UE5 powers solo dev as heavy metal, horror, and hunting converge in The Axis Unseen
Just Purkey Games is a solo indie game company founded by Nate Purkeypile. Nate has over 20 years of experience in the games industry and worked on titles such as Bloodrayne 2, Aeon Flux, Metroid Prime 3, Fallout 3, Skyrim, Fallout 4, Fallout 76, and Starfield. Three of those games (Fallout 3, Skyrim, and Fallout 4) won the most Game of the Year Awards for the years they came out. He was the Lead Artist on Fallout 76 and the Fallout 3 DLCs ‘Point Lookout’ and ‘The Pitt’.
He has worked in a large number of disciplines including world art, lighting, art direction, level design, shaders, design, characters/weapons, tools, production, and marketing.
He has worked in a large number of disciplines including world art, lighting, art direction, level design, shaders, design, characters/weapons, tools, production, and marketing.
With over two decades of experience in the gaming industry, Nate Purkeypile has seen firsthand how the industry has evolved. Spending most of his career at Bethesda where he worked on high-profile franchises such as The Elder Scrolls and Fallout, Purkeypile has tackled numerous aspects of game development ranging from art direction and level design to production and marketing.
It makes sense then that with so much experience under his belt and the availability of tools like Unreal Engine, Purkeypile would feel confident branching out on his own as a solo developer to work on a passion project involving two of his favorite things—heavy metal and horror. That’s where The Axis Unseen comes in.
This unique project places players in position to hunt monsters from folklore by following their tracks and blood trails while attempting to avoid detection. After all, it doesn’t take much for the hunter to become the hunted.
In the game, which features a sprawling world and custom primitive metal soundtrack, players rely on their bow to keep them alive while different arrow types including fire, wind control, and time distortion contribute to the thrill of the hunt.
But how could a solo dev tackle such an ambitious project? Having previously worked with internal engines, Purkeypile chose Unreal Engine 5 to achieve his goals for the game. We caught up with him to learn more about the game as well as the role key UE5 features and the UE ecosystem played in making his vision for The Axis Unseen become a reality.
It makes sense then that with so much experience under his belt and the availability of tools like Unreal Engine, Purkeypile would feel confident branching out on his own as a solo developer to work on a passion project involving two of his favorite things—heavy metal and horror. That’s where The Axis Unseen comes in.
This unique project places players in position to hunt monsters from folklore by following their tracks and blood trails while attempting to avoid detection. After all, it doesn’t take much for the hunter to become the hunted.
In the game, which features a sprawling world and custom primitive metal soundtrack, players rely on their bow to keep them alive while different arrow types including fire, wind control, and time distortion contribute to the thrill of the hunt.
But how could a solo dev tackle such an ambitious project? Having previously worked with internal engines, Purkeypile chose Unreal Engine 5 to achieve his goals for the game. We caught up with him to learn more about the game as well as the role key UE5 features and the UE ecosystem played in making his vision for The Axis Unseen become a reality.
Q: Thanks for joining us! Could you please provide a bit of your industry background?
Nate Purkeypile: I've been making games for a bit more than 20 years now. About 14 of those years were at Bethesda Game Studios working on stuff like Fallout 3, Skyrim, Fallout 4, Fallout 76, and Starfield. I mostly did world art, lighting, level design for cities like ‘Diamond City’ and art direction on things like ‘Point Lookout’, ‘The Pitt’, and Fallout 76. I also worked on the game that was in that movie Grandma's Boy. Yup. That was a real game at one point. Clive Barker was attached to it and everything but it never came out. So the one game I have worked on that got canceled lives on in that weird way. After all those years at big companies, I've completely switched gears and I'm doing the solo indie thing.
Q: The Axis Unseen is described as a “heavy metal horror game”. Where did this (rather unique) concept come from?
Purkeypile: I really like both heavy metal and horror, but there's really not many heavy metal games out there. To me, it seemed like a perfect fit since metal is inherently kind of over the top and intense, just like horror. I also think there are a ton of people out there who like metal (like me) who just aren't getting that many things when it comes to games. That always struck me as a bit strange since one of the biggest and most influential FPS IPs out there is a heavy metal game. I'm talking about Doom. So it was always clear to me that there are a lot of people out there who appreciate that kind of thing.
Nate Purkeypile: I've been making games for a bit more than 20 years now. About 14 of those years were at Bethesda Game Studios working on stuff like Fallout 3, Skyrim, Fallout 4, Fallout 76, and Starfield. I mostly did world art, lighting, level design for cities like ‘Diamond City’ and art direction on things like ‘Point Lookout’, ‘The Pitt’, and Fallout 76. I also worked on the game that was in that movie Grandma's Boy. Yup. That was a real game at one point. Clive Barker was attached to it and everything but it never came out. So the one game I have worked on that got canceled lives on in that weird way. After all those years at big companies, I've completely switched gears and I'm doing the solo indie thing.
Q: The Axis Unseen is described as a “heavy metal horror game”. Where did this (rather unique) concept come from?
Purkeypile: I really like both heavy metal and horror, but there's really not many heavy metal games out there. To me, it seemed like a perfect fit since metal is inherently kind of over the top and intense, just like horror. I also think there are a ton of people out there who like metal (like me) who just aren't getting that many things when it comes to games. That always struck me as a bit strange since one of the biggest and most influential FPS IPs out there is a heavy metal game. I'm talking about Doom. So it was always clear to me that there are a lot of people out there who appreciate that kind of thing.
Q: In the game, players hunt nightmarish monsters from ancient folklore in a mysterious open world. How did you go about selecting, creating, and implementing the game’s folklore monsters?
Purkeypile: This took a long time. I don't think it's much of an exaggeration to say I read about basically almost every monster in the world. There's a lot. It's part of why I picked folklore, there are so many interesting monsters and stories to dig into. I wanted a nice mix of some that are a bit familiar like vampires, werewolves and Bigfoot, but also some really weird and obscure ones like the Australian Bunyip or the Scottish Nuckelavee. I also took into account how they would play and all fit together. So I wanted ones that have a lot of different behaviors and visual styles.
Q: How much refinement has gone into the hunting mechanics of the game?
Purkeypile: This is something that takes endless refinement. I like to always treat the game like I'm about to ship it. I like to keep it really stable and play it and have it playtested by other people constantly. There are so many small things to tweak and things that impact the feel of the game and the balance. You can have an idea of how you want something to work when you first get started, but it takes countless passes of iteration to get it somewhere great.
Purkeypile: This took a long time. I don't think it's much of an exaggeration to say I read about basically almost every monster in the world. There's a lot. It's part of why I picked folklore, there are so many interesting monsters and stories to dig into. I wanted a nice mix of some that are a bit familiar like vampires, werewolves and Bigfoot, but also some really weird and obscure ones like the Australian Bunyip or the Scottish Nuckelavee. I also took into account how they would play and all fit together. So I wanted ones that have a lot of different behaviors and visual styles.
Q: How much refinement has gone into the hunting mechanics of the game?
Purkeypile: This is something that takes endless refinement. I like to always treat the game like I'm about to ship it. I like to keep it really stable and play it and have it playtested by other people constantly. There are so many small things to tweak and things that impact the feel of the game and the balance. You can have an idea of how you want something to work when you first get started, but it takes countless passes of iteration to get it somewhere great.
Q. With an interesting heavy metal theme, what musical and cultural influences does the game draw on? (any particular bands/ folklore tales?)
Purkeypile: Some of the biggest musical inspirations for the game are the bands Soulfly and Heilung. Soulfly has been around for a long time and when I saw them live it was this amazing blend of metal and giant primitive drums. It really struck a chord with me. The band Heilung, while not metal, really focuses on the primitive aspect. Their shows are amazing and they call them "rituals" and have a shaman and everything. It's something completely different from most music and you might think it's just this weird obscure thing, but they have been doing incredibly well and it's clear that this idea to get "back to the primitive" (which is a great Soulfly song as well by the way) resonates with a lot of people. So this whole idea of primitive metal seemed like the perfect fit for the game for me. I wanted metal, but with all of those ancient drums, horns and so on. That fits with the primitive hunting theme and aesthetic that the game has.
As for cultural influences, the core idea is that you are in this world outside of our own that connects everything. This is described in lots of cultures as things like the world tree, the Otherworld, and so on. To me, it just made sense that all these people are describing the same thing and that's why often the same monsters show up all around the world, such as Sasquatch. What if it was all true? What if this place existed and you're there to hunt these monsters? That's what this game is.
Q: Could you please explain how large The Axis Unseen’s game world is and why crafting such a huge environment was essential to the experience?
Purkeypile: The world of The Axis Unseen is about five times larger than Skyrim, which at first sounds just wild. Skyrim is actually a really compressed experience though and it's more about finding dungeons and exploring spaces. This is a hunting game with giant creatures, some of them are up to 30 stories tall. So to do a hunting game right, you need a lot of wilderness. I tried a much smaller map earlier on and it just didn't work. The pacing was all wrong. So even early on I had enough systems up and running to know that this game needed to be big for it to feel right. It also fits the metal aesthetic. With a map this big I can have a mountain that is literally miles tall with a gigantic skull on the top of it and the corpse of a giant serpent wrapped around the whole thing. That's pretty metal. :)
Purkeypile: Some of the biggest musical inspirations for the game are the bands Soulfly and Heilung. Soulfly has been around for a long time and when I saw them live it was this amazing blend of metal and giant primitive drums. It really struck a chord with me. The band Heilung, while not metal, really focuses on the primitive aspect. Their shows are amazing and they call them "rituals" and have a shaman and everything. It's something completely different from most music and you might think it's just this weird obscure thing, but they have been doing incredibly well and it's clear that this idea to get "back to the primitive" (which is a great Soulfly song as well by the way) resonates with a lot of people. So this whole idea of primitive metal seemed like the perfect fit for the game for me. I wanted metal, but with all of those ancient drums, horns and so on. That fits with the primitive hunting theme and aesthetic that the game has.
As for cultural influences, the core idea is that you are in this world outside of our own that connects everything. This is described in lots of cultures as things like the world tree, the Otherworld, and so on. To me, it just made sense that all these people are describing the same thing and that's why often the same monsters show up all around the world, such as Sasquatch. What if it was all true? What if this place existed and you're there to hunt these monsters? That's what this game is.
Q: Could you please explain how large The Axis Unseen’s game world is and why crafting such a huge environment was essential to the experience?
Purkeypile: The world of The Axis Unseen is about five times larger than Skyrim, which at first sounds just wild. Skyrim is actually a really compressed experience though and it's more about finding dungeons and exploring spaces. This is a hunting game with giant creatures, some of them are up to 30 stories tall. So to do a hunting game right, you need a lot of wilderness. I tried a much smaller map earlier on and it just didn't work. The pacing was all wrong. So even early on I had enough systems up and running to know that this game needed to be big for it to feel right. It also fits the metal aesthetic. With a map this big I can have a mountain that is literally miles tall with a gigantic skull on the top of it and the corpse of a giant serpent wrapped around the whole thing. That's pretty metal. :)
Q. Did you lean on any specific UE features for building the large open world, and if so, how did they make the process easier?
Purkeypile: I'm using the World Partition system and the foliage system pretty extensively. In earlier versions of Unreal, an open world like this would have been a lot more difficult, but now it's pretty close to what I'm used to working on games like Skyrim and Fallout, only even faster. I've placed every rock and tree by hand using the foliage tools, which is actually a very fast way to work.
This way I can control every single sightline. A well-done open world isn't just a random scattering of trees and rocks: those placements matter. There is a pacing and a flow to everything in open world design. Controlling those sightlines so you can see interesting landmarks is essential. This is why games like Skyrim and Fallout are still played to this day and I learned a lot about how to layout an open world making those games. I worked with my art team on Fallout 76 to design that map and people have said it's their favorite Fallout map.
Q: How have you leveraged UE5 systems like Nanite and Lumen to bring unprecedented levels of detail and believable, immersive lighting to the experience?
Purkeypile: Absolutely, those two things are essential to how I am building my game and what gives it its unique style. I am using Nanite geometry on everything and almost no textures at all. So every piece of dirt is millions of polygons, which is more than an entire scene was in Skyrim. Since Lumen does such a good job bouncing light around and making things look great, I don't actually need textures. This helps me build the game much faster since I don't need to do low poly models, unwrap things, bake normal maps and so on. All those steps can be skipped. I can sculpt things in VR and just directly put my models in game. Most of them take less than an hour this way. It's pretty uncommon for there to be new features in games like this where it looks dramatically better but also takes LESS time.
Doing it this way also makes the game run way better since I don't need all of that texture memory, so it runs even on one of the oldest computers I have in my house. It's a GeForce 980 sitting in a corner that I mostly use as a file server and it can run the game, which is just amazing. There's this assumption that all these features like Lumen and Nanite are only for high-end machines, but I've found that to not be true at all. You just need to profile your game and optimize it, which is really easy in Unreal.
Purkeypile: I'm using the World Partition system and the foliage system pretty extensively. In earlier versions of Unreal, an open world like this would have been a lot more difficult, but now it's pretty close to what I'm used to working on games like Skyrim and Fallout, only even faster. I've placed every rock and tree by hand using the foliage tools, which is actually a very fast way to work.
This way I can control every single sightline. A well-done open world isn't just a random scattering of trees and rocks: those placements matter. There is a pacing and a flow to everything in open world design. Controlling those sightlines so you can see interesting landmarks is essential. This is why games like Skyrim and Fallout are still played to this day and I learned a lot about how to layout an open world making those games. I worked with my art team on Fallout 76 to design that map and people have said it's their favorite Fallout map.
Q: How have you leveraged UE5 systems like Nanite and Lumen to bring unprecedented levels of detail and believable, immersive lighting to the experience?
Purkeypile: Absolutely, those two things are essential to how I am building my game and what gives it its unique style. I am using Nanite geometry on everything and almost no textures at all. So every piece of dirt is millions of polygons, which is more than an entire scene was in Skyrim. Since Lumen does such a good job bouncing light around and making things look great, I don't actually need textures. This helps me build the game much faster since I don't need to do low poly models, unwrap things, bake normal maps and so on. All those steps can be skipped. I can sculpt things in VR and just directly put my models in game. Most of them take less than an hour this way. It's pretty uncommon for there to be new features in games like this where it looks dramatically better but also takes LESS time.
Doing it this way also makes the game run way better since I don't need all of that texture memory, so it runs even on one of the oldest computers I have in my house. It's a GeForce 980 sitting in a corner that I mostly use as a file server and it can run the game, which is just amazing. There's this assumption that all these features like Lumen and Nanite are only for high-end machines, but I've found that to not be true at all. You just need to profile your game and optimize it, which is really easy in Unreal.
Q: Are there any other specific features of UE5 that you found to be particularly beneficial?
Purkeypile: I really like the new MetaSounds system. This lets me mix and adjust sounds on the fly and not need to bake out countless variations. For instance, most of my creature sounds are multiple sounds mixed together on the fly. It's not just two sounds though, each one tends to have a bucket of random sounds to pull from so you get a lot more potential variation there since it's pulling from multiple random pools of sounds. Again, this also takes less memory since I'm not baking out 100 unique sounds, it's just a handful mixed live.
Q: Considering the scope of the game world, one interesting creative choice is that there’s no map in The Axis Unseen. Could you please talk about your reasoning behind that as well as your approach to UI in general and what you are hoping to achieve in terms of immersion?
Purkeypile: After working on Bethesda games for 14 years, I was kind of sick of staring at menus all the time in games. It's fine for some games but I find that UI is often used as a crutch for so many things. Is the player lost? Hey—just throw a giant minimap there or make a line glow on the ground. In a lot of cases, you're not even really playing the game anymore, you're playing a series of menus. I wanted to get away from that and do as much as possible in the world. Want to know where to go? Look up at that giant two mile tall mountain with the skull and the huge corpse of a dead eagle and use that to orient yourself. Still not sure? You can fire a Spirit Arrow up into the sky and get a bird's eye view of where you are and place a marker. That marker shows up as a beam in the world. You don't need a minimap or a compass to solve every problem about the player getting lost. There are ways to do it while maintaining the consistency of the world and the experience.
That has been one of the things that has resonated with playtesters the most. I think a lot of people have this same UI fatigue that I do and just want to immerse themselves in a world.
Purkeypile: I really like the new MetaSounds system. This lets me mix and adjust sounds on the fly and not need to bake out countless variations. For instance, most of my creature sounds are multiple sounds mixed together on the fly. It's not just two sounds though, each one tends to have a bucket of random sounds to pull from so you get a lot more potential variation there since it's pulling from multiple random pools of sounds. Again, this also takes less memory since I'm not baking out 100 unique sounds, it's just a handful mixed live.
Q: Considering the scope of the game world, one interesting creative choice is that there’s no map in The Axis Unseen. Could you please talk about your reasoning behind that as well as your approach to UI in general and what you are hoping to achieve in terms of immersion?
Purkeypile: After working on Bethesda games for 14 years, I was kind of sick of staring at menus all the time in games. It's fine for some games but I find that UI is often used as a crutch for so many things. Is the player lost? Hey—just throw a giant minimap there or make a line glow on the ground. In a lot of cases, you're not even really playing the game anymore, you're playing a series of menus. I wanted to get away from that and do as much as possible in the world. Want to know where to go? Look up at that giant two mile tall mountain with the skull and the huge corpse of a dead eagle and use that to orient yourself. Still not sure? You can fire a Spirit Arrow up into the sky and get a bird's eye view of where you are and place a marker. That marker shows up as a beam in the world. You don't need a minimap or a compass to solve every problem about the player getting lost. There are ways to do it while maintaining the consistency of the world and the experience.
That has been one of the things that has resonated with playtesters the most. I think a lot of people have this same UI fatigue that I do and just want to immerse themselves in a world.
Q. You’ve worked on a bunch of big-name titles—Fallout 3 and 4, Skyrim etc. What key learnings from those projects were you able to apply to The Axis Unseen?
Purkeypile: One of the biggest lessons I had from working on those games is how to get things done in the time you have, not the time you think it will take. On other games I've worked on like Metroid Prime 3, you would work on a single room for like a month. Everything had to be perfect. Every single little intersection between every object had to be just right. The thing is, most people won't notice. It's a waste of time. You're going to learn so much more and get so much better if you just make something and move on. Could it be better? Maybe. But oftentimes people will just endlessly noodle on something and the differences just aren't noticeable to most people.
So to make a solo game this big, I had to have the same approach. How much time do I have to make the open world? Six months. So I did it in six months. How much time do I have to make the creatures? Six months. So I did it in six months. Using this production style, I'm shipping on time in October. This isn't to say you don't loop back over stuff and make it better, but I just think that if you're laser focused on any one thing for too long, you just lose sight of what even matters. You need a big picture approach, especially making a solo game or a big game.
Q: After working with internal tech in your previous career roles, what were some of the main reasons you made the switch to Unreal Engine 5 for The Axis Unseen?
Purkeypile: Unreal Engine is just so well supported and there is so much knowledge out there. It was an obvious choice to me and I knew having an engine that looked so good could let me leverage a lot of my skills as an artist. I only briefly looked at stuff like Unity before realizing it's just not a fit for the kinds of games I want to do and the kind of impact I wanted the game to have.
Purkeypile: One of the biggest lessons I had from working on those games is how to get things done in the time you have, not the time you think it will take. On other games I've worked on like Metroid Prime 3, you would work on a single room for like a month. Everything had to be perfect. Every single little intersection between every object had to be just right. The thing is, most people won't notice. It's a waste of time. You're going to learn so much more and get so much better if you just make something and move on. Could it be better? Maybe. But oftentimes people will just endlessly noodle on something and the differences just aren't noticeable to most people.
So to make a solo game this big, I had to have the same approach. How much time do I have to make the open world? Six months. So I did it in six months. How much time do I have to make the creatures? Six months. So I did it in six months. Using this production style, I'm shipping on time in October. This isn't to say you don't loop back over stuff and make it better, but I just think that if you're laser focused on any one thing for too long, you just lose sight of what even matters. You need a big picture approach, especially making a solo game or a big game.
Q: After working with internal tech in your previous career roles, what were some of the main reasons you made the switch to Unreal Engine 5 for The Axis Unseen?
Purkeypile: Unreal Engine is just so well supported and there is so much knowledge out there. It was an obvious choice to me and I knew having an engine that looked so good could let me leverage a lot of my skills as an artist. I only briefly looked at stuff like Unity before realizing it's just not a fit for the kinds of games I want to do and the kind of impact I wanted the game to have.
Q: It may be hard to believe, but you’re doing most (all?) of this on your own! Could you please describe your experience working as a solo dev?
Purkeypile: I really like it. I think jumping around between all these different things is fun. I get to learn a lot and there's always new challenges. Plus solving any particular problem is often really fast because I know how it all ties together. I wouldn't recommend that someone just starting out make a game this big, but doing all these different things in Unreal is surprisingly easy to me. It can be terrifying at times though if something breaks and you don't know why. That said, after each moment of terror like that, I've figured it out. The tools are robust enough that I've never been stuck for long.
Q: Considering you don’t have a team to support you, how has Unreal Engine 5 helped you achieve your goals for the project?
Purkeypile: Since Unreal is so fleshed out and stable, I don't really need a team to support me. It's an engine used by so many people and when a major release comes out, you know it's been tested a lot. So often when working with internal tech a new version would come out (which was basically every day) and random things would just... not work. Even big things, like "Oh hey, I guess... light doesn't work anymore." Not just some lights, like all of it. So then you'd have to file a bug report, roll back your version, verify the bug when it is fixed, and update again. There's so much lost time when you're actively building tech and trying to make a game at the same time. You could easily spend half your day not actually doing work in a situation like that.
So using Unreal and having it actually just work, there's no need for a team to support me. The most I've had to do is wait for a new Unreal version for a feature/bug to get fixed, but those have mostly been pretty minor things and as a solo dev that was also fine because I was never running out of things to do. So it's been great.
Purkeypile: I really like it. I think jumping around between all these different things is fun. I get to learn a lot and there's always new challenges. Plus solving any particular problem is often really fast because I know how it all ties together. I wouldn't recommend that someone just starting out make a game this big, but doing all these different things in Unreal is surprisingly easy to me. It can be terrifying at times though if something breaks and you don't know why. That said, after each moment of terror like that, I've figured it out. The tools are robust enough that I've never been stuck for long.
Q: Considering you don’t have a team to support you, how has Unreal Engine 5 helped you achieve your goals for the project?
Purkeypile: Since Unreal is so fleshed out and stable, I don't really need a team to support me. It's an engine used by so many people and when a major release comes out, you know it's been tested a lot. So often when working with internal tech a new version would come out (which was basically every day) and random things would just... not work. Even big things, like "Oh hey, I guess... light doesn't work anymore." Not just some lights, like all of it. So then you'd have to file a bug report, roll back your version, verify the bug when it is fixed, and update again. There's so much lost time when you're actively building tech and trying to make a game at the same time. You could easily spend half your day not actually doing work in a situation like that.
So using Unreal and having it actually just work, there's no need for a team to support me. The most I've had to do is wait for a new Unreal version for a feature/bug to get fixed, but those have mostly been pretty minor things and as a solo dev that was also fine because I was never running out of things to do. So it's been great.
Q. As a solo dev, are there any advantages of working within the Unreal ecosystem beyond the engine itself?
Purkeypile: The Megascans and the Marketplace have been really useful. Things in games are advanced enough now that I think I can safely say we should stop having people do things like make new rocks and fire. Yet this happens on so many games. It's part of why games are so absurdly expensive. It would be like every movie out there saying, "Hey guess what. We are going to invent fire. And rocks. Also cameras. Oh, and toilets. And forks. All of it. We're going to make it all ourselves and make this movie!" It sounds absurd when you put it that way, but so many games do exactly that and then people wonder why it costs hundreds of millions of dollars to make.
If you instead focus on what makes your game actually unique and can get some of those things from elsewhere, you're able to do so much more. That doesn't make it an "asset flip", if you ask me it's the only sensible way to make a game and doing it all yourself is just wasteful.
Q: You’ve been in the industry for over 20 years. How have you seen game development tools like Unreal Engine evolve over time to be more powerful and accessible than when you first began your career?
Purkeypile: It has been a huge leap, especially with Unreal Engine 5. Way back when I worked on Skyrim, the idea that any other engine could do what we were doing was just out of the question. Unreal looked great at the time, but it didn't do the same kinds of open world things that Skyrim was doing.
Now that's not true at all. Lots of games are open world games and Unreal Engine 5's support for that is great. That's why you are seeing even big studios like CD Projekt Red switch from their own internal tech (which was really good, Cyberpunk is a great game) to Unreal Engine. That is a pretty bold statement about how far it has come.
Q: Thank you for your time! Where can people go to learn more about The Axis Unseen?
Purkeypile: You can wishlist The Axis Unseen on the Epic Store and Steam. You can also follow me on Twitter/X at @npurkeypile or on TikTok at @theaxisunseen. There is a demo out for the game now and the game itself comes out on October 22.
Purkeypile: The Megascans and the Marketplace have been really useful. Things in games are advanced enough now that I think I can safely say we should stop having people do things like make new rocks and fire. Yet this happens on so many games. It's part of why games are so absurdly expensive. It would be like every movie out there saying, "Hey guess what. We are going to invent fire. And rocks. Also cameras. Oh, and toilets. And forks. All of it. We're going to make it all ourselves and make this movie!" It sounds absurd when you put it that way, but so many games do exactly that and then people wonder why it costs hundreds of millions of dollars to make.
If you instead focus on what makes your game actually unique and can get some of those things from elsewhere, you're able to do so much more. That doesn't make it an "asset flip", if you ask me it's the only sensible way to make a game and doing it all yourself is just wasteful.
Q: You’ve been in the industry for over 20 years. How have you seen game development tools like Unreal Engine evolve over time to be more powerful and accessible than when you first began your career?
Purkeypile: It has been a huge leap, especially with Unreal Engine 5. Way back when I worked on Skyrim, the idea that any other engine could do what we were doing was just out of the question. Unreal looked great at the time, but it didn't do the same kinds of open world things that Skyrim was doing.
Now that's not true at all. Lots of games are open world games and Unreal Engine 5's support for that is great. That's why you are seeing even big studios like CD Projekt Red switch from their own internal tech (which was really good, Cyberpunk is a great game) to Unreal Engine. That is a pretty bold statement about how far it has come.
Q: Thank you for your time! Where can people go to learn more about The Axis Unseen?
Purkeypile: You can wishlist The Axis Unseen on the Epic Store and Steam. You can also follow me on Twitter/X at @npurkeypile or on TikTok at @theaxisunseen. There is a demo out for the game now and the game itself comes out on October 22.