Clair Obscur Expedition 33: Small Team, Massive Game | Technical Secrets Behind Making Hit RPG

GDC Festival of Gaming spotlights the programming side of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, with Sandfall Interactive’s Tom Guillermin and Florian Torres walking through how a team of only four programmers supported a surprisingly large RPG. The game’s scope includes more than 30 hours of story content plus an equal amount of side content, which makes the underlying systems work especially relevant for teams trying to do more with less.

The core challenge was giving designers maximum creative freedom without turning the codebase into a bottleneck. That meant building tools and gameplay systems that could be combined in flexible ways, so content creation stayed fast even as the game’s scope expanded. For programmers, the interesting part is less the headline size of the team and more the architecture needed to keep iteration practical.

The session also frames the tradeoffs behind that approach: supporting a broad RPG with a small engineering staff requires careful technical planning, disciplined systems design, and a willingness to make the tools do more of the heavy lifting. For studios balancing ambition against staffing, it’s a strong example of how pipeline and runtime decisions can shape what a small team can actually ship.

GDC says the talk is part of its 2026 Festival of Gaming programming, with the next in-person conference scheduled for March 1-5, 2027 in San Francisco.