Terres et Conquerants is a turn-based strategy war game for the Amstrad CPC 8bit computer. It was developped by Ismael Mallouk, an independent developper, and published by Ubisoft. It was released in 1989, and was only available in French, probably because the CPC was mostly popular in France.
How it all started
The programmer of the game was independant and he did not have the resources to do the art for his game, he asked Ubisoft (his publisher) for help. At the time I just had been hired by Ubisoft as an internal graphics artist, so I was put on the project. I did all the art except the overview map that was done by Ismael himself.
The challenge for me was to create the tileset without actually having the game running, so it was a bit of guesswork. Also I was used to the soft-tone palette of the Commodore 64, and the CPC palette was just so saturated it was difficult to do anything realistic. The CPC being a slightly more recent computer than the C64, the low-res mode (160x200) was capable of displaying 16 colors at once (4bit/pixel) out of the 27 available, without bloc constraints (unlike the C64). So I was capable of mixing many colors in the small tiles to provide some nice variations.
Tools used
I used OCP Art Studio (published by Rainbird) for this project. I already new the program because I was already using Advanced Art Studio on the C64 which was similar, so I only had to learn specific CPC features such as the palette.
Complete image galleries
Reviews and articles
Box art
Trivia
When my boss Gerard Guillemot saw the tileset I had done he was so amazed by the quality he gave me a premium when the payroll arrived. Later, when he saw the art integrated in the game he was expecting so much he ended-up a bit disapointed. I didn't get the premium the following month.
Credits
Published by : UBI Soft
Design and programming : Ismael MALLOUK
Artwork : Franck SAUER
Music : Gregory CLEMENT
How to play the game today
You can play the game on the WinAPE emulator if you don't own a CPC computer.
Download the game disk images (see below) and unzip, then in WinAPE mount the first disk in drive a.
Type:
run"-tc"
The game should start momentarily.
Downloads