Feature: 'Road To The IGF: Thomas Bahon, Ankama (Dofus)'

In one of today's new Gamasutra features, this 2006 Independent Games Festival interview chats to Thomas Bahon, co-developer of French PC/Mac strategy MMO Dofus, which is nominated for both the Innovation In Visual Art and Seumas McNally Grand Prize awards at the 2006 IGF. When asked what the smartest and dumbest things done during the development of the title were, Bahon explains: "The best thing we have done, in my mind, is the map editor. It has helped us to standardize map creation and add all the features (landscape, combat features, path finding, collision detection…) using a very quick and simple interface. It allows 2D artists to spend more time on the graphical aspects of the game rather than on technical ones. In contrary, the dumbest thing was that we did not forecast such success. Indeed, at the beginning we did not have any advanced customer support tool and felt quickly overwhelmed. The worst was the size of the world: it has become crowded rapidly and we have had to create a lot of new maps, quests, features, etc. to face the “gamers' invasion” of the Amakna's territories." You can now read the full Gamasutra feature on the subject, including plenty more from Bahon on the development of his company's intriguing title (no registration required, please feel free to link to the article from external websites).