# GSCats

## Introduction

This is a simple game in the style of Apple II Artilley, Scorched Earth, or Worms– but with cats and nobody gets hurt.

This was written as an exercise for me to learn the fundamentals of Apple IIgs game programming, and I certainly won't claim there's anything special here technically. The neatest part is probably the terrain, which is deformable and scrolls at 60fps on stock hardware. Well, sometimes it does, anyway, depending on how you hold your nose. The GS is hard.

## Acknowledgements

I'm writing this game now because I'm learning all the things I wished I could know when I was a teenager and playing all the amazing GS games. Games like Rastan, Task Force, Alien Mind, The Immortal, and Sword of Sodan that did things that people said the GS shouldn't be capable of. I was never able to acquire the knowledge of how these things were done back then, but thanks to an amazing modern retro community, I can! In that spirit, thanks to:

- John Brooks, who has forgotten more about the GS than I will ever know.
- Rebecca Heineman, who wrote every good game on the platform that you probably played except the ones John wrote
- Jeremy Rand, who is inspiring to me with his prolific retro programming endeavours and humble spirit. Not to mention I learned a lot from reading his code for BuGS.
- Brutal Deluxe, who have made so many great GS tools, including [Mr. Sprite](http://www.brutaldeluxe.fr/products/crossdevtools/mrsprite/index.html) and Cadius, upon which this game depends. I doubt you could find anyone more consistently devoted to the platform than these guys. Mr. Sprite's Tech Page is probably the greatest single treatise ever written on how to do fast Apple IIgs graphics.
- Dagen Brock, for tirelessly maintaining the last remaining (as of this writing) good GS emulator, GSPlus. Without good emulators, retro-development dies, so thank you for fighting the good fight, Dagen. Emulating the GS is a thankless job for a platform almost nobody cares about.
- All of the KansasFest and Apple II community on Slack and elsewhere


### Sound Credits:

- Cat noise compilation, by Counter-gamer. Used with permission under CC3.0 license. [https://freesound.org/s/213889/](url)
- Cat Howl, by InspectorJ. Used with permission under CC4.0 license. [https://freesound.org/s/415209/](url)
