How has the game’s design evolved over the course of development?O’Neill:

Essentially, the design language remains intact, but as our team continues to grow, we inherit more talent, opinion, and input.

Fortunately, Hillfarrance, a local investor that loves games and dinosaurs (in fact, the founder had planned to be a palaeontologist) invested in us back in April, and we now have the opportunity to expand our team even further. We’re talking to some true veterans of the game industry and can’t wait to have them part of the team in the coming months.

It’s so important for us to make educated decisions for the success of the game, and there is no algorithm for experience.

While a lot of attention has been given to the game’s graphical fidelity, I know the team is working just as hard on the audio side of the game. What are you doing to ensure the game’s sound palette is just as vibrant as the game’s looks?

O’Neill: The audio is as important as the visuals for storytelling, they are not mutually exclusive, and complement each other from emotionally stimulating events through to every seemingly unimportant pick-up. Being an action-adventure, we knew we wanted a cinematic soundtrack to accentuate the narrative from the beginning and so designed our initial sound palette very early on taking into consideration the location where the game takes place, looking at what instruments are native to those mesoamerican regions. We felt it was important that the sound be organic but very much unique to the story we’re telling. After some early demos putting the palette into practice, we knew we had the tone of Instinction.

How are you creating the vocalizations of the dinosaurs in the game?

O’Neill: This is a really fun process! As with the game’s underscore, we’ve taken a very organic approach to our creature vocalizations, looking to the natural world for inspiration. Modern-day animals and birds have been fantastic source material to bring our creatures to life and we’ve been steadily building up our own library of recordings from various locations in the UK, South America, and New Zealand.

Once you begin to pair together these recordings and manipulate them in different ways, you’re left with some very authentic, animalistic results.

Source: Unreal Engine Blog