How was Elseware Experience formed, and how did it get to the point of creating its first indie game?Mael Vignaux, managing director at Elseware Experience:
The idea behind Elseware Experience originated more than 10 years ago when Benoit and I (Mael) started creating mods for the Source engine. After two publicly acclaimed mods, one for the Half-Life 2 franchise and the second for Left 4 Dead, we decided it was time to scale up and have our own productions. From there, it took us a bit of time as I wanted to complete my physics PhD and Benoit even started to work on big productions. He joined Arkane Studio as a level architect to work on the first Dishonored.
Making your first game is not easy and in order to gather experience and some financial stability, once we decided, we started working on multiple serious games as well as architectural vizualizations.
We started making our first game, Broken Pieces, 10 years after our first mod was released and it took us another two years before we found a publisher and started to really get into production.
Considering your early work was creating mods on the Source Engine, why did you decide to transition over to Unreal Engine for Broken Pieces?
Vignaux: We have worked with multiple game engines in the past and Unreal Engine became the obvious choice for us when we started to aim for high-end results that required very realistic lighting setups. The options offered by the engine (even light baking!) are very wide and it allows a small team such as ours to really obtain a top-tier result.
When we first released Unreal Paris, which was a showcase of what you could do in a real-time environment for an archiviz demonstration, the public reaction was overwhelming and gave us a very distinctive answer: We needed to follow through with the engine.
Source: Unreal Engine Blog