Last year, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 showed that a studio outside of the traditional AAA space could build a successful game that can rival – and arguably surpass – the work of much larger, more established studios. For Adrian Chmielarz, a 34-year game dev veteran now working as creative director on RPG shooter Witchfire, the notion that the often inexperienced devs at Sandfall Interactive managed to make Expedition 33 at all is downright amazing.
"Last week I learned that the guys behind Expedition 33 hired a lot of newbies, people who didn't make a game before," Chmielarz tells GamesIndustry.biz. "And now my world view is ruined, and I don't know what to do." Certainly, there's some experience on the Sandfall team – creative director Guillaume Broche, for example, worked at Ubisoft for several years before founding the studio – but many members of the core development team were pretty new to making games.
"Here we have a game that looks AAA to me, it's just phenomenal in every aspect," Chmielarz says. "There's a deep story, deep method of work, good gameplay, great visuals and sound. It's a very coherent product. And then you hear that the core team was 30 people, half of which were first timers. And I'm like, 'I don't know what to believe anymore.'"
Chmielarz's experience in the industry goes back to 1992, but he's best known for his work at People Can Fly. That studio, which he co-founded in 2002, is responsible for cult classic shooters like Painkiller and Bulletstorm, and aided in development on multiple Gears of War titles. Now as part of a studio called The Astronauts, Chmielarz served as creative director on the 2014 narrative game, The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, and now works in the same role on Witchfire.
The Astronauts is a little smaller, even, than Sandfall – and both studios make use of outsourcing – but it's specifically the relative inexperience of the Expedition 33 team that Chmielarz can't get over. "When you actually look at Expedition 33 from a designer's point of view, there's an incredible amount of smart decisions that allow them to make a game that looks AAA, but is in reality full of shortcuts" he says.
One example of these "smart decisions" is that "enemies don't have faces." That means substantially less work in animating those faces. Then there are the cutscenes. "I couldn't understand how such a small studio can produce such high-quality cinematics," he says. "But then when you watch it, 99% of these cut scenes are actually theatre plays, meaning the characters do not interact with the environment: It's just a person talking to another person." If characters don't have to interact with, say, a chair in the scene, then getting the scene to look right is a whole lot easier.
Expedition 33, Chmielarz says, "is absolutely full to the brim with really smart ideas, but in order to make these ideas, first you need to understand how games work. You have to have this experience in order to find these shortcuts. So apparently there's a couple of really, really talented individuals in that studio who were finding all these ways to make this game appear way bigger than it really is."
