Legends and Lost Arcana

Along with the source and executables, I found my old notes with lots of ideas for monsters and features. I found illustrations of monster designs and effects, some of which I never ended up using.

Dragons

I remember spending hours trying to draw a dragon, and struggling because I never was able to make anything remotely satisfying. I asked my brother Tim if he could give me some help and he took one look at my drawing, and said “your dragon has no wings!” I felt very stupid, but then I added wings and that became the design for the Dragon.

Later, we drew a smaller dragon that I really liked, and the Lesser Dragon was born, and the original Dragon was promoted to Greater Dragon.

In the leftover artwork, I found another dragon that Tim drew, which also had a lot of personality. I wish I had animated it and included it:

Skeletons

One of the creatures I had long wanted to include was the Skeleton, but I never came close to a satisfactory design. With the TRS-80 pixels being so tall, there was no way to render ribs at the scale of the figure. Eventually I came up with a much more abstract approach that was workable. At some point, we had to rely on the imagination of the gamer to complete the picture.

Misfits

Sometimes I tried to draw with a particular creature in mind. At other times, I just I made a lot of doodles. Sometimes one of those doodles was visually pleasing but didn’t obviously correspond to a classic dungeon monster, so I had to invent a creature.

I found a picture that has about twenty designs, some of which I had drawn both animation frames. A little less than half seemed to have made it into the game. Several examples of doodles that were drawings before I invented monsters for them include the Deep Horror, Lobster Man, and most of the unused designs.

Top row:

• Electric eel (final design)
• Kobold (final design)
• Deep Horror (final design)
• Lobster Man (final design)

Second row:

• Giant (alternate weapon, not used)
• Spinner Man (not used, the hands had a kind of twirling effect)
• Wasp Man (final design)

Third row:

• Pentagon creature sketch, unused
• Hexagon creature sketch, unused
• Snake sketch, unused
• Short figure, unused (I guess today we'd call him a Minion)
• I think this is the dog from Crazy Painter, I was looking to see if I could use it as a starting point for something
• Head of something, unused
• Spider sketch, unused

Fourth row:

• Some sort of flying insect man, unused
• Big-head man sketch idea, unused (I guess if a Big5 spaceship was a person, this would be him)
• Two more unused insect designs, and the Wasp Man
• Minotaur, unused
• Lizard Man, unused
• Rust monster (2 frames), unused