In 1997, LucasArts shipped a first-person western called Outlaws. It had hand-drawn cutscenes, a harmonica on the soundtrack, and a story about a retired marshal riding out one last time to save his daughter. I played it at four years old on my parents' PC, understanding maybe a third of what was happening. It ruined me — in the best possible way.

I've been waiting for someone to make something like it again. A proper western shooter. Not open world, not a prestige narrative experience, not a walking sim with spurs. Something mean and lean and replayable — cartoonish programmer-art textures, low-res sprites, the whole old-school aesthetic kept intact. But built around modern game design principles: roguelike structure, endless runs, levels assembled from prebuilt sections into layouts that never play the same way twice.

Nobody made it. So here I am.

Why a roguelike

The honest answer is that I love the idea more than the execution of any single run. A linear western campaign ends. You ride off into the sunset and that's that. But the frontier is supposed to be endless — town after town, outlaw after outlaw, the same basic math of survival playing out in a hundred different arrangements.

Procedurally generated levels felt like the natural answer. Every time you boot up Lawless, the saloon is in a different place. The outlaws are dealing different hands. The layout punishes the strategy that saved you last time. You learn the rules, not the map.

The frontier is supposed to be endless. A linear campaign is a contradiction in terms.

Endless runs means no save scumming, no guaranteed second chances. You die, you ride back out from nothing. The territory remembers you weren't careful. That's the fantasy — not being the predetermined hero, but being the kind of person who might just survive today.

What's in the game right now

Combat is working. That's the honest version of "pre-alpha." You spawn into a corridor-maze level built from modular western tiles — brick, wood, desert adobe — and outlaws patrol it. They see you, they shoot. You see them first, you might not get shot.

The shooting feels right to me. I spent a long time on the gun weight and the hit reactions before I touched anything else. A revolver should feel like a revolver. The double-barrel should feel like a decision you make slowly and regret if you aimed wrong.

The 2.5D question

Lawless is not a full 3D game. The levels are built on a raycasting renderer — the same family of tricks that powered Wolfenstein 3D and the original Outlaws engine. Walls are projected columns, sprites face you always, floor and ceiling are flat planes.

I'm not doing this because it's cheap. I'm doing it because I think it's the right aesthetic for what this game is. The flatness creates a specific kind of menace. Enemies are silhouettes before they're threats. The corridors feel like corridors instead of hallways. It pushes the imagination in directions that polygon counts don't.

The goal isn't to push the style somewhere it wasn't meant to go — it's to stay true to it. Rough walls, flat sprites, that particular kind of ugly-charming that early 3D never quite lost. The screenshots above are early and rough, but the feel is already close to what I'm after.

What's next

Right now there's no procedural generation at all — just a single flat handmade map. That's how early this is. The roguelike structure is the direction, not the current reality.

The immediate next step is getting the gunplay to a point where it feels genuinely good rather than just functional. Movement, weapon feedback, hit reactions — the stuff you touch every single second of play. That has to be right before anything else matters.

Level generation and bounty hunts come after. No timeline, no promises.

I'll be writing here as things move. Grab the pre-alpha on itch.io if you want to see where it stands today.