Clair Obscur devs explain how Expedition 33 was built

At the Game Developers Conference, Sandfall Interactive laid out how a four‑person programming team created Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. Technical director Tom Guillermin and senior gameplay programmer Florian Torres led a panel titled “Delivering a Wide Scope of Features & Content When You Only Have Four Programmers,” and gave a detailed, technical look at the game’s systems.

The biggest reveal: 95% of the gameplay systems were made with Unreal Blueprints. The developers described Blueprints as an Unreal Engine scripting tool that lets creators plug pre‑built nodes together to craft systems, which helped a small team prototype and iterate quickly.

Using Blueprints made it easier for designers to contribute and helped overall stability, the presenters said, but it also made debugging harder and encouraged some poor memory practices. The team did still write original C++ for experimental features and to optimize performance.

clair obscur, expedition 33, sandfall interactive, game developers, tom guillermin, florian torres, unreal blueprints, unreal engine, c++, prototyping