Expedition 33 director Guillaume Broche revealed in an interview with the BBC that he decided to leave Ubisoft and create a GOTY contender purely because he was “bored” working at Ubisoft and wanted to try something new.
Though Expedition 33 selling over a million copies after being made by a core team of around 30 people is enough of a story to make its dev cycle stand out from standard AAA game development, tales of the game’s origins make that story even harder to believe.
Game Director Guillaume Broche and writer Jennifer Svedberg-Yen both spoke with the BBC about the topic, revealing that the process of getting the team together was even more unlikely than people initially realized.
Before they secured funding for the project, Broche was securing dev talent and making a pitch deck by putting out posts on Reddit and putting a team together through online forums.
Expedition 33’s origin is a series of miracles
Svedberg-Yen had never even voice acted in a game before, she just thought it sounded like a fun idea and decided to submit a voice demo and throw her hat in the ring.
“I was like: ‘I’ve never done that, it sounds kinda cool’, so I sent him an audition,” she explained. One thing led to another, and she ended up becoming the lead writer of a story that is, in large part, praised because of how strong its core narrative is.
Lorien Testard, the Expedition 33’s composer, got recruited by Broche thanks to interactions in Soundcloud comments. The director attributed his unnatural penchant for recruitment to “massive luck” paired with people being in lockdown at the time and wanting some new creative outlets.
A picture of Clair Obsur: Expedition 33’s core dev team
Regardless, many of the people working on the title either had no experience working in game development at all, or had very little. The team was made up almost solely of junior members.
“We have, I think, an amazing team mostly of junior people but they are so incredibly invested in the project and talented,” said director Guillaume.
“Somehow it worked, which still makes no sense to me after all these years.”
When Guillaume Broche founded Sandfall and made a site, he started with a simple blog post:
“Well we don’t have much to share now, other than what we shared on the main page, it’s the very beginning you know. But rest assured this blog will be oh so amazing soon. Stay tuned.”
Almost 5 years later, turns out he was right.
While Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 would have been a massive feat regardless of how big the development team was, the accomplishments of the team are made even more impressive considering the unlikely origins of what may become 2025’s Game of the Year.
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