Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War II.  It was met with critical praise when it was released in February  and gamers have taken to its fresh answer to traditional real-time strategy gameplay: the game, developed by Vancouver’s own Relic Entertainment (also known for the acclaimed RTS Company of Heroes) has landed at the top of the global PC sales charts. Dawn of War II (or DoW2) has even pleased longtime fans of its source material, a dystopian tabletop wargame so popular it’s spun off a shelf’s worth of novels.

The setup almost doesn’t matter: a war-torn future (that would be the 40,000) and spacefaring races at war with each other, from your standard Space Marines – the focus of the single-player campaign – to Giger-esque Tyranids, elfin Eldar, and brutish Orks.

Scan DoW2‘s credits and you’ll see a lot of VFS alumni. From Animation & Visual Effects, Senior Artist Ian Cumming, Lead Animator Nathan Hocken, and Artists Claire Roberts, Allan Dilks, Jefferson Takahashi, and Christine Hubbard. From Sound Design for Visual Media, there’s Dialogue Editor Allan Levy. From Game Design, Designers Francois Chaput, Mike Wilson, and Brock Robin, and Assistant Producer Mbuso Radebe.

Game Design alum Francois, who graduated in early ’07, took time out of his busy schedule to talk about designing Dawn of War II, walking in the popular tabletop game’s considerable footsteps, and reinventing the RTS.

Hi, Francois! Thanks for taking the time to talk DoW2. First of all, how does it feel now that the game’s out?

Honestly, it feels pretty good. Reviews have been great, and sales have been strong, which obviously makes all the hard work feel worth it. But really none of that matters in comparison to when my brother in Manitoba calls me to tell me how much he loves the game, and that he’s skipped a few online Halo 3 matches he had planned just to play DoW2 instead.

Could you describe the broad strokes of what you were responsible for on DoW2? When readers play this game, what can they watch out for and say, “Hey, Francois did that”?

I was responsible for the creation of boss battles in DoW2, and their implementation.

This was a lot of fun, even though I felt as though I would have needed more time. It was a tough challenge, but one that forced me to improve as a designer as well, one that brought us a wealth of feedback – good and bad – from the community, reviewers and friends, and I look forward to putting what we’ve learned to use in the future.

I was also involved in many of the gameplay meetings as well, and contributed to things like the pacing of the game, how the game played out on the battlefield, and even what archetypes each of the squads would follow.

Warhammer 40K is pretty huge, with a rabid fanbase, novels – everything. Were you a player of the tabletop game? What was it like, as a designer, to translate a property like that into a video game experience?

Honestly, I had never played the tabletop game. Nor had I read any novels, or codices, or anything on this universe.

The only exposure I’d had prior to Dawn of War II was the original Dawn of War games and expansions,which I was playing before my interview at Relic to familiarize myself with their works other than Company of Heroes. In fact, the only exposure to tabletop Warhammer was when I bought some wood elf models to use in my D&D games.

So first thing I had to do was understand the tabletop fanbase, and what they tend to like. Then I had to do the same with the original Dawn of War‘s fanbase. I did a lot of reading, a lot of research, I read so many forums, reviews, fan work and so on.

Eventually the universe became kind of a mindset, and I began to see how things could work as a game. Really, the vision the team had created before I joined the team in December 2007 was very strong and very clear to me, and I was able to contribute to that vision and help it evolve into what Dawn of War II came out.

So all that to say that it was very tiring, but very inspirational and challenging. I feel now as though I have, in a sense, lived the universe and time that everything takes place in, and if I could change anything, I would only want to do it again the exact same way as I did it before, only to experience it all over again.

DoW2 has been getting a lot of praise for its single-player campaign – although it gets away from what one might consider the traditional RTS model of base-building and so on. Even the notion of bosses – it’s not unprecedented, but it’s still sort of unusual. As a designer, how do you handle that challenge of meeting gamers’ expectations while trying to do something new?

Well, the original Dawn of War was fun, but the campaign really was dry, long-winded… even if it was rather short. Then we – Relic – made Company of Heroes, where the campaign wasn’t particularly great, but after every mission, you felt victorious and that felt good. It was also very cinematic, and that made it feel more epic.

But in the missions, what happened before the current mission never mattered. That was one of the first issues we identified: players don’t like restarting every mission. So we decided to base the campaign around named sergeants and their squads. Long story short, everything fell into place afterwards. We also aproached this game with the philosophy that a) this is a game, so Orks dropping Space Marine Bolters wasn’t too ridiculous,  and b) this is not a remake of the original Dawn of War. We wanted this to be going into your collection next to the Dawn of War games and its expansions, and not replace them.

As for the bosses, that was my very first task as a designer. I was to make bosses in an RTS, and I had never seen that before. So this was just an opportunity for me to show that I was up to the task and come up with ideas for how this could work.

Again, this was a challenge that forced me to become a better designer. I wasn’t without help, however. The great thing about working at Relic. and I’m guessing at any other studio. is that everybody has ideas – artists, receptionists, everyone. So this was a great opportunity to meet the team and gather a whole plethora of ideas.

It was rather tough to tell what the true expectations were, and whose expectations they were. We quickly learned that the vocal people are generally people who aren’t so happy with something. People who were happy about what we were advertising DoW 2 as would mostly keep quiet, and it was hard to gauge how many people were sold and how many weren’t. In the end, we stuck with our vision and made the game we set out to make, and I’m really happy with what we have.

How does designing for a single-player experience differ from designing a competitive multiplayer one, when they’re both in the same box?

A strong vision for the final product and lots of communicating and playing the other half of the product. As a designer, it’s really your responsibility to be as familiar with the entire game and the vision of every aspect so that you can contribute to a cohesive product. I keep mentioning the vision – that’s because it’s the most important thing to keep in mind, especially in early stages of the product when it is barely even playable. Unless everyone has a unified goal in mind, everybody then starts to have different ideas of what the game should be and that leads everything in very different directions.

Reaching back a ways now, your VFS game was a third-person vehicle-based shooter. Our readers might be wondering how on earth that could possibly help prepare you for designing an RTS. Did it?

Well, depends on how we look at this. I’d say it absolutely did help – I learned very valuable lessons that directly applied to what I was doing, regardless of the genre. So let’s just assume that a genre is nothing more than a name given to a game to help consumers have a rough idea of the how the game plays. This means that games are now all games, just with different goals, and means of reaching those goals. At Relic, we have been allowing the players to control multiple units at once as opposed to a single unit. Really that’s the biggest difference. So I’ll break the game down into two areas: “goals and progression” and “gameplay”.

Goals and progression were very similar in our VFS project, The Enemy Within, and in Dawn of War II. On DoW 2, I was responsible for designing the bosses, which were goals along the overall path the player was to follow towards his end goal.

Games of all genres have this in common. What must the player do to get to his objectives? This includes designing moments that would occur in between mission starts and boss fights, or even after. This also included the pacing of events, placements of enemy encounters, and so on. These are all aspects that I had experienced while at VFS.

Gameplay was different, because in DoW 2 you control four squads at a time while in The Enemy Within you only controlled one ship. Aside from the actual controls/inputs/interface that the player interacts with, it’s really much like designing diffent weapons or ships in any other game. Switching between weapons is like switching which squad you control.

So genre aside, I felt that most of my experiences did help out a great deal. I would also say that the difference between the two games helped me create things that are traditionally not thought to belong in an RTS.

Last question: What’s your favourite thing about your job?

As I mentioned, my favourite thing is hearing people whose opinions matter a great deal to me tell me that they are enjoying a game I have worked on. When critics like it, sure, that’s nice, but when someone will go out of their way to tell me that they are enjoying our game, it really does feel great.

In fact, one of the coolest moments here was when our lead designer received a phone call from Penny Arcade‘s Tycho, telling us how much he was enjoying the game – that it just blew him away. He proceeded to say that he didn’t think his call really meant all that much to us, but he just wanted us to know how he felt about our game. Our leads simply replied, “Actually, you have no idea how much this means to us. We couldn’t ask for more than our fans enjoying our game!”

No kidding! Thanks again, Francois, for showing us under the hood!