Anyone who’s ever worked on a big creative project knows the mix of excitement and agony that comes with a breakthrough, especially when that breakthrough means redoing chunks of work you thought were finished. For the team behind Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, that feeling hit hard in the middle of development.
In a recent interview with Pirate Software, Guillame Broche, CEO and Creative Director of Sandfall Interactive, shares a story that anyone in game development can relate to. Broche describes how, partway through development, he discovered a tweak that completely transformed how the game’s enemy attacks felt to play. “For me, it was when I found something that makes the game feel ten times better during enemy attacks”, Broche says.
Broche’s moment of revelation came with a heavy dose of reality: actually applying that improvement wouldn’t just be a simple fix. It would mean going through more than a thousand attacks and skills and manually updating each one. “You’re like ahh okay, let’s do it,” he adds, perfectly capturing the mixture of pride and pain that comes from wanting your game to be the best it can be, no matter how much effort it takes.
He isn’t the only one on the team who ran into a soul-crushing do-over. During the same interview, Nicholas Maxson-Francome, the game’s art director, shares his own low point regarding development. “ I think for me it was the world map because I made the first iteration, the 2D world map you see when you go through”, he explains. “And suddenly, Victor, our UI designer, comes back to me and says, listen, it’s not the right coordinates, nothing fits between the map and where you’re going. So basically I had to re-do that from scratch.”
These stories are a peek behind the curtain at the kind of unexpected setbacks and all-hands-on-deck problem-solving that go into making a game as ambitious as Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. What starts as a great idea, something that can make a game feel “ten times better,” often means hours, days, or even weeks of painstaking work to get it just right.
But in the end, these are the moments that help shape a memorable player experience. “It’s like three to four minutes per skill, but you’re like ahh okay let’s do it,” Broche says, reflecting the mix of exhaustion and determination that comes with caring about every detail.
It’s stories like these that show just how much behind-the-scenes sweat and dedication go into every feature, every map, and every single one of those 1,100 attacks. For the developers at Sandfall Interactive, it’s all worth it if players get to experience a world that feels as good as they imagined. Even if getting there meant more than a few painful nights at the keyboard.
