Arena Returns

Dofus Arena, renamed Arena Confrontation after a few years, was one of my favourite game when I was in high-school. It featured several highly interesting points:

• a 1-versus-1 strategic game with ~30 minutes long games,
• a “competitive” mode in which everyone (from the best player in the ladder to a new player) had the same constraints,
• very little random draws,
• when a random draw needed to occur, the probably of each outcome was computable by head with a little bit of practice.

The game was developed until around 2012 when the last full-time developer on the game left for another project. It stayed online for more than a year without anything more than vital maintenance, but eventually closed around the end of 2013.

I kept the game in mind since that time and always wanted to play again. I was made aware of several projects trying to revive the game by re-implementing a server, joined some of them as a developer to help, but none of them lead to functional minimal server implementation… until Arena Returns!

I’ll make a proper series of blog posts around that subject in the future, but the team behind Arena Returns (a group of 6 people, me included) successfully:

• de-obfuscated by hand most of the last available game client for the game,
• fixed several issues to be able to re-compile ourselves the game client,
• implemented a game server compatible with the game client that supports the main mode of game,
• ran 2 live events in which the server was put online and hosted more than a hundred players concurrently, and nearly 40.000 matchs played over a period of a month,
• built a community of more than 2500 people around the game.

If you want to learn more about the different challenges we had to solve and how a dead game can be brought back to life, keep an eye on this blog.