HELLO
*emerges from the pit*
I learned about these kind of first person tiles when I was mucking about with Forgotten Realms: Unlimited Adventures, which is this old DOS program for making those SSI D&D games. I've always had a soft spot for this kind of art, even though I usually find the games extremely dreary.
Buck Rogers is cool though.
You might want to investigate
Dungeon Craft as it's a modernized version of UA. Certainly it's enough to mess around with wallsets, anyway.
Y'anyway you might also want to look at a template of a wallset !
(transparency turned off so you can see where they fit)
So basically yes, left and right walls and a facing wall, which are assembled by the game as it goes. Let's look at how a receeding corridor would look:
So this makes sense for how the tiles are arranged, nay? You might notice a little oddity though. Those pink lines showing the perspective lines? They don't converge to a point. I guess this is so they can always fit that wall in there? I'm really not sure. But it results in a little oddity...
See how the wall actually gets wider as you back away? It's the reason that FRUA tiles are designed so the first tile is always the base wall with features layered on top:
The wood planks are the base wall tile, and the door, fireplace are drawn on top of it. This way features don't get duplicated a bunch to fill in the space. This I learned from an error in Dungeon Craft, actually, because it treated all tiles equally so if you backed away from a door it would become three doors at some point in the distance.
Now black crypt has much more clever art. You can see they added darkening as things recede. This is a very good idea, you'll always be able to match the relative darkness of the facing walls up too, of course, because it's tile based. I like the higher horizon line too, as it suggests a low dungeon ceiling.
I would guess based on your Dungeon Master screenshot that the tiles would be arranged something like this:
It has a proper vanishing point too!
The other thing is that from what I've seen it looks like some console RPGs of this sort actually use smaller tiles to form the bigger wall chunks. I'm not sure how that would work. Anyway, it shouldn't be too hard to set up your own system for making the wall pieces. As for a graphics engine to play around with, I'd love one too
Unfortunately being the old DOS beast that it is I can't recommend FRUA, it's just too much work getting stuff into the engine, and last time I checked I don't think you can do Dungeon Craft on lower resolutions.
Heck if you want to make a challenge of this though, I could see making our own little template and just assembling some mockups manually. Could be fun
