There are no plans to expand Sandfall Interactive despite the success of its debut game Clair Obscur: Expedition 33.
That’s according to the studio’s chief tech officer and the game’s lead programmer, Tom Guillermin, who told Automaton that growing the size of its development team wasn’t necessary for the type of games it makes.
“I think that, for now, I’d prefer working as a small team,” Guillermin explained. “I’m not sure how big ‘an ideal team’ would be, but when it comes to making a full-priced turn-based RPG, I believe that the team we have now is just the right size.”
CEO and creative director Guillaume Broche reiterated that while the game did have the support of external partners for QA, localisation, marketing and other tasks, the core development team was relatively small.
“We had five people working on environments, two on the story,” he said. “And I think, around three to six people worked on the cinematics. The music was done by four people.”
He also pointed out that the reason such a small team was able to succeed was because every member of the team was highly skilled, noting that the studio “conducted over 200 interviews in order to gather the first team members”, with a focus on hungry young talent over experienced veterans.
“At the time, our VFX artist and character designer had both just graduated from college, and this game was their first job ever,” he explained. “Since they had very little experience working, they also didn’t have many existing notions of what work was supposed to be like, which I think I was a good thing, because they managed to adapt to our peculiar work style.”
33 days after its release, Expedition 33 achieved 3.3 million copies sold, a sales milestone so oddly fitting that its studio had to promise on social media that it was real.
The studio has also received praise from Hideo Kojima [240 articles]” href=”https://www.videogameschronicle.com/people/hideo-kojima/”>Hideo Kojima, who has said the French studio’s smaller team size is “ideal”.
“They only have like 33 team members and a dog,” Kojima said during a group interview in June. “That’s my ideal when I create something with a team. Creation has now become much bigger. It’s kind of a war between how efficient you could [be] with the small team, but you have to make it so grand.”
There’s been some debate as to what ‘counts’ as the total size of Clair Obscur’s development team. While the game’s credits do list around 30-40 staff working at Sandfall, it also lists numerous other outsourced animation, QA and performance capture staff – as Broche points out in the Automaton interview – that bring the total number of people involved in the game well into the hundreds.
As such, some have argued that while the game was made with a smaller team than most triple-A titles, the claim that a hugely praised game was only made by a small team of 30-40 people isn’t an entirely accurate one.
