Sandfall Interactive’s Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 unexpectedly, but deservingly, became one of the most loved games in 2025, with many influential people in the industry nominating it as their personal game of the year. During CEDEC 2025, Automaton Japan had the chance to meet up with Guillaume Broche and Tom Guillermin, the creative director and lead programmer of the game respectively. We asked them about how Sandfall Interactive approached creating such a polished game with such a small team, as well as their aspirations for future expansion.
Guillermin says that right now, the studio isn’t really planning on expanding the scale of development any further, emphasizing that while it may not be ideal, their team is currently just the right size to tackle games like Clair Obscur. “I think that, for now, I’d prefer working as a small team. I’m not sure how big “an ideal team” would be (laughs). 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.”
While Sandfall Interactive had the support of external partners for things like QA, localization and marketing, core development work was done with a very limited team. “We had five people working on environments, two on the story. And I think, around three to six people worked on the cinematics. The music was done by four people,” Broche says. He notes that, while the team was small, everything worked out because all of the members were so highly skilled. And that talent was carefully hand-picked by Sandfall Interactive. Apparently, the first few members of the studio were meticulously chosen over the course of more than 200 interviews.
“After establishing our company, we conducted over 200 interviews in order to gather the first team members. The screenings were rather rigorous,” Broche laughs. However, after the first rounds of interviews, he said that his focus was on finding young, talented people that had “fighting spirit,” as opposed to seasoned industry professionals.
As Guillermin notes, “At the time, our VFX artist and character designer had both just graduated from college, and this game was their first job ever. 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.”
Many influential people in the game industry praised Sandfall Interactive’s approach to development, with Hideo Kojima himself stating that Sandfall Interactive made him reconsider his stance on large development studios. In an age where development is getting harder and harder, requiring more manpower to create “monumental” games, Sandfall Interactive proved that it can be done with a tight-knit team full of highly talented individuals. And, given the success of the game, it is likely that this development style may be taken on by other mid-sized studios as well.
