Nate Purkeypile's The Axis Unseen seems like a lot at first. The game is styled as an open world "Heavy Metal Horror Hunting" experience, with realistic elements that will task players with tracking dangerous creatures while trying not to get killed themselves. It's an ambitious combination of genres, but one which Purkeypile (who recently started his own independent studio Just Purkey Games) seems qualified to handle, especially given his previous accomplishments.
During his time at Bethesda Softworks, Purkeypile was a world artist on multiple Fallout titles, include Fallout 3, Fallout 4, and as a lead artist on Fallout 76. He also has experience on other landmark Bethesda titles like Skyrim, and still shares development stories of the game on Twitter (like when Skyrim's opening scene was ruined by bees) a decade after release. It's clear Purkeypile loves massive open-world adventures, but The Axis Unseen is a step in a new direction for the now-solo game developer.
Recently, Screen Rant spoke with The Axis Unseen's creator about what players can expect from the game itself, and how developing environments in games like Fallout 4 and Skyrim helped to prepare him for the challenges of solo development.
What made you go from Bethesda - working on Skyrim, and Fallout and all of this really cool stuff - to deciding to go into solo development?
I liked the experience of working as a smaller team, without as much bureaucracy and all these meetings and stuff like that. I always kind of wanted to do the solo dev thing because, even way back in the day, I did mods with pretty small teams of four to six people or something. It just seemed like an interesting challenge.
Unreal [Engine 5] was very well-suited for that, with the way they have blueprints and mega scans and all these things that are massive force multipliers, where you really can do a game on your own. And I don't think that was necessarily the case 10 years ago; it would be much harder to do something like that if you needed to do all the C++ yourself and all the modeling by hand.
All those things help make it easier, and so I wanted to give it a try.
Did you explore a lot of other engines before you settled on Unreal for your game?
I looked around a little bit but, again, I think you need to be more of a real coder [for Unity]. I've done coding before, but it's been like 20 years, so blueprints seem like a really good option.
Also, what they're doing with Unreal 5 with Nanite and Lumen is really suited for my skills of world building and stuff. So, that was a perfect fit. I can use essentially infinite [polygons] on the stuff I make now with Nanite, which is just bonkers. I'm loving it.
You've been sharing a lot of really cool stuff around the Skyrim anniversary on Twitter. Has the idea for this particular game been in your head for that long? Because when you say "heavy metal open world horror hunting game," that's a very large combination of things, but I don't know if I've heard all of them smashed together at once before.
I didn't have any specific idea, but I suppose that traces back to the roots of who I am. I'm kind of from the middle of nowhere in Oregon, so I grew up in the wilderness but then also spent a lot of time being into horror stuff; reading scary stories and watching scary movies.
I've always liked metal but, at the same time, I felt there's not much in the way of metal games. And if there is, it usually is almost the satire side; it's the hair metal kind of thing. I wanted something that's a little darker and more serious.
Brütal Legend didn't take it seriously enough?
I mean, Brütal Legend a great game. But it is definitely an army of guys literally head banging and 200-foot walls of speakers. I guess it's not quite the tone I'm going for with this.
Can you talk a little bit more about the tone that you are going for?
The overall pitch is that you're hunting and tracking monsters in this world outside time. There's all these legends from around the world of monsters and, if you start reading it, you're like, "Why do these all sound kind of the same?" The idea is that there's this other world in between everything that's connecting it, which is also related to the name.
It's called The Axis Unseen, because there's this concept of the axis mundi, which is things like the World Tree or another alternate world connecting everything. That's where all the monsters come from, and that's why all the legends are sort of the same.
And so, you end up in this world, and you're hunting and tracking them. And by tracking, I mean actually looking at their prints. You have to pay attention to wind direction, because they might smell you. It's not just like your regular hunting game, where if they smell you or something, they're gonna run off. No, if they smell you, they might come and eat your face. It's that kind of game.
Is this a gigantic open world like Skyrim, or is this more of open world hunting in the old Cabela's sense, where you have four different locations? You can go to different biomes, but they're not connected into one giant mass.
It's gonna be all one connected thing, along the lines of Skyrim and Fallout and all that. Now that they've done some changes to Unreal, I feel like that's a lot easier to do than it was before. Their setup is pretty similar to what I'm used to. I have all that stuff working now; for it to actually be open world, generating the landscape and everything.
It's just so cool that you can do that, and that the technology is available for a small group of people to be able to do something which took an entire group to do 15 years ago.
Why I think that's also possible is because, back on Skyrim and Fallout, every single rock and everything was all placed by hand. It's maybe not the most efficient way of doing it. The way I'm doing it now, there's this program called Houdini, where you can generate landscape and then simulate the erosion.
And you can kind of guide it to make it look the way you want it, like a mountain where you need it and things like that. But then you can also even populate all those trees and all those rocks and even spawn points. I can get that massive landmass, but then come in after the fact and make specific locations within that. But it's not all just by hand, because it doesn't really make sense to be planting trees by hand. Those things happen based on rules, like, "Where does water go?" There's a logic to it, so it makes sense to leverage that.
When you are doing that, do you find that you enjoy the process of worldbuilding more? Because you can do a broad stroke with a brush, and then come in and get all those fine details?
Yeah, it's really enjoyable. The way I'm doing it is actually incredibly dorky, but I love it. Because I'm actually sculpting it in VR, so I can be like, "I think it a mountain would be right here," and do a terrible sculpture of it. But then I take that block out, bring it in, and do all that erosion and populate stuff on it.
And it's really easy to then iterate, because then I can run around and see how it fees. If it turns out that's terrible, it's not three months down the drain. I just adjust the sculpt or do whatever to tweak it as needed.
Are you going to be announcing a release date for The Axis Unseen, or is that going to still be up in the air as you continue to work on it?
The release date is probably going to be a little bit tentative, but it will be a decent-sized project I'm announcing relatively early, but I'd rather have my development process be a little bit more open so people can see how it goes and just have it out there. Now that I don't have to run everything through PR, I'd rather develop that way. It just seems a little bit more interesting to me.
How have you found the response from the community to be? How many people are asking you questions about your game development?
I mean, it slowly goes up over time, and it definitely seems like there's interest. It feels like every person I talk to is like, "Man, I love heavy metal to. This sounds great." And sometimes it turns out my composer is some journalist's favorite musician.
I think there's a lot of people out there who are into this kind of thing, so I'd like to think I'm not just doing this blind, like, "I'm just gonna do my dream indie game." I really do think it's an underserved market.
Can you talk a little bit about how the heavy metal aspect is actually implemented into it?
It has its own custom soundtrack. It's like 90 minutes of music, and all of that exists now. We're just working on finishing it up, so there'll be lots of different musical cues depending on where you are: specific locations, if you unlock something, etc. As combat changes within the game, like if you're getting stalked by something, the music will change. Or once combat starts, and they're chasing you, then it'll change again.
That also depends on where you're at, like in each biome that I was mentioning. Each one of those has their own set of music. That's how it's all set up, and it's all working pretty great. I love the soundtrack.
Are you planning on doing difficulty sliders, or are you going to make it realistic, hardcore hunting all of the time? Are you going to let people try to have a little bit more of an arcade experience, if they would like that?
Since it's a single player game, I'm totally open to putting in sliders and stuff like that. As much as I like Dark Souls and stuff like that, I don't know if I agree that you have to play it that way. Because I think there's a pretty decent chunk of people who, if it ends up being too difficult for them or whatever, they'll just stop playing. And there's not much to gain from doing that.
I'll obviously have my default setup of like, "Hey, this is the way you should play." But if you disagree, you can change that. And other games have also done that in interesting ways, like Hades and things like that, where you can opt in for things that make it harder. I think that's a really interesting way to do it, where there's a benefit to doing it, but you're making the game harder at the same time. You know what you're getting into, and that sort of design is interesting to me as well.
How long would you say the final product that you're aiming for is going to end up being?
It's hard for me to say at this stage, but my guess would be that it's definitely going to be at least 20 hours, since it's an open world simulation heavy game that is somewhat methodical. I think it'll be something like that.
Obviously, the phrase "open world" has so many different connotations attached to it. Are you planning on having a whole bunch of side missions, NPCs, and random events happening, like in Fallout or Skyrim? Or is it going to be more toned down and restrained?
I think, just as a necessity of scope, it's likely to be a lot more constrained than that. A lot more like in-world lore, as opposed to branching conversation trees where you're romancing followers and things like that. As much as I would like to have all of those things. I don't think it's realistic for me to do that.
What are you the most excited about for people to engage with in your game?
I guess I'm excited to see what kind of wacky worldbuilding I can do without any prior constraints. To be able to build whatever kinds of locations I like. People like Blackreach, which I did for Skyrim, and that was just something that we snuck in really quick. So, it's me kind of going wild like that, but with even fewer constraints.
It's amazing that you can 'sneak in Blackreach really quick,' given how much time people ended up spending there.
Yeah, and that was a very little amount of time. I did most of the work for that in two days, because it was never on the schedule.
What was the process? Just, "We think it would be cool to have an underground cave system?"
Yeah. It was me and Joel Burgess, the lead level designer. We always liked the idea, but people kept saying no to it. And we were like, "We think it's gonna be so cool. What if we do it anyways?"
At that point, technically speaking, I was actually a year ahead of my schedule. I had leeway to more or less schedule myself, so I was able to do that. I just kind of winged it and put it in, and I was still getting all my other tasks done on time. I guess coffee and hotkeys are really useful for getting a lot of stuff done in advance.
Is there anything else about The Axis Unseen that you want to make sure people are aware of right now?
I can talk a little bit about how I found my composer, because I just think it's fun. His name is Clifford Meyer, and he used to be in the bands Isis and Red Sparowes. Isis, in particular, was always one of my favorite bands to work to. I think they've been around for 20 years or something. They stopped making music about 10 years ago, but I've always loved them.
And one day, I was just like, "Ideally, if I could have any music for my game, what would it be?" And it would be them. I just found their Bandcamp page and just send an email. I was like, "Hey, do you guys license any music? I worked on Skyrim." And I got actually got a response: "Hey, I'm a really big fan of Skyrim. And, yeah, we do license our music." So, I'm gonna have their licensed music as well.
But then he offered, "Hey, are you looking for anyone to do music?" We got talking, and it worked out great. He's been amazing to work with.. I lucked out getting one of my favorite musicians to actually do music for my game, which is super cool.
Are they doing any official songs for the game?
No, I just have old music from the actual band itself, separately. And then stuff from Clifford, since they're not together as a band anymore. If I could manage to get them all together to make something, it'd be pretty cool. They've been really great to work with.
A lot of indies warn you against it. I've always heard, "Don't go into licensing music. It's a total pain," but it's honestly not that bad. If you deal with smaller labels, it's slightly complicated. But that's what lawyers are for. Just have them sign paperwork, and it's fine.
Interested players can check out JustPurkeyGames' official website and The Axis Unseen's Steam page to stay up-to-date with the game's progress.