Sandfall Interactive found quite a bit of success with its debut title, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. Studio founder Guillamue Broche has revealed that he decided to leave Ubisoft and create a new studio to work on the title because he got bored with his tenure in the massive gaming company.
In an interview with BBC, Broche spoke about a desire of “wanting to do something different,” as one of his main motivating factors to found Sandfall Interactive. “Bored in their job and wanting to do something different,” answered Broche when asked about his decision to leave Ubisoft to found Sandfall Interactive.
Further in the interview, he also spoke about how he came to recruit more developers for the project that would eventually become Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. For instance, he first got in contact with Jennifer Svendberg-Yen, who he credits with having worn “many different hats” during development, through online forums.
“I saw a post on Reddit by Guillaume asking for voice actors to record something for free for a demo,” said Svendberg-Yen. “I was like: ‘I’ve never done that, it sounds kinda cool’, so I sent him an audition.”
According to Broche, his success in building up the right team for the development of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 was in large part thanks to the lockdowns caused by the Covid-19 pandemic a few years ago. He believes it was because of several talented people at the time were looking for a creative outlet.
“It’s always the same story,” he said. “I have a list of 15 people to contact and I’m like: ‘Okay I’m probably going to get maybe no one at all’. And every time the first one is like: ‘Yeah, let’s do it’.”
Even his recruitment of composer Lorien Testard played out similarly, after Broche discovered his music through the work Testard had uploaded on Soundcloud. Svendberg-Yen refers to this as the “Guillaume effect,” crediting Broche with being good at recruiting “really cool people.”
Broche and Svendberg-Yen also spoke about having taken on many different responsibilities during the development of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. “And so we all pitch in and do different parts, things that may be outside of our traditional role,” said Svendberg-Yen, who also did a lot of work in localising the title.
“We have, I think, an amazing team mostly of junior people but they are so incredibly invested in the project and talented,” said Broche. “Somehow it worked, which still makes no sense to me after all these years.”
In a post on the official website for Sandfall Interactive, the studio had revealed how it had discovered and recruited Testard to work on Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. In a post on the website, Testard also wrote about how he started making music after being inspired by many Nintendo 64 classics, including The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask.
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is available on PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S. Check out our review for more details. More recently, the studio had revealed that it had sold more than 2 million copies of the game.
