Exclusive: The Axis Unseen Developer On Making an Open-World Game Solo, Steam Deck Support, Regional Pricing, and More

Plus: collaborating with Clifford Meyer of Red Sparrowes and Isis for the game's soundtrack.

The Axis Unseen is an open-world heavy metal-inspired horror game developed by Nate Purkeypile for PC under the label of Just Purkey Games. I stumbled upon The Axis Unseen while watching No Clip (the home of all good video game documentaries) and immediately added it to my wishlist. After all, it’s not every day talent responsible for the likes of Skyrim and Metroid Prime 3 decides to strike out solo.

Fast forward a few months, and the game is slated for an October release date with a demo out next week. Suffice to say, I had to reach out to Purkeypile to know more about The Axis Unseen’s development process, what’s it like to make an open-world game solo, bringing it to the Steam Deck, and more. He also shed light on how Clifford Meyer of Red Sparrowes and Isis fame collaborated on the game’s soundtrack. Some responses have been edited slightly for clarity and length. 

1. For the uninitiated, could you give us a brief background of your game development journey?
   My name is Nate Purkeypile and I have been making games for more than 20 years now. About 14 of those years were spent at Bethesda Game Studios working on games like Fallout 3, Skyrim, Fallout 4, Fallout 76, and Starfield. I mostly did world art, lighting and making cities like Diamond City and Little Lamplight.
   

2. What is The Axis Unseen about and what can players expect at launch?
   The Axis Unseen is a heavy metal horror game where you hunt monsters from folklore in an open world. At launch, it'll be a full single-player game with no microtransactions or DLC, it's not Games as a Service. It's a game you can play and beat. That said, it's not small and it's taken most private testers about 20 hours to beat doing just the core stuff. A completionist run would take a lot longer.

3. What are the inspirations for The Axis Unseen and how long has it been in development?  How did you go about researching the topics it deals with and what was the reason for this choice of theme? 
   The main inspirations are folklore and heavy metal, so it's a blend of those two things. It's been in development for about 3.5 years now and comes out next month, which is actually on schedule and when I wanted it to come out. For research, I've read about practically every folklore monster there is and I constantly watch horror movies and listen to a lot of heavy metal. So research is a constant and ongoing thing.
   

4. The description for The Axis Unseen states it takes place in an "open world", given how loaded that term tends to be in terms of expectations from consumers — with you being a solo dev — walk that tightrope between player expectation and what can be done?
   It's a hunting game, so it needs a lot of wilderness, so it is definitely a large open world. It's about five times the size of Skyrim, since you need a lot of breathing room for proper hunting gameplay. I tried smaller spaces and it just didn't work. I also have a lot of very large creatures, so those need room as well. The main focus is on exploring the wilderness in this world outside of our own, so it isn't full of dungeons to explore. So while it is huge, it is still approachable.
   

5. What challenges have you faced developing a game of this kind? 
   It's gone a lot smoother than I expected really. Unreal Engine has been great to work with. It's mostly a matter of iteration and constantly trying to playtest the game and make it better.
   

6. A topic that comes up often with game developers and publishers on Steam is how the current 'meta' to bring about sales success is that it's dictated by wishlists.  As an indie developer how do you view this and what's your strategy?
   I think it's pretty true and wishlists matter a lot and visibility on Steam matters more than almost anything else. So doing all sorts of marketing to help drive that is only sensible. I try all sorts of things, I don't think there's any one answer and you never know what will really take off. That said, some things are more effective than others. For instance Twitter and TikTok are still pretty big but I've found Facebook to be not that effective at all.
   

7. I noticed that Just Purkey Games is also a recipient of the Epic Mega Grant. What support did Epic offer and what's it like working with a big engine maker like them? Does the game have any bespoke Unreal Engine features?
   Epic has been really supportive and has done a lot to help showcase the game. They haven't done any bespoke work for me, but they don't need to, it's already a really flexible and fleshed out engine.

8. What was it like working with Clifford Meyer? How did that collab happen and what can players expect in terms of The Axis Unseen's music?
   It's super random how this happened. I really liked the band that Clifford used to be in called Isis (this was before the terrorists) and I wanted to license some of their music. So I just reached out on their Bandcamp page and mentioned how I worked on Skyrim and stuff. Turns out Clifford was a fan of Skyrim and also wanted to know if I was looking for anyone to do music for my game. So we got to chatting and it worked out great. Clifford was awesome to work for and totally got the unique tone I was going for with the primitive metal.

9. Audiences outside of the US and EU usually expect a lower price tag on Steam. I'm curious to know, as a developer and a gamer, what are your thoughts on regional pricing? And will The Axis Unseen feature regional pricing in-line with Steam guidelines or do you plan on having your own pricing strategy?  
   Regional pricing is to be expected but I have modified mine a bit with some advice from a friend who handles that kind of thing on a day to day basis a lot more than I do.

10. While you've stated that the game runs smoothly on the Steam Deck, what were the challenges of optimising for Steam Deck?
    The biggest thing is that if it runs out of memory, it just crashes. So even if you were just going to have a temporary spike as it loads between levels or something, that won't work. So the actual amount of memory I'm using now is even lower (usually like 8-10GB across the shared memory pools). That's not bad though since really, this just forced me to optimise some stuff that probably shouldn't have been taking up that much space to begin with. So ultimately the Deck was really useful as a testing machine. There's so much you can miss if you just play your game on some absurd gaming PC at 120fps.
    

11. Finally, any plans to bring The Axis Unseen to other platforms?
    It depends on how it goes but sim-shipping a game as a solo dev seems like a bad idea and I want to make sure it's worth my time to do it. That isn't always the case for indie devs putting things out on consoles these days. For now, just wishlist the game on Steam and buy it when it comes out. The more people who buy it, the more likely I am to put it on consoles as well.

You can wishlist The Axis Unseen on Steam.