Interview
April 14, 2026
Crafted by hand, Out of Words melds traditional art with modern tech using UE5
About Kong Orange (Founded 2011) - The world needs digital quality time. Digital quality time is unforgettable entertainment your mind feasts on, while your heart is beating. That’s what we create at Kong Orange in the form of video games to all platforms. Best known for Felix The Reaper (2019).
The Kong Orange game development studio is a vigorous body moving ecstatically in a meaningful direction. The body is formed by a colorful collective of charismatic colleagues concentrating on quality. Esben Kjær Ravn is the CEO & Founder of Kong Orange, and he spends his days at the helm in awe of what all the people working at Kong Orange magically conjures up.
About WiredFly - WiredFly is an award-winning stop-motion animation and handcrafted videogame studio from Aarhus, Denmark. Founded by Director Johan Oettinger in 2006, we specialize in narrative-driven Scandinavian storytelling with a recognizable artisanal touch.
Our driving force can be summarized as “handmade artistry”, marching ever forward in bridging the gap between the tactile experience of stop-motion animation and the interactive worlds of videogames.
Developed in Denmark by a team of around 40 puppet makers, programmers, and poets, Out of Words is a co-op platformer adventure with themes of trust, collaboration, and emotional connection woven into the very heart of the experience. Together with a friend via online cross-platform or couch co-op, players take on the roles of Kurt and Karla to explore the wild, colorful realm of Vokabulantis in a story about the first time they held hands.
Image courtesy of the Out of Words team and Epic Games Publishing
One of the hallmarks of this project is that everything you see in the game has been crafted by hand. Over the past several years, the two companies developing the game, Kong Orange and WiredFly, could usually be found scattered among brushes, puppets, computers, consoles, cameras and more, bringing their handmade characters to life using Unreal Engine 5.
But while collaboration around the studio has been central to the project’s success, the game’s main characters themselves can’t speak—meaning the need for communication in order to solve the game’s physics-defying puzzles is transferred directly onto the players themselves.
So why was Unreal Engine 5 chosen for this unique project, and how did features ranging from Nanite and Lumen to Blueprints and MetaSounds help the teams blend the physical with the virtual while telling a heartfelt story along the way? We connected with Game Director Johan Oettinger, Executive Producer Esben Kjær Ravn, and several other members of the development team to find out.
But while collaboration around the studio has been central to the project’s success, the game’s main characters themselves can’t speak—meaning the need for communication in order to solve the game’s physics-defying puzzles is transferred directly onto the players themselves.
So why was Unreal Engine 5 chosen for this unique project, and how did features ranging from Nanite and Lumen to Blueprints and MetaSounds help the teams blend the physical with the virtual while telling a heartfelt story along the way? We connected with Game Director Johan Oettinger, Executive Producer Esben Kjær Ravn, and several other members of the development team to find out.
Thanks for joining us! Out of Words certainly looks amazing! Please tell us what the game is all about.
Johan Oettinger - Game Director: Out of Words is about that moment you realize something has changed between you and a friend. Now new emotions are at play and you suddenly don’t know what to say to each other.
Where are Kong Orange and WiredFly studios based and how big is the team working on Out of Words?
Esben Kjær Ravn - Executive Producer: We are based in Aarhus, Denmark. Day to day, we sit together in one big studio with space for everything like crafting puppets, animating in stop motion, and writing code (even playing the accordion for that matter). We are around 40 people between the two companies scattered among brushes, puppets, computers, consoles, 3D printers, cameras, and much more.
Image courtesy of the Out of Words team, Blink Twice, and Epic Games Publishing
In your opinion, what makes the co-op genre so compelling and what is Out of Words doing to push the genre forward?
Oettinger: Creating a relationship through the art of game design is enormously satisfying. Knowing that two people will play together, talk about what they experience, and journey through the world and characters we built while creating a joint memory in their life is the dream.
We really have this dream at heart when we develop co-op mechanics. The mechanics need to feel inherently cooperative and inviting for sync and coordination. Through gameplay, we want the players to get swept up together, talk, laugh, and cry while they play. The emotional journey in the story is told through the mechanics themselves; they reflect the mood and feel of where they appear in the character-driven story.
What could you tell us about the game’s protagonists, Kurt and Karla?
Boris Hansen - Scriptwriter: Kurt and Karla are 13 years old and have been friends since kindergarten, and one of the defining features of their friendship is that they’ve always been able to talk about anything and everything, even as they’ve grown older. This changes when something comes between them for the first time: a misunderstanding, a disagreement, a subtle sense of something new and strange in the air. They are cast into Vokabulantis, the world of words and meaning, where they must figure out how to rebuild the language they share in order to save their friendship.
Image courtesy of the Out of Words team and Epic Games Publishing
As an experience designed to be co-op from the ground up, what considerations went into designing the game’s puzzle platforming and physics-defying gameplay?
Jeff Sparks - Lead Designer: Designing for cooperative play from the ground up was an exciting challenge. A lot of discoveries came through deep experimentation early on. We prototyped hundreds of small game modes and really out-there mechanics built around players helping one another and progressing together. Some of those ideas made it into the game, while others simply helped us understand what cooperation felt like when it was working well.
One of the biggest design goals throughout development was to marry the mechanics of play with the emotional experience of the characters. We always wanted what players were doing mechanically to reflect what Kurt and Karla were feeling as their relationship evolved. Some mechanics were designed to express moments of tension or disconnect when they weren’t getting along. Others reflected growing trust and collaboration as things progressed. That emotional alignment became a guiding principle for how puzzles and many of these mechanics came to be.
On a more technical level, we’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about camera framing and spatial readability from level to level. It’s not always super straightforward to make sure both players remain clearly visible and oriented in the world without breaking immersion.
Maintaining a strong sense of presence is essential. We really want players to feel embodied in their characters and the world itself so that they can stay aware of their partner’s presence there too.
Another major consideration for how we built things came from the nuance that Kurt and Karla don’t speak, and we wanted their loss of communication to facilitate a journey where that conversation moves off the screen and onto the couch. How to solve problems, how to move forward, perhaps even how they feel—we hope these things manifest into conversations between the players themselves. So many scenarios were therefore designed not just to encourage problem-solving, but to spark discussion, interpretation, and shared emotional understanding.
Ultimately, everything came back to fostering connection: between mechanics and emotion, between characters and players, and most importantly, between the two people playing through this journey together.
Image courtesy of the Out of Words team, Blink Twice, and Epic Games Publishing
When setting out to create Out of Words, what type of evaluation process went into selecting a game engine?
Marian Pugliese - Tech Producer: Usually, you want to leverage the experience the team has already built upon during previous projects. For Out of Words, that path was taken early on. For earlier prototypes, we tried different engines that were familiar to the team. However, once the scope of the game design and the artistic ambitions were clearer, Unreal Engine became the obvious choice. At the time, you could feel Danish indie developers were getting more used to Unreal Engine. So even if a learning curve and unfamiliarity were present, there was a major willingness to experiment.
Ravn: So the team was quite ready to go Unreal to say the least, when we were approached by Epic Games Publishing. We had been talking about doing so for quite a while, and thus we started over in Unreal discarding prior prototypes made with other engines. And we haven’t looked back since.
Which UE5 feature(s) stood out to you most during development (and why)?
Pugliese: Outside rendering and scripting capabilities that need no introduction by us at this point, these are a few of the favourite tools in our belt:
- Game and engine subsystems, to structure our gameplay and core systems
- Actor Components, to develop non-destructive and composable gameplay elements
- Level hierarchy and streaming, to frame our memory budget meaningfully
- Data Assets and Data Tables, to organize assets and information with ease
- C++ parent class to child Blueprint, to provide a live bridge between programmers and designers
- Movie Render Queue, to do justice to our unique hybrid stop-motion cinematics
- Quartz and MetaSounds, to fill the world of Vokabulantis with music, ambience, and life
- Editor extensibility and developer settings, to make the developer experience smooth and intuitive
Image courtesy of the Out of Words team and Epic Games Publishing
Out of Words’ visual approach is stunning. Could you please tell us about the handcrafted nature of the visuals and how Unreal Engine helped you bring them to life?
Pugliese: Everything is made by our own fabrication department in house. This means the feedback loop between developers is fast and grounded in a tactile world. We also built our own photogrammetry and texture scanning rigs, with custom engineering, lights, and panels.
We developed a variety of pipelines to bring our handcrafted artistry to life in Unreal Engine. From full digital twins to material texture scanning, we made sure to test and vet multiple paths and techniques—picking, choosing, and adjusting the ones that fit our team the most.
Unreal Engine 5’s features such as Nanite and Lumen meant we could drastically reduce the amount of steps between 3D scanning an asset in RealityScan and introducing it to the game world. As such, we were able to quickly compose and adjust the scenery, environments, and characters to our satisfaction before committing a particular asset or material to a more dedicated processing pass.
Image courtesy of the Out of Words team and Epic Games Publishing
How have Unreal Engine 5’s lighting, materials, and environment tools helped you achieve the game’s distinctive visual art style?
Pugliese: Our aspiration is for Out of Words to capture the experience of stop-motion animation. Despite translating the 1:5 scale of our models to a 1:1 in engine, the amount of control given over lighting, camera, and materials enable us to reproduce the magic of a stop-motion animation set faithfully.
It is an interesting approach as it uses Unreal’s predisposition towards realistic rendering in a different way than normally seen. Once again, the multitude of control paths over lighting, camera framing, and post-processing is second to none.
The material pipeline in Unreal Engine is really robust. The shader graph is powerful,
optimized, and intuitive. For us, this meant it was enjoyable both to recreate handcrafted materials and to author handmade details.
Set dressing and environment designing is just as enjoyable, as everything works intuitively and responsively—sculpting landscape, dropping static meshes, adding foliage volumes, putting together hero areas, populating the world with details, and placing interactive Blueprint elements.
What were the biggest visual wins you got “out of the box” from Unreal Engine?
Pugliese: Obviously, the visual fidelity of Nanite left us agape from the very beginning. You could say we are really picky about that. We want the handcrafted details to be as close to the original handmade asset as possible. That has been made possible thanks to Unreal Engine.
Fallback meshes are also surprisingly well done, requiring minimal to no manual adjustments. This ease of use extends far beyond its original scope of gameplay: that, and Lumen, and the new Movie Render Pipeline made our unique hybrid stop-motion cinematics look as good as we would have wished for.
Image courtesy of the Out of Words team and Epic Games Publishing
Did you take advantage of any of the in-engine animation tools in bringing the characters to life? If so, what sort of benefits did this elicit?
Pugliese: Out of Words’s animation stack takes advantage of many of Unreal Engine’s animation system features.
First and foremost, the Animation Blueprints suite. In particular, Animation Template Blueprints were fundamental for our main characters. Modular NPCs make extensive use of both Template and Leader Pose.
Animation Notifies provide a good solution to transform the Animation Sequence as a single definition hub for SFX, VFX, and gameplay/animation communication.
Despite being a bit overwhelming at first, Control Rig is a powerful tool. Once mastered, it is reliable both as a post-animation adjustment layer and a procedural animation driver.
As an indie studio, iteration speed is everything—how did Unreal affect your ability to prototype, test, and throw things away?
Pugliese: Prototyping in Unreal Engine is incredibly fast. The process can be undertaken independently by any discipline for any need they might want to test for. Since most systems would leverage Blueprints, and/or other members of the same node visual language (e.g., shader graph, PCG), it is easy for other teammates to find their footing in each other’s prototypes and contribute. The level steaming and sub-levels framework also give freedom to work independently on a shared goal.
Throwing away a prototype is something no game developer is really ever prepared for! We might be guilty of keeping our darlings around for longer than necessary, if only to replay them ourselves. However, asset validation rules, cooking exclusion lists, and automatic reference discovery guarantee only what is actually needed is packaged—so bloating is minimal or nonexistent.
Image courtesy of the Out of Words team and Epic Games Publishing
Were you able to leverage C++ and Blueprints in tandem to streamline development across teams?
Pugliese: We were. It is important to understand how those two faces of the same coin operate to take the best out of it. C++ is a really robust language. Blueprints are really fast. Once the links between the two become apparent to the team as a whole, iteration is both fast and robust. Recognizing how they interlock brings to life a most valuable framework for game development.
Daniel Bross - Tech Lead: What worked well for us was also to keep things Blueprint-heavy while prototyping and then convert most systems to C++ once we knew what was needed.
That way we could leverage both the iteration-speed of Blueprints and the performance of C++.
How important has it been for you to have access to UE’s source code throughout development?
Pugliese: Extremely important and one of the major advantages of Unreal Engine. On the one hand, having access to the source code means nothing is written in stone. If something does not fit your needs, you can adjust it to your liking. If you find an annoying bug in the engine, there is nothing stopping you from fixing it. On the other hand, it enables you to synchronize with the development teams that made Unreal Engine possible. It is not only “standing on the shoulders of giants”, but being able to retrace their footsteps and follow their thoughts. Their problem-solving process becomes apparent to you. Over time, you can better understand the direction to take full advantage of the technology.
How have Unreal Engine’s profiling tools assisted your team with debugging and performance optimization?
Pugliese: Unreal Engine has always offered many small ways to check the temperature of your work: the shader graph’s instruction sum-up; the class reference and asset size map views; and the many optimization and debug view modes; and a personal favorite, the platform preview views.
In recent years, Epic has been really proactive moving forward awareness and know-how for Unreal Insights. The tool has also received a lot of updates, both in capabilities and usability, including the possibility of running traces in the editor. For us, Insights is taking its rightful place as front and center of diagnostics and optimization as well. Every update, we look forward to the knowledge that can be gained more and more easily through it.
Image courtesy of the Out of Words team and Epic Games Publishing
Which UE5 feature(s) had the largest quantifiable impact on cross-discipline workflows? How did these features help the team reduce iteration time, improve team collaboration, and/or lower production costs throughout the development process?
Pugliese: Probably, the inherited extensibility of the engine itself. Everything in Unreal Engine has been made from and for developing real games and projects. As such, developers have the keys to the kingdom, so to speak, to do as they please. It is fundamental to take the time to decorate and live in the ecosystem until it becomes yours to own.
Being able to create your own system and extend existing ones is one thing. Developing native interfaces for them—either through Slate or editor UMGs—is what really elevates cross
disciplinarity. It gives the whole team the same dictionary to view, control, quantify,
manipulate, and talk about the entities of a game (be it assets, systems, variables, mechanics, or beyond). Not only are developers then able to achieve their shared goals, but they can do so with mastery and fluency.
Bross: As mentioned earlier, having the ability to balance the use of Blueprints and C++ depending on what phase a level is in and what discipline is working on it, has had a giant positive impact on our productivity. Programmers can stay low-level while giving designers and CG artists access to the few settings they need, and designers can quickly prototype ideas without having to touch C++ or needing a programmer.
Did the team take advantage of the UE documentation, Epic Developer Community, Epic Pro Support, or other parts of the ecosystem like Fab throughout development?
Pugliese: Yes, we take full advantage of them. The Unreal Engine documentation is a fundamental step in exploring a new feature. The Epic Developer Community and Epic Pro Support both are a reliable source of information. The positive of an expanding community is that you are then not working in isolation: most blockers are surely to have been encountered and overcome by somebody else. You gain awareness of the greater scope of a problem and, in most cases, a solution or a feature and the best practices associated with it. We used it sporadically, but Fab is a great collection of third-party resources from trustworthy developers.
Image courtesy of the Out of Words team and Epic Games Publishing
Do you have any advice for indie teams evaluating Unreal Engine today?
Pugliese:
1. Dive in! Without fear and with the greatest amount of curiosity. All the answers are there. Explore C++ classes, Blueprint nodes, context menus, plugin modules, and the community. You would be surprised how much more there is to enjoy.
2. Learn Slate or editor UMGs! Developers are also players. The engine is their game. Carve out the time to make your developer experience as good as you’d want your player experience to be.
3. Peek over the giant’s shoulder. Unreal Engine is built by and for game developers. Take the time to learn the Unreal way. Even if you don’t align perfectly with it, it will give you a deeper insight into the power of the tool you are holding. Remember, you will ultimately tailor it to your needs, but you need to be aware of what fabric you are working on first.
Thanks for your time! Where can people go to learn more about Out of Words?
Ravn: Look for Out of Words across all the social media platforms, where we try to share a lot from behind the scenes— a lot of hand-crafting and stop motion animation in particular. You can find out more here, including our socials:
https://www.outofwordsgame.com/