Interview
July 29, 2025
Small teams, big dreams: why these indies chose UE5 to power their games
We were incredibly proud to see that more than half of the over 50 games showcased during last month’s Summer Game Fest livestream were powered by Unreal Engine—a testament to the creativity of our talented and diverse developer community.
It was particularly exciting that many of those games had been made by small teams, especially given our focus on making sure Unreal Engine is packed full of features that empower teams of all sizes to punch beyond their weight.
With Out of Words, End of Abyss, Infinitesimals, ILL, Felt That: Boxing, and many others making a big splash, we reached out to some of the studios that used UE for titles featured at Summer Games Fest and asked them why they chose Unreal Engine 5 for their games, and how it enabled them to achieve their goals. Here’s what they had to say.
It was particularly exciting that many of those games had been made by small teams, especially given our focus on making sure Unreal Engine is packed full of features that empower teams of all sizes to punch beyond their weight.
With Out of Words, End of Abyss, Infinitesimals, ILL, Felt That: Boxing, and many others making a big splash, we reached out to some of the studios that used UE for titles featured at Summer Games Fest and asked them why they chose Unreal Engine 5 for their games, and how it enabled them to achieve their goals. Here’s what they had to say.
End of Abyss
Section 9 Interactive I Epic Games Publishing
In the depths of a mysterious underground compound, a mission to investigate disturbances of unknown origin spirals into a harrowing descent through a broken and abandoned world. In End of Abyss, you play as the young combat technician, Cel, as she uncovers the truth behind the facility’s derelict areas and confronts the monstrous creatures that roam them.
Mattias Ottvall, Co-Founder of Section 9 Interactive, spoke about his studio’s decision to use Unreal Engine:
"We’ve used many different game engines in the past, but when we started using Unreal Engine over 10 years ago, we never looked back.
"When we started our new gaming company with only a handful of people, Unreal Engine, with free access and the world's best game editor, was again an instant choice for our new project.
"As a small team, we need to be efficient and as UE5 extends the greatness of UE4, we get access to tools such as the Material Editor, Niagara, Control Rig, MetaSounds, Sequencer, and Unreal Motion Graphics (UMG) which are all essential to our workflow.
“With Blueprints and source code access, we find it really fast to prototype and iterate on game ideas. We are up and running on consoles in no time and we get superb graphical results out of the engine."
Felt That: Boxing
Sans Strings Studio
Felt That: Boxing is a comedic boxing game set in a world where the charm of furry puppets collides with the fury of boxing. Step into the shoes of Ezra "Fuzz-E" Wright, an unlikely hero with a big heart. His quest? Battle his way through the Tournament of a Million Punches to save an orphanage!
Find out why Ryan Corniel, Co-Founder & Chief Creative Officer, at Sans Strings Studio feels Unreal Engine was the right choice to develop the game:
“Sans Strings Studio chose Unreal Engine for Felt That: Boxing due to its suite of real-time interactive animation capabilities, which power our puppeteering system.
"Unreal enables instant, human-driven performance capture, which can be quickly improvised and iterated upon. Its robust physics engine supports the game’s flailing, physics-driven puppet combat and enables the photorealistic, handcrafted simulation of fur and textiles.
"The engine’s flexibility also lets the studio scale characters and assets across multiple platforms, including games, linear entertainment, experiential, and live events.”
Fractured Blooms
Serenity Forge
Restore your neglected house to its former glory by growing crops, cooking delicious meals, learning new recipes, and taking care of its inhabitants in this psychological life sim!
Zhenghua Yang (Z), Founder and CEO of Serenity Forge, offers his take on why Unreal Engine was chosen by the studio for Fractured Blooms:
“Fractured Blooms is a game inspired by a true story. It's a personal game. It's a meaningful game. It’s a game about care, trauma, and the quiet collapse of a world that feels familiar, until it isn’t.
“We chose Unreal Engine 5 because it gave us the tools to bring that world to life with emotional fidelity and visual precision. From the softness of morning light through the dead trees to the slow, surreal decay of a cozy home, UE5 allowed us to express themes of love and hate in a tactile way.
“The engine’s rendering power, lighting system, and Blueprint’s flexibility helped us build a meaningful space that’s both beautiful and broken. For a game this intimate and quietly horrifying, atmosphere is everything—and Unreal made that possible.”
ILL
Team Clout I Mundfish Powerhouse
Developed by Team Clout, ILL is a realistic first-person action horror game that takes you into a dark fort overtaken by a mysterious entity. Unpredictable monsters, a visceral dismemberment system, and realistic physics create an atmosphere of relentless terror.
Check out what Game Director Max Verehin has to say about Unreal Engine and explore some of Mundfish’s other projects like Atomic Heart II and The Cube:
“Team Clout chose Unreal Engine 5 for ILL because of its powerful visual and technical capabilities: Nanite, Lumen, virtual shadows, ray tracing—all of which are essential for delivering the gritty, grounded horror experience we’re building.
“UE5 allows us to create dense, atmospheric environments where every flicker of light or shifting shadow adds to the tension. Thanks to our collaboration with Mundfish Powerhouse, we’ve been able to push these features further.
“Their engineering team brings deep low-level expertise in rendering, physics, and engine systems. We’re making sure ILL runs smoothly and looks stunning across all platforms. From day one, we’ve been focused on high-end visuals and solid performance, and UE5 makes that possible.”
Infinitesimals
Cubit Studios I Epic Games Publishing
As the leader of a once-elite squadron torn apart by disaster and scattered across a hostile world, you must locate, rescue, and reunite your crew to rebuild your strength and bring the fight to the hostile machines hunting you down.
Find out how James McWilliams, Director and Co-Founder of Cubit Studios, was drawn to Unreal Engine for the development of Infinitesimals:
“I started developing the concept of Infinitesimals in early 2013, initially with 2D animated concepts and music. I had originally planned to use Unity to develop the game, since I had previous experience with it. A few early 3D art tests were rendered in Unity.
“However, I had begun to work with Unreal Engine professionally in my day job, doing animated concepts and using UE’s Cascade Particle Editor to create FX for Crackdown 3 in its very early stages (for the cloud destruction tech demo). I really liked that It already had features like the node-based Material Editor and Blueprint built in, rather than requiring third-party plugins. I prefer the built-in tools because they tend to be more integrated into the engine as a whole and work more broadly with its other systems.
“The idea of Blueprints really appealed to me, because being able to prototype ideas myself using visual scripting was very liberating. In the past, I had to express game design ideas by making animated mock-ups only.
“First I made a UE Marketplace (now Fab) asset pack, both as an experiment to see if that was a viable way of making money, but also to learn more about UE in the process. The income from that product then allowed me to start hiring another team member part-time.
“As I learned more and more how to use Blueprints, I realized I could do more and more myself to make playable prototypes of game mechanics, and that really changed my career. It became something I used in my work for other studios, as well as for Infinitesimals.”
Mixtape
Beethoven & Dinosaur I Annapurna Interactive
On their last night together, three friends embark on one final adventure where they play through a mixtape of memories, set to the soundtrack of a generation.
Roman Maksymyschyn, Technical Director of Beethoven & Dinosaur, explains why Unreal Engine made most sense for the development of Mixtape:
“Mixtape is a project that required rapid iteration for our small Australian team to make a large variety of high-quality gameplay and environments, as well as having the depth to really fine-tune all the knobs to get the exact look and feel we wanted as a game that is heavily inspired by film/cinema. Unreal was the obvious choice for our game since it hadeverything we needed for this out of the box.
“The fact that Unreal is open source with many example projects means we have lots of reference material for what is considered best practice, and can cherry pick certain features / fixes from upstream without having to wait or upgrade to a major version at a risky time.
“Mixtape takes a lot of reference from cinema, and as such it was important for our creative team to have lots of control to craft the exact shots they want. Unreal has a lot of the tooling required out of the box to make this happen via its Sequencer system, cinematic cameras, and more, and in addition to cutscenes, we have been able to extend these systems to let us author and preview things like dynamic gameplay cameras in the editor.
“In particular, we like that Epic dogfood their own product by making games such as Fortnite, which means their engine has to be good in practice too, not just in theory. The fact that many AAA studios also use Unreal Engine to ship their cross-platform games is a green flag for us too.
“Unreal’s Marketplace (now Fab) and plugin ecosystem is a great resource, especially when trying to rapidly prototype/kitbash new gameplay, or even just as examples of ways to achieve certain effects or systems to learn from when implementing your own.”
Out of Words
Kong Orange, Wired Fly, and Morten Søndergaard I Epic Games Publishing
Find your lost voices in a co-op platformer adventure. Together with a friend, via online cross-platform or couch co-op, explore the wild, colorful realm of Vokabulantis as Kurt and Karla in a story about the first time they held hands—where everything you see is crafted by hand.
Mariano Pugliese, Unreal Jack-of-all-Trades on Out of Words, reveals how Unreal Engine changed the game for the project:
“We’re not a team that likes to compromise on our artistic vision, but rather persist on our goals until they come through. Our objective is to bring a tactile, handcrafted, and unique world from our fabricators' workshop to all the players out there, and make it fun to play in it.
“From cutscene stop-motion animations to game-optimized handmade assets, Unreal Engine 5 is an unmatchable resource to preserve our one-to-five scale artworks in all their fine-grained details.
“Among the many strengths Unreal offers, the real-time optimization mesh rendering system Nanite and the real-time global illumination solutions Lumen and MegaLights have helped us shape Out of Words more than anything.”