods! Having that for Conan Exiles would have be so less painful... store.steampowered.com/news/group/4...

So for the ones wondering, on January 1st "Encounter" had actually reached exactly 350 games sold, so when asked how many I sold in the first year I will use that number even if technically the game was released on December 20 😇

In August 2024, to work comfortably with Unreal Engine I upgraded my PC to 128GB of RAM for 4260 NOK ($420), a similar kit of memory (slightly slower) in the same show is now at 14969 NOK ($1487). 🥹 I sure hope I don't get a computer failure or need to upgrade...

First day at work... after six months not working. Let's just say that my Slack "unread" message list was kind of long 😅

Not sure how you started 2026, me I started it by watching the 1974 "Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla" while having my breakfast. It's actually quite good, some of the special effects were surprisingly high quality!

Encounter 1.2.5 has been released on Itch with the improved support for controllers. If you happen to have a controller that still does not behave, please comment with details on the model, etc... Thanks! defenceforce.itch.io/encounter/de...

Well, one couple more thing to add to the list of things done in 2025, with my very first code change to Oricutron (hopefully did not break anything), which was also my very first "pull request". Guess the next step is to update Encounter to use this new version of the emulator!

I've added support for analog joysticks to Oricutron, that works at least with my 8BitDo and another generic wired analog pad, now I need to test the Xbox and PlayStation pads.

Somebody made an unboxing of my physical edition of Encounter (in French), good thing that the Steam keys are hidden under a sticker :D www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9bb...

Encounter has been for sale at $2.99 for the last 7 months, with seasonal sale rebate at 75%. I was told that was way too cheap, and after thinking about it I think I'll raise the price back to $3.99 and not go under 50% rebate during sales. Does that sound sane?

One hour of online gaming on my Oric, it's crazy how reliable this machine is! 8bit-slicks.com

Yesterday I posted my post mortem article (blog.defence-force.org/index.php?pa...) but I had reports that on some browsers or devices the text was rescaled all wrong. I did a CSS change that seemed to have at least fixed the issue in Firefox when screen scaling was larger than 100%.

"Encounter" was launched exactly one year ago, so here is my post mortem for the game. It's very long, so you can skip at the very end if all you want to know is to get the core numbers (sales, time spent, ...) blog.defence-force.org/index.php?pa...

Seing all these videos about how the RAM prices is destroying the industry, I decided to take a look at what actually is the memory usage for my game... well, the launcher uses 4.3 megabytes, and the emulator uses 11 megabytes, so to play Encounter you need at last 16 megs😅

The Winter Sale are on on both Steam and Itch. I only need 15 more sales to reach 300 units sold, that would be a nice round number for the one year anniversary of the game 😇 store.steampowered.com/app/3319780/... defenceforce.itch.io/encounter

The problem of being a game developer, is that testing/playing the games you work on kind of skew the Steam recap statistics! 😅

Since Encounter was released almost one year ago (in 4 days), I'm preparing a post mortem on the project, with financial numbers on number of sales, revenue, etc...💰 Is there anything in particular you would be interested to know about regarding the project?📋

Ouch, I'm not sure how they managed to damage that machine that much, the plastic of the Oric computers is generally quite sturdy!

I had played Half Life 2 when it was released, I'm currently replaying it, and I realized it's not really a first person shooter, it's definitely more of a puzzle game that happens to have guns.

Half of the Encounter Physical Editions have been purchased and sent. Since I'm keeping one for me, it means there are only 4 remaining. I hope everyone of them will be happy in what they received, it can't be more custom than that!

Still correcting mistakes I made when I released the game almost one year ago: Steam agreed for me to change the game's name so add a subtitle to make it clearer what it actually is. Also my way of making the Steam store results cleaner so people don't waste time!

Looking at all the reports on the price of RAM and how it's going to be a problem for the game industry, I feel the need to mention that my game, "Encounter", requires a machine with 64KB of RAM, it will not run on the 16KB models. Sorry!

Since retroactively patching floppies is kind of boring, I just pushed a new Encounter update on both Steam and Itch. 😅 This will be the version written on the Physical Edition disks!

I guess the full French manual is now a thing...

Bien revenu sur Oslo, bien content du séjour sur Lyon, et d'avoir pu voir autant de personnes - dont certaines que je n'avais pas vu depuis plus de 25 ans ! Et pour ceux que je n'ai pas pu voir pour diverses raisons, ca sera pour la prochaine fois !

It took some time, but the Free "make your own physical edition" DLC for Encounter is now visible on the game store page. 🎉

My DLC store page has been accepted... now I just need to find out how the heck I can upload files! (It's my very first DLC, never did that before, so brand new here)

Well, I guess that's technically my first (free) DLC!🎉 defenceforce.itch.io/encounter/de... I should do the same for Steam, but that's for tomorrow's me! Thanks to anyone who helped with the French version of the user manual!

J'ai maintenant une version Française du manuel de Encounter, si quelqu'un veut jeter un coup d'oeuil histoire de voir si ca n'est pas truffé d'erreurs, ca serait sympa, merci! defence-force.org/download/enc...

The Physical Edition of Encounter is now "feature complete", everything is in the boxes. That took quite some time 😅 www.youtube.com/watch?v=8WAU...