Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 Writer Jennifer Svedberg-Yen Joined the Team After Working in Finance, Teaching Cuban Salsa, and a NASA Experiment: 'Maybe I Can Say I'm a Writer Now'

I was really stoked when, ahead of February's DICE Summit in Las Vegas, I was offered the opportunity to chat with Jennifer Svedberg-Yen, one of the writers of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. I already knew Svedberg-Yen had a fascinating story. Past interviews with her talked about her background in finance, how she had barely played video games before signing on with Sandfall Interactive, and how she found the studio incidentally, through responding to a Reddit post. But even that background that did not prepare me for how wonderfully strange her path to game development truly was. Svedberg-Yen and I sat down in a busy hotel Starbucks for over an hour to talk about her and her work. We covered not just her finance background but also a five-year period of self-discovery where she taught Cuban salsa dancing, participated in a NASA experiment, and became a licensed EMT. Then, we chatted about the game itself: its themes, its characters, and how she drew them from different aspects of her life, despite having done very little writing (and zero professional writing) prior to her work on the game. And we also talked about her history with video games, which prior to Expedition 33 was bare