🚀 go-pugleaf

Tom Harrigan wrote:
> 
> It's amazing how great that game was compared to the flashy junk that's
> been coming out lately.
>
> [Snipped]
> 
> > : Actually, I think the game was called SunDog, which ran on the Apple II,
> > : and was truly awesome for its time. Written by a guy named Bruce Webster,
> >
> > The game was written by FTL Software, and I believe it debuted on the
> > Atari ST.  It was one of the first games I bought fot it - it was truly
> > awesome for the time.  Very much like Privateer - you traded, explored
> > planets, got robbed ont he street, used teleporters, went to the bank,
> > flew in space, hyperjumped, and had dogfights.  VERY cool.

Thanks for the kind words, one and all. After some 22 years of 
software engineering and other activities, I still remain proudest of 
SunDog: Frozen Legacy, and it means a lot that others still think fondly
of it. :-) 

A few additions, corrections, and trivia:

-- Wayne Holder was co-designer of the game and still (to my knowledge) 
   runs FTL Games in San Diego. 

-- SunDog first came out on the Apple II and was released at the West 
   Coast Computer Faire in March, 1984. It was written in Apple Pascal
   (roughly 15,000 lines) and 6502 assembly (roughly 5000 lines). I
   did about 95% of the coding for version 1.0 and 90% for version
   2.0 (shipped October 1984). It came on a double-sided floppy (280KB
   storage) that you had to manually remove and flip over, and ran in 
   64KB of RAM. 

-- I wrote the graphics library from scratch; it supported multiple
   overlapping windows, drag-and-drop icons, and joystick control
   (we were heavily influenced by Apple's Lisa computer, the precursor
   to the Macintosh). I also developed tools for editing icons, fonts, 
   and maps. I even wrote a p-code/6502 disassembler so that
   we could hack the p-code interpreter. 

-- The Atari ST version--which had graphics and animation I could only
   dream about--was done by Doug Bell, Mike Newton, and Andy Jaros,
again
   with contributions from Wayne. It came out (I believe) in late 1985
or
   early 1986. FTL's big success, though, was DungeonMaster. 

-- The subtitle (Frozen Legacy) was a play on words, referring both to
   the fact that you couldn't get clear title to your inherited starship
   until you fulfilled your late uncle's contract and to the fact that
   fulfilling that contract involved finding and transporting
cryogenically
   stored colonists. 

-- SunDog was to be a trilogy. The second game (SunDog: Old Scores to
Settle)
   was to deal with finding out why your uncle died and was advertised
in the
   game credits. The third game would deal with the political
ramifications of
   what you discovered. 

-- SunDog wasn't the game we originally set out to develop. We started
   out doing the computer version of a solitare SF RPG called Star
Smuggler
   from DwarfStar Games (a division of Heritage USA). Two months into
the
   project, Heritage went into bankruptcy--before we had finalized the
   rights. So we had to throw out all that work and start from scratch
   with a brand new game design that wouldn't infringe on Star Smuggler. 

-- SunDog was actually set in the game universe of an SF RPG that I was
   developing before I started work at FTL Games and continued work on
   while at FTL. I had generated four sectors of systems, with names for 
   each system and tech levels, law levels, wealth levels, and names for 
   each planet. We used one of those sectors for SunDog and would have 
   expanded to the others for the sequels. A few of the planet/system
   names were anagrams of company and personal names. 

-- I left FTL Games in October of 1984, a week after SunDog 2.0 was
released.
   I was so burned out that I did not do professional software
development again
   until four years later, when I took a contract position at Apple
Computer. 
   I was fortunate to be able to support myself with writing and
teaching in
   the meantime. 

Probably more than y'all wanted to know, but there it is. I keep
swearing that
I'm going to do a modern version of SunDog someday, but I'm not sure if
that'll
happen. Ah, well...thanks again for the kind words.  ..bruce..

--------------------------------------
bruce f. webster | bweb...@bfwa.com |
Bruce F. Webster and Associates, Inc.|
    http://www.bfwa.com/~bwebster    |
--------------------------------------