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Sandfall Interactive may have released one of the best games of the year with Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, but the French-based development studio has no plans to expand. While studios like Larian have massively expanded their team sizes following their successes, Sandfall believes their team is “just the right size”.
Speaking to Automaton Media, creative director Guillaume Broche and lead programmer Tom Guillermin discussed the size of Sandfall Interactive as a team. While Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 did make heavy use of outsourcing and contract work, the team believes its the perfect size to keep producing killer RPGs.
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 devs on team size
In the interview, creative director Guillaume Broche explained that he wants to continue the exact same strategy for the studio’s next release as he did with Expedition 33. This means that Sandfall will continue to have a small core team while making use of contractors, store assets when needed and more.
“I think that, for now, I’d prefer working as a small team,” the programmer said. “I’m not sure how big ‘an ideal team’ would be (laughs). But when it comes to making a full-priced turn-based RPG, I believe that the team we have now is just the right size.”
Sandfall Interactive’s leads are ex-Ubisoft and have plenty of experience working in the AAA machine. In AAA development, it’s usual for tens of people, if not more, to be working on a single aspect of the game, but the Clair Obscur team wants to remain slim and streamlined.
“We had five people working on environments, two on the story. And I think, around three to six people worked on the cinematics. The music was done by four people,” added the creative director. “After establishing our company, we conducted over 200 interviews in order to gather the first team members. The screenings were rather rigorous.”
“At the time, our VFX artist and character designer had both just graduated from college,” they continued. “And this game was their first job ever. Since they had very little experience working, they also didn’t have many existing notions of what work was supposed to be like—which I think was a good thing, because they managed to adapt to our peculiar work style.”
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is one hell of a success story, and the team already has plans for its next game. It’s a fantastic game that looks incredible, sounds fantastic and has some amazing performances, and there’s even more content on the way.
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