During a revealing presentation at this year’s Game Developers Conference, Sandfall Interactive pulled back the curtain on the development process behind their upcoming RPG, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. In a technical panel, the studio’s technical director, Tom Guillermin, and senior gameplay programmer, Florian Torres, disclosed a startling fact: approximately 95% of the game’s gameplay systems were constructed not with traditional code, but with Unreal Engine’s visual scripting tool known as Blueprints.
The Blueprint-Centric Development Strategy
This approach represented a fundamental shift from conventional game development pipelines. Blueprints are a node-based visual scripting system within Unreal Engine that allows developers to create game logic by connecting pre-made functional blocks, resembling a flowchart more than a text-based programming language. For Sandfall Interactive, this was not a minor experiment but the core architectural decision that enabled the creation of a complex, turn-based RPG with a notably small team of programmers.
“Our goal was to build an ambitious RPG with deep systems, but we had to be realistic about our resources,” explained Guillermin during the panel. “Blueprints allowed us to prototype rapidly, iterate on designs in real-time, and empower team members who might not have a traditional computer science background to contribute directly to gameplay mechanics.”
Empowering Designers and Accelerating Production
The visual nature of Blueprints created a more inclusive development environment. Game designers could directly implement and tweak systems like character abilities, status effects (buffs and debuffs), and encounter logic without acting as a middleman for a programmer. This reduced communication overhead and accelerated the iteration cycle, allowing the team to test and refine gameplay ideas with unprecedented speed.
“A designer could conceive a new combat ability in the morning, build a functional prototype using Blueprints by lunch, and have it ready for testing in the afternoon,” Torres noted. “This tight loop was instrumental in developing the game’s strategic depth and ensuring all systems felt cohesive.” The studio reported that this methodology contributed significantly to overall project stability during production, as changes could be visualized and understood by the entire team more easily than parsing lines of code.
Navigating the Inherent Challenges
However, the heavy reliance on Blueprints was not without significant trade-offs. The developers were candid about the drawbacks encountered during the multi-year development cycle. Debugging, the process of finding and fixing errors, became notably more complex. Tracing the flow of logic through a sprawling web of Blueprint nodes could be more time-consuming than stepping through traditional code, especially for subtle, hard-to-reproduce bugs.
Performance and Memory Considerations
Another critical challenge involved performance optimization. While Unreal Engine’s Blueprint system is highly capable, certain patterns of use can lead to less-than-ideal memory management and CPU overhead. “We had to be very disciplined,” Guillermin admitted. “It’s easy to build something that works in Blueprints, but making it efficient is another skill entirely. We encountered situations where we had to refactor entire Blueprint systems to improve frame rate or reduce hitches.”
To address these limitations, the team did not abandon traditional coding entirely. They wrote custom C++ code for performance-critical sections, experimental features that required low-level engine access, and to create custom nodes that could then be used within the Blueprint system itself. This hybrid approach allowed them to leverage the speed of visual scripting while retaining the power and control of native code where it mattered most.
Curious Development Anecdotes and Clever Workarounds
The panel was also peppered with amusing and insightful anecdotes that highlighted the creative problem-solving inherent in game development. One standout example involved the character Esquie. In the game, there are sequences where Esquie appears to be swimming. Technically, however, the character is not navigating a swimming animation state in the traditional sense. Instead, the developers created an invisible walkable surface just below the water’s visual plane. Esquie is essentially walking on this submerged platform while animation and visual effects sell the illusion of swimming.
“We even joked during development that Esquie is permanently in a ‘default swim state,'” Torres said, acknowledging the slight contradiction. “It was a clever hack that solved a specific design problem without needing to build a full, complex swimming system from scratch. These kinds of solutions are the bread and butter of a small team trying to do big things.”
A Model, Not a Mandate
Both developers were careful to frame their experience as a case study, not a universal prescription. “This is how *we* built *our* game,” Guillermin emphasized in the panel’s conclusion. “We are not saying Blueprints are objectively better than code, or that every studio should do this. We are showing what is possible. For a small team with a specific skillset and a clear vision, visual scripting can be an incredibly powerful tool to level the playing field against much larger competitors.”
The Broader Implications for Indie and AA Development
The revelation about Clair Obscur: Expedition 33‘s development speaks to a larger trend in the game industry. Advanced, accessible tools like Unreal Engine Blueprints are democratizing high-fidelity game development. They lower the barrier to entry for creating complex, system-driven games that were once the exclusive domain of large studios with massive engineering departments.
For indie and AA studios like Sandfall Interactive, these tools represent a strategic advantage. They allow small, agile teams to focus their limited resources on creativity, art, and design rather than spending years building foundational technology. The success of this project demonstrates that a compelling, visually stunning, and mechanically deep RPG can be architected primarily with visual scripting, challenging long-held assumptions about the “right” way to build a game.
The story of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is ultimately one of pragmatic innovation. Faced with the daunting task of creating a sprawling RPG, Sandfall Interactive made a bold technical choice. They embraced a tool for its strengths, diligently worked around its weaknesses, and maintained a hybrid, flexible approach throughout. Their journey offers a valuable blueprint—in both the literal and figurative sense—for other small teams aiming to turn ambitious visions into playable reality, proving that the tools you choose are less important than the ingenuity with which you use them.
