There's a chance, as you read this, that there's a game developer sitting by a lake in a forest, making an Unreal Engine 5 game out of the back of a trailer and using AI to design the monsters. There's a lot to unpack there, but it's also worth mentioning the dev in question is a 18 year vet who cut his teeth on games like Metroid Prime, before spending most of their career at Bethesda working on Fallout, Skyrim, and Starf𒁃ield. The game itself, , is certainly cool – an open world hunting game where you're tracking mythical entities – but it's the production method that interests me the most: a game made on the road, with creatures conjured from the ethereal brains of art AI, and sculpted in a VR headset by a campfire. 

Method game development

The developer in question is Nate Purkeypile, a former Bethesda World/Lighting Artist artist who recently went solo. "I wanted to do something that I wanted to do, instead of what someone else wanted," he explains, adding, "I felt the tools werꦬe advanced enough that I could do a lot more than I would have been able to do before, so it seems like a𝕴 really good time." Of course, developers go solo to make games all the time, but Nate is taking his project on the road. "It's like method game development," he jokes, "making a forest hunting game in the forest". 

"The real seed 💦if you dig way back," Nate continues, "is that I grew up in the woods thinking about monsters. Inevitably, when I play hunting games I like the mechanics but my mind always jumps to like, 'what if there were monsters?'" Which is a reasonable question you can apply to almost any activity. In terms of a monster hunting game though, it's because Nate "really liked the tactile feel of paying attention to the wind, and following tracks; the really deep simulator approach to it."

That's led to a game about someone who's crossed over into the world where monsters come from, who has to hunt and survive long enough to work out what's going on and how to get back. "You're trying to 𒆙find out what happened in this place? Where are these🎀 monsters coming from?" Nate explains. And, because it's a game about tracking and hunting things, you'll build out a set of sense based powers to help you. Things like an ability to detect scent as particles in the air, or see tracks on the ground – abilities you gain from the creatures you take down. 

Tracker senses 

to shape his monsters. It's a similar program to which you might have heard of from an unofficial spin off, Dall-E Mini, now called , creating such modern classics as '' and ''. While that produced some fun plasticine-faced creations, the more adva𒆙nced versionꦦs can conjure far more professional horrors. Things like this: 

"I've been keeping tabs on that AI stuff for a while but it was not great for a long time,'' Nate explains. "Even a few years ago, you'd have those weird fractal dogs from Google that's kind of interesting [but] not useful for anything'. But then MidJourney and Dall-E arrived: "those were a huge step forward and ꧟within like 30 minutes I had immediately burned through all my starter credits and just subscribed right away". 

In terms of how Nate coaxes monsters from code, it's an iterative process. "I usually start with something general like 'deer monster in a forest,' but then start adding different terms to see what it does, like 'in a foggy forest at night', or 'in the style of HR Gieger', 'like an oil painting', [etc]. ꧙You can add in more vague terms, genres even. It also shows you four variants, and then you can ask it to either keep digging down on one of those variants and make four more that are kind of sꩲimilar, or upscale one you like. So you can just sort of like, go through this web of possibilities."

This method certainly creates some interesting creatures. Things that capture the𝔉 essence of a monster, while feeling… wrong. "I feel like it's just gonna help me push my monster designs slightly more refined and weirder," says Nate. "I feel like if I did it without [AI], maybe it would just be what people have done before. I want to make a lot of 𒁃creatures and I want to make them good but I also need to find a pipeline that works for me to do it fast".

There's one last trick in Nate's mobile game studio and that's VR 3D sculpting on a Quest headset. "It lets you experiment easily because you can just sort of push and pull stuff, quickly try something and be like, 'oh no, that sucks' and it's not like a biꩵg deal. It's super easy to do it in VR – it's like whittling wood." Even with a VR headset Nate's set up can still be ultra portable: "I'm just using the Quest wirelessly connected to the laptop. [I🔜t] all fits in a backpack and you can do it anywhere you can set up."

Axis Unseen currently has a release date of 'when the axis aligns', which I'll take as 'when it's ready'. Until then, if you want to see more about what so♋rt of game ge🎉ts made in a forest by AI, you can sign up for updates at or take a look on .