Following on from its breakout success, the director of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 has shared his philosophy for making games - but admits that he got "really, really, really lucky," so perhaps you should be careful about following his advice to the letter.
Speaking to Pirate Software, Guillaume Broche was asked what advice he might have for aspiring developers. In response, he said anyone should take his words "with a grain of salt because I consider myself really, really, really lucky in how all the stars aligned."
His main piece of advice is that "you don't have to make a game that you think people will like, you have to make a game that you will like." That design philosophy is one that's often repeated, but one that Broche says he often sees new devs fall foul of. "In terms of creative decisions," he says, "if I would not like it in the game, it doesn't go in the game."
That can make for a very personal game, but he protests that "it's not narcissistic [...] it's just that if it talks deeply to a player, like really, really deeply, it will, in my opinion, not fail." For Broche, he says he's fortunate enough that his personal tastes were "mainstream," and could be "appreciated by a lot of people."
"I was expecting this game to be niche," he admits, "but I think it will always resonate if there's a sense of honesty and truth and joy in the game, and I think that's really, really important. And even in recent games, the indie games that blew up, it's always the games that feel very authentic, and true, and the teams made the game that they wanted to play and not the games they think people want to play."
To think of games like Vampire Survivors, or Balatro, you can see that Broche has a point - some of the biggest breakouts of the past five or so years have been almost entirely unique, but sold to the point that they were almost immediately chased up by copycats.
Broche's good fortune is two-fold, he points out. First, he was fortunate enough to have tastes that overlapped with a big enough audience to make his game a success. Second, he was lucky enough to be able to put together "this amazing team," which he says is so god that "I think I don't believe it to this day."
Elsewhere, Broche says that team is "like an RPG party" full of people from all walks of life who came together to make the game - like the lead writer who got hired for the game as a voice actor before eventually helping shape one of this year's GOTY contenders.
