An RPG party where the exchange of silly ideas is an important part of the creative process: what was the approach of Expedition 33 developers and why it worked
In a world where game development is often associated with multimillion-dollar budgets and huge corporations, the story of Sandfall Studios, the creators of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, sounds like a real fairy tale. It is known that the studio found the lead writer through a random audition for voice actors on Reddit. And now, director Guillaume Broche claims that this is, in fact, the story of the creation of the entire studio.
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"Basically, the whole story of Sunfall is like an RPG party, where I just send an email to someone and that person instantly says: "Okay, let's work together," Brosch says in an interview.
Some members of the Sandfall team were found through ArtStation, while others were found among the developers of lesser-known indie games. The result is a stellar team of nearly three dozen core developers who have created the highest-rated game of 2025 (so far) and even received recognition from the French president.
"It's really a team that was put together in a very random way, but somehow the synergy worked," adds Broch. "It's our first project, and actually a lot of the team is very, very young. For many of us, this is the first game we're releasing. It's a real miracle that we were lucky enough to have such a great team on the first try, to be honest."
A small team can be a huge advantage for certain aspects of game development, especially communication and understanding. Brosch says that regular and open sharing of even seemingly "stupid" ideas was an important part of the Sandfall creative process.
"Our best way to create cool content is to just think of stupid ideas," he says, "and we have tons of them. Every lunchtime we just imagine stupid things that don't make sense and are very silly, and the thing is, we don't have any really big corporate review meetings and stuff like that, so a lot of times it's just: try something."
"If the person who has the idea just tries something and it's fun, they say: 'Hey, Guillaume, come here, look at this'. And I'm like: "Oh, that's fun," and then we just build it into the game, and if it needs more refinement, we refine it a little bit more. But overall, we're super open to everyone's ideas. I think that's our main strength, that we leave enough creativity for everyone to just put their heart and soul into the game. But also, the creative vision itself is very, very clear. We know where we want to go."
You can learn more about Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 you can find out in our article here .
Source: Pirate Software
