How was the “Game of the Year” was made

In 2020, in the midst of a kavid pandemic, Bash Guillaume looked like millions of others worldwide.

“Sad in his work and wanting to do something else.”

Working at the French game giant Ubisoft at the time he had an idea for his own project – a role -playing game inspired by one of the favorite childhood, the classic Japanese series Final Fantasy.

It would be Claire -Oblast: the expedition 33, which in five years became a sensation.

For three days he sold a million copies, headed the Viral SPOTIFY graphics with his soundtrack and even won the praise from French President Emmanuel Macron.

But one of the most wonderful things in this is the story of how it has been done – a fairy tale about random reports Reddit, “mass luck” and an unusual approach to game development.

The expedition 33 is installed in Lumiere, a fictional world, marked by a huge monolith, which carries a luminous figure on the face.

Every year, the essence known as Paines, arises and reduces the number by one, causing each of this age to disappear, and the game follows a group that seeks to destroy the mysterious creature.

It is an intriguing setting for an epic fairy tale, but the aesthetics of the game inspired by France of the 19th century, and its fighting at the old school also placed it.

But the usual wisdom, when Guillaume began, was that the players did not want something like this.

So, five years ago, he began to recruit people for his passionate project, releasing messages on Reddit and online forums on potential colleagues.

One of those who replied was Jennifer Witness-I, who was in close in Australia at the time.

“I saw a message about Reddit from Guillaume, asking voice actors to record anything free for demonstration,” she says.

“I liked,” I never did it, it sounds cool, “so I sent it a listening.”

Initially, Jennifer acted as the main character in the early version of the game, but as a result, the role switched to become a leading writer of the team.

In the end, Guillaume left Ubisoft and formed Sandfall Interactive to work on Clair, which fell asleep full -time from its base in France in Montpellier.

After providing financing from Kepler Interactive, the main team grew about 30 people.

Many of them were found in a similar, unusual way of Jennifer.

Composer Loryien Testard – who has never worked on video games before – was discovered through messages on the SoundCloud music site.

“I call it a giam’s effect. It is very good in finding really cool people,” says Jennifer.

Guillaume more modestly attributes their success Covid – people who are looking for a creative socket – as well as “large -scale luck”.

“It’s always the same story,” he says.

“I have a list of 15 people who need to contact and I like: ‘Okay, I probably won’t get, perhaps no one.”

“And every time the first one looks like,” yes, let’s do it. “

But Guillaume admits that he is aimed at people who seemed “in accordance with the direction”, he wanted to take the project.

“Lorien, when we first discussed the game, we had exactly the same links,” he says.

“We loved the same thing. We looked at the same things. The discussion was so flowing.”

The expedition 33 also praised for its production values ​​- rival with games that hundreds, even thousands of employees, worked on.

Guillaume binds some of this to the recent successes in the tools used to create games, which allowed the team to work more efficiently.

Kepler’s support allowed the studio to attract actors, including Charlie Cox, the lord of Andy Serxis rings, as well as video game actors Jennifer English and Ben Star.

And while Sandfall really called for additional contributions from support, musicians and other professionals, Jennifer and Guillaume say the main team is over “wearing a lot of different hats”.

“And so we all enter and make different parts, things that can be in our traditional role,” says Jennifer, who also answered the game into different languages.

“I believe that the strange team is mostly of the younger people, but they are so incredibly invested in the project and talented,” Guillaume says.

“For some reason, it worked that it still makes no sense for me after all these years.”

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