By ArtiZen Editorial Team
Feng Ji is the CEO of Game Science, the Chinese studio behind the recently famed AAA game Black Myth: Wukong. Feng has an unusual gaming experience in terms of his opinions slamming the game dev culture at that time and his crazy addiction to playing video games endlessly.
When Feng Ji newly graduated from Central Technology University in China, he immersed himself in the World of Warcraft days and nights. He slept during the day and went online in NetCafe playing games all night, even borrowing money from schoolmates to put into the WOW game. He was planning to pursue a graduate degree, but his passion for video games surpassed his academic interest and he applied for jobs in indie game studios and later started in the industry as a game operation producer. In two years’ time, Feng Ji became increasingly baffled at “what is normal in the gaming industry”, he wrote an article debunking the dark side of the game industry: Who murdered our games? Urging the industry to reflect on some fundamental questions:
- How to keep players addicted?
- How to induce players to spend more money?
- How to encourage players to form guilds?
- How to get players hate each other?
- How to hide well the casino/gambling mechanics in the game?
So it seems natural that all monetization-driven company would adopt the above doctrines as their criteria for a qualified game producer. So webpage games have created many modules such as new maps, new monsters, new levels, new weapons, incarnation, transmigration, double experience, family system, announcement function, battle ranks, kick someone from a group, un-kickable right, gotcha box, coins area, double coins area, 10X coins area, etc.
Later, Feng Ji worked at Tencent Games for 18 months until he met an opportunity to design a web game based on the Journey to the West IP.
Art Director: Yang Qi Responsible for Character Design.
Majored in fine arts at China Academy of Art, Yang started to take part in game dev since senior year in college, after working in several startup studios, he and his friends founded their own studio, made an MMO game named The Catalog of Mountains and Oceans， which also featured with various monsters and mythologic animals in Chinese folklores and traditions.
Yang later joined Tencent Games as a character artist. When he first onboarded the team, he just did what he needed to do within the team, sometimes going the extra mile for his artwork to make it look polished. Until he met the group of Fengji and others, he started to believe that there existed a group who took making games seriously.
Together they spent 5 years on this ambitious, passionate project “Warlord” (Chinese God of War) , the story is also based on the Journey to the West mythology. It’s an innovation program within Tencent, which is different from most other programs that have a revenue KPI, the team grew from 30 to 200. This project won the best technology breakthrough award in Tencent and was even released with a solid console version.
Years later, Feng Ji, Yang Qi, and other former Tencent employees co-founded Game Science, Feng Ji said, the only impulse to quit Tencent and create a startup is that they see the rising tide of the mobile game market. Game Science partnered with Netease to develop its first mobile cards game: A Hundred Fierce Man. This game is based on another Chinese classic novel The Three Kingdoms. If we say The Journey to the West resonates partly with Lord of Rings, then Three Kingdoms share similarities with Game of Thrones.
In 2017, inspired by Blizzard’s Starcraft 2, Game Science developed another mobile game Art of War: Red Tide, which was featured by the Apple store in nine countries and it was also launched on Steam, harvested 400k players, and also ranked top on Steam free list.
The Birth of Black Myth: Wukong
In 2018, the co-founders of Game Science felt that if they still can not initiate the project, it would be too late for them to fulfill their Journey to the West dream. In the meantime, the total number of Chinese PC gamers on Steam had surpassed American players, this timing is just like 2002 when Chinese film market is waiting for a AAA film to start the era of big blockbuster movies. The market maturity for standalone PC game is ready,
In terms of gameplay selection, we reached some consensus at the beginning, to do a strong sense of enemy oppression, a sophisticated level structure, mysterious style narrative action game, but what style? Is it like Monster Hunter, or Dark Souls, or God of War?
Note that this is not a specific type of game, but rather what it conveys to the player. For example, God of War focuses on action, while Dark Souls focuses on more clever level design and character growth.
They preferred to create a design language similar to that of Black Myth: Wukong, such as replacing weapon blocks with brass heads and iron arms; No need to lean over and touch the grass, you can become a cicada and a plant. For another example, instead of trying to implement the level structure of the soul game that Feng Ji is keen on, he chose episodic levels as the game process to reflect the long journey to the West.
Beyond the design aspect, the technical challenges take longer to overcome. In order to present a higher quality picture performance, as well as a coherent large map, “Black Myth: Wukong” in the beginning selected UE4 engine (later converted to UE5), which is a new tool for the team, we need to start from scratch to study the tech documents, and get familiar with the software.
In the early demo, the character’s facial expression was not authentic enough, and bugs appears frequently. Feng Ji has more than once expressed his desire for experienced technical artists, and he is extremely envious of the real-time animation clips in The Last of Us 2 – no matter how the character run to the table and pick up a cup, it is completely a smooth character movement. However, for Game Science, such a movement, probably took two or three months.
In order to produce high-quality models, Yang Qi wanted to leverage the power of outsourcing. He said that in “Black Myth: Wukong”, the price of making a flower pot and a rockery image is more than the same item in real world; To make a large building costs more than 100,000 yuan, the same amount of money to erect a building in downtown. This shows their attention to detail. “Once we asked to carve a window, and external artist team thought it’s too easy for them , but when we send over the draft drawing, on the window it’s a story about Eight immortals crossing the sea.
Of course, Game Science faced its own 81 crucibles on the journey to the global market. Rumors such like sexually abusive job ads, and offensive expressions from a male perspective, have collided heavily with the current cultural trends in America, such as feminism, diversity, and inclusion concepts. But Wukong has gone through its darkest stealth dev journey and achieved fantastic performance goals:
— 10 million copies sold in three days and set records on Steam, driving over 37 million concurrent players.
— The original lore book “Journey to the West” sales have increased by 31 percent in the west
— Landmarks in China featured in the game offer free access to global tourists
