Last year, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 showed that a studio outside of the traditional AAA space could build a successful game that can rival – and arguably surpass – the work of much larger, more established studios. For Adrian Chmielarz, a 34-year game dev veteran now working as creative director on RPG shooter Witchfire, the notion that the often inexperienced devs at Sandfall Interactive managed to make Expedition 33 at all is downright amazing.
"Last week I learned that the guys behind Expedition 33 hired a lot of newbies, people who didn't make a game before," Chmielarz tells GamesIndustry.biz. "And now my world view is ruined, and I don't know what to do." Certainly, there's some experience on the Sandfall team – creative director Guillaume Broche, for example, worked at Ubisoft for several years before founding the studio – but many members of the core development team were pretty new to making games.
