Customer Profile: Hashbane Interactive

We love seeing the work of our customers! In this new profile, we talk to the talented team from Hashbane Interactive , a game development company working on Instinction, a widely anticipated upcoming prehistoric action-adventure game.

Thank you for sharing images on the MetaShoot Discord channel. Can you tell us about Hashbane??

Thanks for taking the time to connect with us! Hashbane Interactive is currently based in New Zealand and will soon be relocating the studio to a different country with additional branches in other locations.

For as long as we can remember we have been talking about creating a prehistoric action-adventure game – and after all the years providing commercial marketing collateral for others, we took the leap to create something special for ourselves…? our game Instinction was born.

Prior to receiving our first investment we were self funding our game development with the profits from our commercial client work which specialized in Architectural Visualization, Interactive Presentations, Videos and Animation. After nearly two decades of using traditional renderers on render farms (locally and online) we started incorporating Unreal Engine into some of these projects back in 2015 and UE soon became our go-to for all production work. The engine has continually gotten better and more feature rich.

We finished our first prototype back in March 2022 which secured our first investment. Last year we received three separate funding rounds and an Epic MegaGrant, so we were able to grow and we now have team members in eight different countries. Some of our early coverage garnered interest from investors, publishers, and multiple strategic partners, such as our current relationships and coverage with 英特尔 , 英伟达 and Epic Games .

Have you worked on any famous projects that you’d like to mention in the article??

Collectively our team has worked on Apple Tv’s/BBC’s Prehistoric Planet, Game of Thrones: House of the Dragon, Godzilla vs Kong, Aquaman, Mufasa: The Lion King, Oscar winning 1917 and Ghostbusters as well as previous video games such as The Last of Us series & Uncharted for Naughty Dog, Cyberpunk 2077 and Shadow of the Tomb Raider and some yet to be revealed titles. The teams prior expertise includes creative and technical work for Crystal Dynamics, Lucas Arts, EA, Eidos, Apple TV, BBC, HBO, Warner Bros, DC Comics, Disney, Playstation, Naughty Dog, Santa Monica Studio, Bandai Namco, CD Projekt Red, Avalanche, MPC and Sony London.

How did you start integrating MetaShoot into your UE workflow??

Metashoot came at an ideal time for the team. We had started creating a project in UE that would be shared with the creature, human, assets, and art teams to standardize the renders and animations for showcasing WIP and final models to our stakeholders and our community. We heard about MetaShoot on LinkedIn and gave it a spin. Our creative director set out to create a lighting template and tested it out with our Coelophysis model (it had not yet been rigged or animated) and we had a ton of shots and animations in no time!? The results were shared with the team and publicly that same week.

Following that we had a team workshop with the artists and ran through what we would consider to be the best-of-best practices and the workshop was recorded for future reference. Overall the artists got a massive jump start in understanding lighting and cameras in UE, which is usually reserved for more experienced team members. We ended up creating a variety of lighting scenarios, indoor studio and outdoor shots (day, night, overcast, etc) for the whole team.

"MetaShoot leverages what Unreal Engine offers in a tidy package with presets and very accurate lighting and staging assets."

"MetaShoot is an absolute time saver for a novice or veteran, we use it all the time now!"

The imagery for Instinction looks awesome. Can you share more info on the project??

In a nutshell, Instinction is a narrative-driven action-adventure game with prehistoric animals set for release at the end of 2025 on PC, PS and Xbox.

To best keep on track with our deadline the initial release will be in First Person, then we will include Third Person, Co-Op as a DLC. We’re talking with Flat2VR to offer VR support too during the development of the game.We will offer full modding support via Mod.io with custom game modes. We’ll open up our backlog of unseen content and roadmap on our public Discord Server, our Steam page and our website.?

You can also read about a few of our team members here: https://medium.com/hashbane-interactive

All other links are found here: https://linkin.bio/instinctiongame