Open Apple #38 (August 2014) : The Lawless Legends Team

This month on Open Apple, we go deep on Lawless Legends with most of the team building it. We’ve managed to corner Seth Sternberger (of 8-bit Weapon fame), Martin Haye, and Brendan Robert (Dave Schmenk, we’re coming for you…) to grill them on this amazing effort. We also wish a fond farewell to co-host Ken Gagne, and welcome our new co-host Quinn Dunki. Listeners can look forward to more angry sarcasm and less professionalism here on Open Apple. Of course, we also ramble some more about KansasFest 2014. Because KansasFest.

Lawless Legends is a new wild west RPG game being built cross-platform for classic 8-bit computers, and possibly a few modern machines as well. Among its many outstanding features are a 2.5D free-roaming raycast engine, mipmapping, sprites, a high-level scripting language, and full modern pipeline for creating art and design elements. We gather up as many of the team as we can muster and pick their brains about how the game is coming along. We go deep into the process of building it, and take some cheap shots at Commodore along the way. It’s okay though, by the time their machines finish loading, this will all be ancient history.

More information on everything mentioned in the show can be found after the jump.

Links for Episode 38

* KansasFest – The biggest and best retrocomputing conference there is.* Lawless Legends on Facebook – Get the scoop on this game, and keep up with the latest news.* Lawless Legends on Github – All the source code, ready to be forked around with.* Outlaw Editor – The cross-platform retro game editor which is the beating heart of the Lawless Legends pipeline.* JACE – The Java Apple Computer Emulator, which is the beating heart of the beating heart of Outlaw.* The Tale of Big Blue – Follow a single pixel from editor to screen memory. Martin walks through the raycaster top to bottom.* Blockly – The graphical code editor which was incorporated into Lawless’ design pipeline.* “Burger” Becky Heineman – The legendary Apple ][ game developer by whom Lawless Legends managed to get noticed.* Graphics Gems – Techniques for optimizing rendering engines that are as useful on the Apple ][ as they are on the PlayStation 4.* 8-Bit Weapon – The chiptunes band with a soft spot for the Apple ][, and a love of retro RPGs.