I’m Tom Guillermin, co-founder and CTO of Sandfall Interactive, and I’m excited to share some insight into how our team created the community and critically acclaimed RPG Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. This blog draws on our session at the GDC (Game Developers Conference) Festival of Gaming, where video game professionals from across a range of disciplines come together to share knowledge and experiences.
Our talk, which was delivered alongside our senior gameplay programmer, Florian Torres, explores how our small technical team aimed to give designers maximum creative freedom by enabling them to create and combine gameplay elements. Here, we will highlight examples that we believe this great community will appreciate.
The team and our reality
Creating video games is a marriage of many disciplines, and the skill set available changes as the team changes. From the bombastic abilities you see in combat to the assets that make up the game’s world map and beyond, efficient and smart structuring and planning put us in the best position to bring Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 to life.
The earliest versions of the game were made by Guillaume Broche, CEO of Sandfall Interactive, alone in his bedroom, with occasional help from me. Then we moved on to more advanced prototypes, growing the team with the ultimate goal of creating a vertical slice. Suddenly, there were twelve of us, and in 2022, we went to GDC in hopes of finding a publisher to help us continue development. There, we met Kepler Interactive, whose support meant we could develop an Alpha build and continue adding necessary roles: artists and programmers, especially.
Now for an important confession: We’re not much for coding. Our development philosophy at Sandfall is based on the reality that we have limited programming bandwidth, so we focus on what’s most important to delivering a good player experience and helping the creative team achieve their aims.
For that reason, we’re big fans of the Unreal Engine for its many core features. It also offers many additional benefits, such as bug fixes and performance optimizations. You have to do some integration work on each update, but as a small team, you try to keep the engine as-is to keep the process straightforward. During production, we also used quite a few external plugins for engine features not native to Unreal, as well as to prototype gameplay features.
Unreal Engine Blueprints
Because not everybody on the team is a programmer and we needed everyone to be able to contribute to the logic of the game, we used Blueprint visual scripting instead of C++ programming language: it’s a system in Unreal Engine that uses a node-based interface to script gameplay elements directly in the Unreal Editor. Essentially, you have a collection of recipes made of code that you can creatively deploy to get the results you want. It gives designers the ability to use many concepts and tools generally restricted to programmers.
With the team able to engage with this shared language, Blueprints allowed us to craft everything that goes into showcasing a skill in-game—character movement, visual effects, camera movement, etc. It’s really similar to any 3D software. You control the camera’s location and rotation, as well as the focal length, which can be animated. We have camera shakes, visual effects, and time dilation… All this contributes to a feeling of intensity over the course of the skill activation.
Creative solutions
There’s a lot of work that goes into the assets your team makes for these engaging and exciting experiences. You can deploy them multiple times and get very creative in different situations. A different perspective, visual deployment, detailed changes, etc.
The world map is a great example of this for us, and it was a major focus in development. It was one of the last levels we created, but it is also the biggest, with the most features. We used elements from other levels to create this one, even if it doesn’t appear that way. Technically, everything related to enemies and battles is the same—interaction, looting, NPCs, dialogues, and so on. We also repurposed art elements from the other levels, in keeping with our emphasis on efficiency.
Coding is an incredibly important part of video game development, and Blueprints, which are themselves a different way of coding, are one of the modern ways for aspiring developers or the infinitely curious within the PlayStation community to start creating their own projects.
At Sandfall Interactive, programmers create the building blocks—like the Blueprints nodes—and we let the designers play with them. Usually, that means using them in a way different from how the programmers imagined, which is exactly what we wanted. As programmers, our job is to make designers’ lives simpler.
There’s truth in many cliches, and we certainly stress this one: Teamwork makes the dream work. It sounds simple, but you need to truly need to lean on each other and create workflows that recognize, encourage, and benefit from that teamwork. We chose an engine that gave us a lot to work with in its base form, grabbed a few external enhancements, simplified the set of tools in our toolbox, reused elements we crafted, and more, all to achieve our goal of realizing our shared creative vision. That’s game development.
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is available now on PlayStation 5, and there’s also a two-hour trial for PlayStation Plus subscribers.