I’m Tom Guillermin, co-founder and CTO of Sandfall Interactive, and I’m excited to share some insight into how our team created the community and critically acclaimed RPG Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. This blog draws on our session at the GDC (Game Developers Conference) Festival of Gaming, where video game professionals from across a range of disciplines come together to share knowledge and experiences.
Our talk, which was delivered alongside our senior gameplay programmer, Florian Torres, explores how our small technical team aimed to give designers maximum creative freedom by enabling them to create and combine gameplay elements. Here, we will highlight examples that we believe this great community will appreciate.
The team and our reality
Creating video games is a marriage of many disciplines, and the skill set available changes as the team changes. From the bombastic abilities you see in combat to the assets that make up the game’s world map and beyond, efficient and smart structuring and planning put us in the best position to bring Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 to life.
The earliest versions of the game were made by Guillaume Broche, CEO of Sandfall Interactive, alone in his bedroom, with occasional help from me. Then we moved on to more advanced prototypes, growing the team with the ultimate goal of creating a vertical slice. Suddenly, there were twelve of us, and in 2022, we went to GDC in hopes of finding a publisher to help us continue development. There, we met Kepler Interactive, whose support meant we could develop an Alpha build and continue adding necessary roles: artists and programmers, especially.
Now for an important confession: We’re not much for coding. Our development philosophy at Sandfall is based on the reality that we have limited programming bandwidth, so we focus on what’s most important to delivering a good player experience and helping the creative team achieve their aims.
For that reason, we’re big fans of the Unreal Engine for its