DINO WORLD: A truly raawr-some dinosaur game in Fortnite
Surviving on an island full of dinosaurs is more exciting if those dinosaurs feel real. That’s the idea behind DINO WORLD, the open-world survival role-playing experience from Hawk Studios.
Rather than treating dinosaurs as scripted enemies waiting for players to stumble into range, the team set out to create predators and wildlife that behave like living creatures with their own instincts, reactions, and personalities.
We spoke with co-founder Duuk Balvers and owner Lucas Liboiron about how they combined Unreal Editor for Fortnite (UEFN) features including dynamic dinosaur behaviors, layered audio, and thoughtful environmental optimization to create a prehistoric island that’s as immersive as it is dangerous.
Dinosaurs that think
To create the believable creatures of DINO WORLD, Hawk Studios started with a solid foundation.
The team sourced high-quality assets from Fab before expanding them into more than 11 custom NPCs, each designed with its own behaviors and movement. But visual quality was just the first step.
Over the past year, Hawk Studios has developed a hierarchy-based state system that enables the dinosaurs to react dynamically to what’s happening around them. Rather than following predetermined paths, they patrol their territory, investigate suspicious activity, engage players when threatened, and retreat when the situation changes.
Randomized attack animations and unique movement logic also help ensure encounters don’t become repetitive. “This system was refined over months of testing to ensure stability and performance at scale in an open world,” says Liboiron.
The result is a world where encounters feel like surviving unpredictable wildlife, rather than facing off against an NPC.
Audio for the win
Hawk Studios recognized that visual behavior was just one facet of the realism they needed to achieve. One of the team’s biggest discoveries during development was that sound often determines whether players perceive an NPC as truly alive.
“We designed an in-depth audio system tightly integrated with NPC states, using layered sounds that change with behavior, ambient breathing while idle, heavy low-end footsteps when moving, reactive roars when alerted, and distinct cues when retreating or becoming aggressive,” says Liboiron.
As well as contributing to the atmosphere by ratcheting up tension, these sounds serve a gameplay purpose: players can interpret a dinosaur’s intentions without relying on interface elements, creating more natural moments of suspense as they learn to recognize danger through audio alone.
Building a dense, performant island
Creating a lush prehistoric environment presented another challenge: maintaining performance across platforms.
The team relied heavily on UEFN’s Foliage Mode to edit settings such as cull distances and shadow toggles for meshes
“This allowed us to significantly reduce performance impact across all platforms without sacrificing visual fidelity,” explains Duuk. “We paired this with native Fortnite assets and custom content from the Fab store, allowing for rapid iteration as the native props blended seamlessly with our custom imports for a high-quality look.”
That result is a dense environment that feels handcrafted without introducing unnecessary performance overhead.
Every system in DINO WORLD was designed with one goal in mind: making the island feel alive.
From intelligent dinosaur behaviors to audio that communicates intent and an optimized environment packed with detail, each element works together to create a survival experience where players are constantly reading, reacting, and adapting.
If you’re ready to test your survival skills against prehistoric predators, you can jump into DINO WORLD Beta today using island code 1687-7763-4146.