Thanks as always !
It is the same dream! I totally get your idea and would love to see your concept go further. Some day I want to have mammals in DoN too but realistically unless I first complete a simple prototype with a few invertebrates, plants and ecological phenomena, I can’t even dream of moving on to even reptiles, amphibians or birds. However, if the gaming community likes this game I am willing to go all the way.
My game is already magnified 5x though! Would it still benefit from tilt shift? The thing is, the mountain isn’t setup properly (it needs to be scaled up 5x) and that may be messing things up.
Here are some in-game screenshots to give an idea of DoN’s world scale. The Jumping Spider in my GIFs is actually a tiny dot on the foot of the Unreal mannequin (the mannequin itself is scaled up 5x) or just a tiny speck on the underside of a leaf (second screenshot).
BTW - I thank you for the detailed feedback, it is deeply appreciated. I’ll do some more reading on tilt shift later today. If it’s anything like the “perspective illusion” trick that some movies use, it may end up making my creatures look even smaller than they already are though! 
If someone had given me these links 1.5 years ago, I could have taken the game in a different direction, but it’s probably too late now. Machine learning sounds interesting for sure, but I’m already sitting atop a frightening pile of unfinished features, bugs, and performance issues so I simply can’t afford to take on new features!
