Gamasutra Interview: Ankama Talks Dofus, Animation, Subscribers

by Brandon Sheffield

French indie MMO Dofus began when some web developers got together to make a game. With its charming graphical style and free to play area (a small percentage of the full game), Dofus has gained favor with players and critics, propelling the company from a small indie to a larger player.

Ankama was formed in 2001 by Camille Chafer, Emmanuel Darras, and Anthony Roux, and has since grown stealthily to 400 employees, including a new studio in Japan, focusing on animation and manga extensions of the company’s properties. The original game was done entirely in Flash, well before it became a popular platform for games.

As the company rolls out Dofus 2.0 and a new game called Wakfu, we spoke with CTO Camille Chafer and international marketing manager Cedric Gerard about Ankama’s past and future, including the new animation studio, the ups and downs of working in Flash, and player/subscriber numbers.

How did Dofus come about as an indie MMO? Most people wouldn’t attempt such a thing.

Camille Chafer: Ironically, Dofus was not supposed to be a MMO in the first place, back in 2003.

We wanted it to be a turn-based fighting game, PvP only. We were inspired by Final Fantasy Tactics, and wanted to build a similar online game where players would be facing real players, with a massive ranking ladder.

At the beginning it was a very simple project, which we were working on at night and during the weekend. We wanted to have fun, and were not really concerned about commercial aspects. After a while we thought of adding new functionalities, like moving around a town instead of simply chatting in a room. After that, we thought of adding pets in the town, working on summoning AI so they could be fought against…

Then we realized we actually were making an MMO, we were just lacking the professions and an experience system. Since a community had already gathered around Dofus and those guys were quite supportive, we thought of making Dofus into a real MMO.

To be honest, if we had thought of making an MMO in the first place, I think we would have dropped it. It’s probably because we had a slow evolution and kept adding new objectives to the project that we succeeded.

Later on we started developing Dofus-Arena which is PvP only. It is now much more advanced than the first version of Dofus but has retained the original idea of a PVP centered tactical game.

Did anyone on the team have prior experience running servers and such, or did that have to be learned on the go?

CC: We were a web agency, nobody had experience in video games development. We had good developers and talented graphic artists, but no one had game production experience, not to mention MMO development experience!

Learning was a slow process, we made mistakes, we had to go back and start again sometimes. But we were driven by our interest in releasing a game that would be fun, and which we wanted to play.

There was no publisher or producer watching our backs, and we could spend nights working or reworking some parts of the game. We were creating a game for ourselves and for the people talking with us on the forums, so we were not counting hours, and slowly learning.

What are the up and downsides to using flash as a development platform for an MMO?

CC: Flash was not meant to be used for game development in the first place. It may still be partly true today, but five years ago when we first started, it was very true.

There are lots of confines you have to adapt to – for example, Actionscript is an interpreted language, much slower than C++ which is commonly used in MMO development. We had no control over the use of hardware resources, network capacities were limited and only text could be sent. Binary was to be avoided at all costs (it seems to be ok now). There was no thread handling, and you could not use 3D gfx cards.

But Flash had a very strong point: the graphic engine. You could display an image, rotate it, shape it, resize it, make it transparent … all of that was very easy.

Integrating animations and images made by graphic artists was a piece of cake, since everything could be done just with Flash. A Flash game could also be played on any computer as long as it was equipped with Flash Player.

Sometimes confines can be advantageous for a project, and we think that was the case for Dofus, they made the game original and what it is today.

So why is Dofus a turn-based game? I wish I could say it was all due to Final Fantasy Tactics, but to be honest, it’s also because Flash had trouble displaying too many animations at once!

How easy is it to push updates?

Cedric Gerard: For a long time, Dofus updates were pushed zip archives that were put up on the website. Players had to unpack it in the Dofus folder in order to erase the old files. It was efficient, but a bit tedious from a player’s point of view. They had to visit the website, download a file, uncompress it, and sometimes could screw the install and not be able to play again.

Last year, we launched an online updater which detects patches and updates the game automatically. Makes things much easier for everyone.

We waited a long time to launch this tool, because it had a downside; the fact that we now had an executable file meant that players would not be able to play just by loading an html page. But players seem to be quite ok with it, it makes it easier and they like it much better now.

The company has grown a lot since its inception – can you explain the origins of Ankama Animation, and how the whole cross-media angle came about?

Want to read more than click here: Gamasutra