Touché: The Adventures of the Fifth Musketeer

Development history

Most of the work on the game was done at an office attached to the house of Graham Lilley in Birmingham, a hideaway built by the previous owner.

He recalls the memory problems, as Touché: The Adventures of the Fifth Musketeer was a DOS game and was originally restricted to 2 MB of memory and a CD-ROM. He was running 256 color SVGA and had some huge scrolling (at that time) artwork loaded so they were very tight. He used a DOS extender and a 32 bit compiler from Watcom. This memory issue restricted the number of characters that could be loaded and in fact some were painted on the backdrop and just their heads and arms were animated.

Lilley got only one production copy from the distributors, probably a casualty of U.S. Gold Ltd.'s demise which happened as the game was released. Only a CD-ROM, no box or manual.

Graphics

Teoman Irmak was the only artist working on the game. It took him about a year and a half to finish everything, characters and animation included. Locations took 3 or 4 days, the scrolling screens about a week each. Backgrounds were started with pencil drawings and than done in traditional watercolors. Regardless of the requirements of the script, his personal quest for the project was "the property of light."