Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 developer Sandfall Studios famously found its lead writer via a random Reddit audition for voice actors, and director Guillaume Broche says that's basically the origin story for the whole studio.
"Basically, the whole story of Sunfall is like an RPG party where I just send a mail to someone and this person instantly says, okay, let's work together," Broche tells Pirate Software in an interview.
Some Sandfall folks were found via ArtStation, others from obscure indie games. The result was a stellar cast of nearly three dozen core devs who've shipped the highest-rated game of 2025 so far and earned a shoutout from the president of France.
"It's really a team just assembled together in very random ways, but somehow the synergy worked out," Broche adds. "It's our first project and actually a lot of the team is very, very junior. For a lot of us it's our first game that we ship. It's quite a miracle that we were lucky enough to have a team this cool on our first try honestly."
A small team can be a huge boon for certain aspects of game development, especially communication and rapport. Broche says regularly and openly sharing even seemingly "stupid" ideas was a big part of Sandfall's creative process.
"Our best way of making cool content is just, we think about stupid ideas," he says. "And we have a ton of stupid ideas. Every lunch, we just imagine stupid stuff that makes no sense and [is] very silly, and the thing is, we don't have any very big corporate meetings on the validation pass and everything, so very often it's like, just try something.
"If this person who has this idea just tries something and it's fun, it's like, hey Guillaume, come here, look at this. And I'm like, oh, this is fun, and then we just build it in the game, and if it needs more polish we'll polish it a bit more. But in general, the ideas, we are super open to everybody's ideas. I think that's our key strength, that we leave enough creativity for everyone to just put their own soul in the game. But also, the creative vision itself is very, very clear. We know where we want to go."
As I near the end of Expedition 33 myself, it feels like that spontaneousness and silliness has helped give the game levity. It's a deeply funny, silly adventure that can also punch you right in the gut, and Broche says he was missing that contrast of drama and silliness in the games he'd been seeing. Be the change you want to see in the world, I suppose, and maybe email that rando just to see where it goes.
"That was me at three in the morning trying to come up with something": Clair Obscur: Expedition 33's silliest moment came to its writer when she was very, very tired.
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