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Sandfall Interactive hired more junior and first-time developers than you'd expect from a team that just delivered an award-sweeping game of the year winner, but the studio had to do "twice the work" to make it happen.
One reason for Sandfall Interactive's younger crowd is that "Montpellier is a super-young city," creative director Guillaume Broche told Edge Magazine. There's also the fact that "senior people tend to go for safer options," and the French company didn't have a credit to its name at the time.
"[The younger staff] didn't have any expectations about how a studio should be run and how a game should be made, and they brought fresh ideas that were very valuable for the rest of the project," lead designer Michel Nora added. "So it ended up being a good decision, but it was also kind of by force, because it's almost impossible to hire any senior people if you don't have the money, which wasn't there at the beginning."
Producer Francois Meurisse agreed that getting younger staff on board had its up sides, like the fact that no one bought "bad habits from other gaming companies or other games or other past experiences." They were simply learning alongside each other.
"[We were] trying to create something new, and even new skills, from scratch," Meurisse continued. "I'd say we basically did twice the work, because we were doing things for the first time to that scale. [But we had] the opportunity to research and execute the best practices. I also worked a lot of collaborating and exchanging [ideas] with other teams in France, and in Montpellier where many other indie studios are based. I find this industry great, it's so collaborative among companies, rather than competitive. We benefitted a lot from sharing experiences."
