Scorn – Towards Artistic Expression in Unreal Engine

Ebb Software was one of the partners of this year’s Unreal Day, the second gathering of the Unreal Engine community in the region, organized by SGA, 3Lateral and Epic Games. The event included workshops, masterclasses, as well as a Keynote & Showcase program. Ebb Software supported the realization of masterclasses, and Lazar Mesaroš, their Art Producer, held a masterclass called Painting with Light: An Artistic Adventure in Light Studies.

Miroslav closed the Showcase program with a talk titled Experiences that Matter: A Future Landscape of Gaming. This is a man with extensive experience in business development in the field of gaming, who took the helm of one of the most important games ever produced in Serbia – Scorn, before its long-awaited release. Before that, Miro was part of Zero Gravity Studios, which released the ambitious space survival game Hellion in 2017.

In case you’ve been hibernating for a long time and somehow missed what it’s all about, Scorn is a survival horror game characterized primarily by worldbuilding from Giger’s nightmares. Behind it stands Ebb Software, a studio that is part of Kepler Interactive, and which always strives to create a different breed of video games.

We talked about Scorn, Ebb Software and the capacity of video games as a medium to express complex ideas, so feel free to expand the horizons of your expectations with a story about a slightly different game dev practice in the region.

SGA: How satisfied are you with the results of Scorn after its release?

Miroslav: We are very satisfied with how everything went and how it is still going! It is sold in a certain form and with certain fluctuations even a year after the release. What’s most important is that what Scorn has done business-wise has allowed us to move forward and continue to be as creative as we were with Scorn.

SGA: Reviews of the game went both ways. What did you conclude about your game based on them?

Miroslav: We are very pleased that it was like that. There was a solid number of negative comments, but luckily the positive ones prevailed. It was a sign that the game leaves no one indifferent. It also pointed to the fact that we want to continue to be uncompromising in our expression of ideas. Whether that is a smart strategy or not, only time will tell. Our focus is on artistic expression, so whoever likes it – great; and who doesn’t – that’s okay, too.

SGA: Scorn is considered a game of supreme artistic merit. Are you satisfied with the reactions from the art community?

Miroslav: We are very satisfied! That’s what we put the most effort into – to depict that surreal and morbid world and bring it closer to players in the best possible way. The great thing is that this has been recognized by the community, so we’ve also received various art direction awards.

SGA: The development of Scorn took a long time. How does the team feel now that most of the work is done?

Miroslav: It is now a year after the release and many things have happened. The team, as expected, was very tired when it was all over. We tried to take a break. Different teams finished their work on the game at different times, so we saw to it that each team got its rest buffer. Then we reoriented to cooperation on different projects, with different studios within Kepler Interactive.

SGA: What does being part of Kepler Interactive mean to you?

Miroslav: Kepler Interactive is a great organization that has an idea to create an ecosystem of game developers around the world, tying them under their hood. One of the biggest strengths is that Kepler Interactive leaves complete creative freedom to the studios, which is OP. The relationship between the studios is fraternal. We share knowledge and experience most openly and there is active co-development, in which we jointly explore different areas of game development. Creatively, therefore, we participate in the creation of various games, although, of course, the leading studio has the main say.

That’s our idea of ​​a break, especially for the art team that has spent so much time in the fleshy creations of Scorn. It’s important for the mental health of each of them to somehow get away from that world. And no project is even close to Scorn in that regard – people are working on “normal” things now. 😄 During all this time we are preparing for our next project, which is in the early stages of ideation.

SGA: Now that you’ve set some expectations with the first game, how do you plan to handle them?

Miroslav: We see the community that supports what Ebb Software does as people who are interested and attracted to unusual things. What we will certainly be committed to is producing something extraordinary again. We are interested in exploring video games as a medium that can convey various complex ideas in very unusual ways. They can be philosophical, sociological, religious… The specificity of the medium in which the player has agency and how to put it into operation to participate in the story itself is our challenge and the subject of interest of the studio itself. What we do is definitely closer to art than entertainment.

SGA: Is it hard to separate the Ebb Software brand from the game’s brand? How important is it to you anyway and, if so, why?

Miroslav: It wasn’t important to us until now, but now that we have something behind us and when what we have created has met a certain response, one of the things we will deal with is building the Ebb Software brand, which should demonstrate a specific and recognizable way of thinking. Ebb Software certainly, as an idea that frames what we do, also includes Scorn, but it is much broader than that. Therefore, it will not be directly related to the “first child”.

SGA: How is Ebb Software organized?

Miroslav: In the last period of Scorn‘s development, the whole team turned into a machine that was able to present the entire content we were working on at the highest possible level. It was a big factory. Now, in a new environment, our thought is practical. We are creating a team in which each individual will have the opportunity to realize themself as a creative game developer – someone who really has the opportunity to understand what video game development is and to participate in it creatively. We definitely don’t want a studio with specialized people who do things according to tasks in their niche. We are always interested in talking to new people because we are looking for real creatives who can look at what they do more broadly and provide the highest possible quality in their niche.

SGA: What is the place of Unreal Engine in your pipeline?

Miroslav: It has an inevitable place as an engine that, at the moment, is absolutely unrivaled. There is not even a hint that we would think about building our engine or choosing something else that is already on the market. Unreal is good enough for all our needs.

SGA: Scorn can be said to be an AA-level game. Is it important for you to strive for the next step when it comes to the length and development of the gameplay and other criteria, and not just the quality of the graphics and art?

Miroslav: We are aware that there is a lot of room for improvement. There are also things we are not satisfied with within the game itself, primarily the gameplay. It’s something we want to make better in future games. It doesn’t matter to us whether we are AA or AAA, but we certainly won’t go below that. The production value of any product from Ebb Software will be top-notch.

SGA: Can we hear, or at least get a hint as to what you’re working on after Scorn?

Miroslav: If we can troll a little, we can say that we’re working on a King Kong sequel, but we won’t say that. 😊 We are thinking about different ideas and experimenting with them, as we are currently in the early ideation stage.

SGA: How do you see the local gaming scene?

Miroslav: I think that in the future, and quite soon, Serbia will become a Mecca for developers from different parts of the world. Time will tell if I’m right. There is a serious appeal that we emanate from here, which interests various creatives from the gaming industry. I sincerely hope that the landscape of the games we produce in Serbia will also change.