Shownotes
Recorded live at GDC 2026, Jase sat down with Tom Guillermin, Co‑Founder and CTO of Sandfall Interactive, to unpack how Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 grew from a bedroom prototype into an award‑winning global hit. Tom shares the technical and creative decisions that helped a 30‑person team move fast without breaking things.
In this episode:
- Why Sandfall Interactive chose Perforce P4 + Unreal over DIY versioning
- How lightweight bots gave real‑time visibility and protected release branches
- What enabling nightly builds across PC, Xbox, and PlayStation really looks like at a small studio
- Tom’s advice for founders: technology should serve designers, not slow them down
Timestamps:
00:00 Live from GDC: introduction and episode setup
01:37 Awards buzz and early reception
02:56 From a bedroom prototype to a real studio
04:25 Outgrowing file sharing → moving to Perforce P4
05:28 Unreal Engine integration and workflow setup
07:32 DevOps realities and nightly builds at a 30‑person studio
10:20 Discord bot for real‑time Perforce visibility
13:51 Scrappy tools vs. Over‑engineering
25:55 Exclusive file locking and milestone approval bot
28:19 Protecting release branches without slowing the team
37:07 The integration bot: managing dependencies across branches
40:18 What happens when a nightly build goes wrong
46:17 Advice for new studio founders
48:52 Building tools designers actually want to use
50:28 Using Unreal Sequencer for all skills
52:09 Closing remarks
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