How the ‘game of the year’ is made

In 2020, at the height of the Covid Pandemie, Guillaume brooch was like millions of others around the world.

“Bored in their work and want to do something else.”

Working for the French gaming giant Ubisoft at the time, he had an idea for his own project – a role play game inspired by one of his children’s favorites, the classic Japanese series Final Fantasy.

That would be Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 who became a sensation five years later.

It sold a million copies in just three days, at the top of Spotify Viral Hitlijsten with its soundtrack and even praised French President Emmanuel Macron.

But one of the most remarkable things is the story of how it was made -a story of random reddit messages, “massive happiness” and an unusual approach to game development.

Expedition 33 is set in Lumiere, a fictional world overshadowed by a huge monolith that wears a glowing figure on his face.

Every year an entity is created that is known as the painting scriptures and lowers the number with one, which makes everyone disappear from that age, and the game follows a group on a search to destroy the mysterious being.

It is an intriguing arrangement for an epic story, but the aesthetics of the game, inspired by the 19th-century France, and the Old-School Turn-Based Fights also distinguish it.

But the conventional wisdom when Guillaume started was that players didn’t want something like that.

So, five years ago, he started recruiting people for his passion project, in which messages on Reddit and Online Forums were expressed by potential colleagues.

One of those who responded was Jennifer Svedberg-Yen, who was closed in Australia at that time.

“I saw a message on Reddit by Guillaume and asked for voice actors to record something for free for a demo,” she says.

“I had something like that:” I’ve never done that, it sounds quite cool, “so I sent him an audition.”

Jennifer was originally cast as an important character in an early version of the game, but eventually changed a role to become the leader of the team.

Guillaume eventually left Ubisoft and formed Sandfall Interactive to work on Clair Obscur full -time from the base in Montpellier, France.

After securing the financing of publisher Kepler Interactive, the core team grew to around 30 people.

Many of them were found in a similar, unusual way as Jennifer.

Composer Lorien Testard – who had never worked on a video game before – was discovered via messages on the SoundCloud website in the field of music exchange.

“I call this the Guillaume effect. He is very good at finding really cool people,” says Jennifer.

Guillaume attributes more modestly his success rate to Covid – people looking for a creative exhaust valve – and also “massive happiness”.

“It’s always the same story,” he says.

“I have a list of 15 people to contact us and I am: ‘Okay, I may probably not be at all at all’.

“And every time the first is like:” Yes, let’s do it. “

But Guillaume does admit that he focused on people who “seemed to be in accordance with the direction”, he wanted to take the project.

“Lorien, when we first discussed the game, we had exactly the same references,” he says.

“We loved the same. We looked at the same things. The discussion was so fluent.”

Expedition 33 is also generally praised for its production values ​​- which compete with those of games that have even worked hundreds, even thousands of employees.

Guillaume attributes part of this to recent developments in tools that are used to make games, allowing the team to work more efficiently.

By allowing Kepler’s support, the studio was able to attract actors, including Daredevil’s Charlie Cox, Lord of the Rings star Andy Serkis, and video game actors Jennifer English and Ben Starr.

And while Sandfall had extra input from support studios, musicians and other specialists, Jennifer and Guillaume say that the core team eventually “wore many different hats”.

“And so we all pitch and do different parts, things that can fall outside our traditional role,” says Jennifer, who was also responsible for translating the game into different languages.

“We think, I think, a great team mainly from junior people, but they have been so incredibly invested in the project and talented,” says Guillaume.

“Somehow it worked, which after all these years still doesn’t make sense for me.”

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