From commercial animation to indie game debut success: The story of Ember Lab

gamesindustry.biz:

Ember Lab has been around since 2009, starting out as a company specialising in commercial animation and digital content. But a decade later it would make its mark in video games with the release of Kena: Bridge of Spirits.

So how did its co-founders, COO Josh Grier and chief creative Michael Grier, go from wanting to become filmmakers to making a game that would catch the attention of Sony just as it was preparing to unveil PlayStation 5?

Speaking to the two softly spoken brothers at Develop, the difference between media matters less than being able to tell a story with original content. "We always knew that we wanted to make our own content, we've always been storytellers at heart," says Michael.

In fact, "fun learning" came through their commercial work, which also included small mobile games for some clients' advertising campaigns. It was these short development cycles that initially planted the seed that they might be able to make their own game.

"We spent a long time in the commercial world and we learned a lot from the 60-second stories that we had to tell," Josh explains.

These projects also helped shape what Mike refers to as Ember Lab's style, a blend of stylised CG characters in realistically lit and rendered environments.

In the end, deciding to get into games was easier than the uphill struggle to break into film as an independent studio. The real turning point came in 2015 when Epic made Unreal Engine 4 free for all users.

"It was a very artist-friendly platform at the time, and so a lot of our VFX background translated very well to using it," Josh says.

The studio also caught attention with its 2016 CG short film, 'Majora's Mask - Terrible Fate', a tribute to The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask,