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WELCOME: to the home of OKLABSOFT, an independent game development studio founded in 2015. Our passion is retro computer fantasy role-playing games. At oklabsoft, we create realms.

CONTACT: oklab.software@gmail.com
or follow us on Twitter @oklabsoft

or join us on Discord!

POPULATION: Two. Justin and Aaron.

HISTORY: Back in the mid 80s, I (Aaron) worked with a school friend to begin writing a fantasy role-playing game called “Lurking” on the Apple IIe using Apple BASIC. The game was inspired by Ultima III and Wizardry which had been consuming all of our time that wasn’t devoted to working on the project. The tile-based game display was rendering far too slowly so we delved into 6502 Assembly subroutines to speed things up. Things were working out fabulously, but than ‘End Of Memory’ put an end to our project.

Fast forward to the mid 90s. While in college, I dusted of the Lurking idea and had another go. This time, it was QBasic on my IBM PS2 (no, not a PlayStation). I actually finished the game which used colored text characters to render the tile view. Once again, ‘Out Of Memory’ plagued me but I trimmed and cropped until I had a ‘finished’ project. Who to test it? My brother, Justin, who received a copy on 3.5″ floppy. After some time, he gave me the bad news that the game was full of bugs including the failure of some major monsters (namely, one dragon) to even show up in the game. I’m not sure why it was never fixed but it resides still on that same computer in a landfill somewhere. I do wish I could have another look at it now.

Circa 2005: I discovered Visual Basic. Gone were all of my maps and documents. So I started from scratch. I got pretty far in development but was plagued by a random error that I tried for months to solve but failed to. I eventually gave up. I eventually got a new computer. I eventually threw out my old computer. One more instance of Lurking in a landfill somewhere. The real bummer, somewhere along the way years later I randomly had an epiphany and realized suddenly what had caused that error (using an example of bitblt from an old text that used a single that needed to be a double type variable).

2015: “Hey Justin, how would you feel about having another go at Lurking?” And, here we are.