Sandfall Interactive, the French studio founded by ex-Ubisoft devs which recently released instant-hit turn-based JRPG Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, has a YouTube channel filled with trailers and developer dives and soundtrack snippets.
There's also an old channel called Sandfall Devs which has 536 subscribers and exactly one video: a 2021 tutorial on a character asset pipeline for Unreal Engine 5, where Expedition 33 director Guillaume Broche brings vtuber-like puppeteering to old face models that might just be a precursor to Lune, a character who, four years after this video was posted, has become the glue for my party in the finished game.
I found this video via an ancient Reddit post from Broche – the same way that an old draft of an Expedition 33 trailer resurfaced, "terrible robotic voices" and all.
"Guillaume Broche here from Sandfall Interactive, a new video game studio based in France from ex-Ubisoft devs working on an RPG on Unreal Engine 5," the prophetic video description begins.
"Here is the first dev tutorial offered to you by our team. Want to create amazing realistic characters while keeping 100% artistic freedom ? Well this pipeline is made for you. You can sculpt your metahuman the way you want without breaking the rig in Unreal Engine."
MetaHuman is an Unreal Engine 5 framework that aims to simplify the process of creating and animating detailed human characters.
In the video, Broche shows an early model of a woman with dark hair and eyes, as well as a line of black runes down her left eye, which suggests to me that this could be a precursor to Lune, who has similar features in Expedition 33.
The video is focused on a specific approach to wrangling MetaHuman and making more expressive characters without crossing any wires. It's an interesting look at the primordial development soup that was poured into Expedition 33, and as a non-dev, I'm also struck by the shots where those characters seem to mirror Broche's speech and movements not unlike vtuber models.
I don't know what Broche's setup was at the time, but the model behavior resembles facial tracking. They speak when he speaks, and their expressions match the inflection of his voice. It's one of those uncanny, can't-look-away oddities that game development is so good at.
It's doubly fascinating given that Expedition 33's characters and realistic presentation ended up being among its strongest points. Games in active development are often like birds: absolutely hideous when they're babies, then quite suddenly beautiful.
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