are there art archives?

[tiamat1968]

I wanted to ask people if there are any art archives for Dungeon Master, Eye of the Beholder, or similar action-oriented 1st-person dungeon crawlers.

I'm currently making an indie game using the Gold Box/Unlimited Adventures engine, which is a slightly less actiony close cousin to the Eye of the Beholder games. UA has an art archive, which I know includes a fair amount of art derived from the Eye of the Beholder, Dungeon Master, and Lands of Lore series, and probably other games in the 1P dungeon crawler genre.

I got the idea after someone in my Discord group started raving about "The Great" Rick Parks behind the artwork from Land of Lore: Throne of Chaos. So I opened up Lands of Lore and indeed some of the artwork is pretty awesome.

If there aren't art archives, I'd love to hear what people well-learned in dungeon crawler lore think are the prettiest games. I really loved Scotia's Tower from LoL: ToC.

[Gambit37]

What do you mean by art archives? Do you want the extracted assets from the games? I made these available on here years ago as zip files, but I'm not sure they are still online, try searching the forum.

If you're just talking about appreciating the art, I agree, I still have a big nostalgic warmth for this art style. Dungeon Master looks a bit ropey these days, but the Eye of the Beholder / Lands of Lore style still looks amazing. The jump from 16 colours to 256 made a huge difference to what was possible. Having said that, I'm still a big fan of the Captive graphics, which were 32 colours on the Amiga. Black Crypt looked awesome too, that used 64 colours (well, 32+32 halfbrite).

You might also like this thing that I'm working on (although it's not a restricted palette, I'm using millions of colours, so not really "retro" in that sense):