Zhao Wenyong, Tech Director
On the day of the interview with Wen Yong, he had just returned from a technology sharing class in Shanghai. As a well-known tech expert in the circle, such technology sharing is common among peers, but this time the sharing is a little different from the previous one.
In the past, when he introduced himself at the beginning of the technology sharing class, he could only say that he was the technical director of "Hundred Generals" and "Art of War: Red Tide", and there were few people in the audience. But this time when he introduced himself on stage as the technical director of "Black Myth: Wukong", the audience was full of exclamations. After all, no one expected that just after watching a game trailer known as "the light of domestic 3A", its technical director actually appeared in front of him.
Wen Yong, surnamed Zhao, graduated from the Department of Software Engineering at Sun Yat-sen University. He is not shy about saying that since he came into contact with "Red Alert" at the age of eight, he has been bound to the game in his life so far, and he believes that he has some talent for programming. He got this major because he likes playing games.
In college, he participated in Microsoft’s Imagine Cup (Microsoft’s technology competition for global students) and entered the semi-finals. At that time, he led a small team of five students and completed a shooting game project that he thought was pretty good. In 2009, he entered Tencent as an intern. After graduating in 2010, he became a regular and joined Feng Ji’s project team.
Feng Ji introduced Wen Yong to me, saying that he is a rare all-round player in the company. Although he is the technical director and is responsible for the main program of multiple projects, he will also make cameo appearances in game design from time to time. He often talks to the village chief and Yang Qi about the design of levels and gameplay, and often comes up with some good ideas.
Wen Yong smiled and said, in fact, he is a "handyman". It is not a talent that has developed this ability, but when he first entered the project team, as a newcomer, no one helped him realize some ideas. He can only rely on himself to complete it.
In Tencent’s project, Wen Yong has done user interface interaction, programming, and planning. He even once transferred to the WeChat department to do background message architecture. However, he did not feel very happy in the two months of WeChat, on the one hand, because this position requires 24 hours on standby, ready to deal with emergencies in the background at any time, and he was once criticized by the leader for missing an emergency call because he slept too much late at night; on the other hand, it is mainly because he is far away from the game, and he feels that it is not interesting to be a pure code farmer.
So when Feng Ji extended an olive branch to him in Game Science, he agreed without much hesitation. He said that many companies had come to poach him at that time, but he felt that these people were not very reliable. But Feng ****** a deep impression of him.
The first project of game science was "Baijiang Xing", which was a mobile game similar to "Dota Legend" gameplay. Wen Yong said that when mobile games first took off, they were very disapproving, because the mobile games at that time were very average in performance due to technical and hardware limitations, and they were completely different from the console games he had played. But later it was found that with the continuous improvement of mobile phone performance, mobile games can also make pictures similar to the quality of console games, so mobile games have improved.
As the technical director, Wen Yong doesn’t just complete the main program work. He also often "challenges" Feng Ji in the system and gameplay planning of the game. For example, when making "Art of War: Red Tide", Wen Yong questioned the core gameplay at that time, the process from the player making a decision to seeing the effect was too long, and finally persuaded Feng Ji to make adjustments. "But I don’t always intervene in everything, and I will only mention it to him when I see something I can’t bear."
The project of "Black Myth: Wukong" was actually first proposed by Yang Qi in 2016. At that time, the project of "Baijiang Xing" was nearing the end, and everyone was discussing what to do next. Yang Qi’s idea was actually not opposed, but the biggest problem was that as a stand-alone game project, the commercial input-output ratio at that time was too low. "In addition, we may still lack some accumulation or running-in in technology. There are many technical things I can know how to achieve, but we don’t have enough people or experienced teams to do this."
Wen Yong even said that from the perspective of pure programming technology, the development difficulty of "Black Myth: Wukong" is even lower than that of "Art of War: Red Tide" in some dimensions, because the latter wanted to achieve 100-to-100 large-scale war scenes on mobile phones at that time, and it was necessary to calculate and advance in real time. The picture is also realistic. This challenge has many obstacles, but "Wukong", an action game, has not exceeded the technical limit I have mastered. Of course, this is also because after two mobile game projects, the team has expanded, and the development experience and mutual cooperation have also run well. "
But this doesn’t mean that "Black Myth: Wukong" is a very simple project. From the depth and breadth of this project alone, Wen Yong can explore a lot of directions in this project. In his words, "Wukong" is a more attractive project, and doing such a project will make him enjoy it more. Unlike when he was doing "Red Tide", his mentality was almost always on the verge of collapse, forcing him to complete various impossible challenges in two years. "My hair fell the most on this mobile game project."
Wen Yong was also a "cloud player" when he was a student, because he couldn’t afford a console, and many games were made up after taking a job and buying a console. Wen Yong’s taste in playing games is also very mixed, but he is more reluctant to the bloody and violent part of the game, including the QTE of Kui Ye’s large number of violent actions in "God of War 3". In addition, he doesn’t like zombie and zombie-themed games, so the "Resident Evil" series and the "Last Survivor" series are also "cloud clearance".
The only exception may be "Dark Souls 3". In Wen Yong’s words, this game is just on the edge of the horror and violence he can accept. At first, he heard that it was difficult, but after he started playing it, he found that he could accept it.
After playing enough action games, Wen Yong’s understanding of this category becomes deeper. He believes that although the IP itself is their moat, the most important difference between these different action games is the core experience. Everyone is an action game, but they play it completely differently. Under this premise, it seems that various sub-categories of action games have been done by others, and simply imitating a certain category may be a dead end, and it is easy for players to think that they are copying.
In the initial stage of developing "Black Myth: Wukong", the biggest problem for Wen Yong was the manpower problem. As the technical director of the company, he was responsible for multiple projects at the same time, so once he encountered any problems in the project and had to solve them himself, he had to often go back and forth between the Shenzhen and Hangzhou studios of Game Science. This time, the project used UE4, a new engine they had not used before, and they encountered more problems at the beginning. Wen Yong was a little tired.
Wen Yong’s role in the team seems to be to solve problems at any time, because as the main program of the project, any planning requirements or art features in the game will eventually be implemented by him in code. He still remembers that when he decided to show the clips from the Black Wind Mountain level, after the first version came out, he was a little flustered, because the effect was so far from what he expected, it was almost impossible to see.
With the continuous evolution and adjustment of the version, the effect of the demonstration is more and more reassuring, but from Wen Yong’s point of view, there is still a lot of room for optimization. For example, the hair effect of Ling Xuzi, at first everyone had no experience, so they could only explore the plan to achieve it by themselves. Until the end, Wen Yong still felt a little worried that the effect was not very good. However, after the trailer was released, he was relieved to see that even David Jaffe, the producer of the original "God of War", praised the hair effect, but still felt that he could do better.
This 13-minute demo took about four or five months, and until the final version was finalized, Wen Yong still felt that it would be "a little unsafe" to release it like this. But Wen Yong had no idea of the effect of the trailer after it was released. He thought it would be good to have one or two million views of this trailer, but he did not expect that after the trailer was released at 10 am on Thursday, the popularity of this trailer was obviously "a little out of control."
Wen Yong felt a little flattered, and of course he was very happy, because he didn’t expect to be so popular, but what followed was an invisible pressure. Before this, the team didn’t have a particularly clear goal on how much time it would take to complete the project, but now there must be a clearer plan for the time to complete the project. And before, he felt that if the first generation didn’t do well, he could continue to be the second generation and the third generation, but now it seems to have become a state of "success or benevolence". If it doesn’t work well, it will be doomed. "This is actually not the result we expected."
The first problem for Wen Yong now is to quickly build the program and technical team to be more complete. The project still lacks a lot of talents in many specific types of work. He feels that three years is the minimum time for this project to achieve a satisfactory result. "But for me, at least if this is a work without regrets, I certainly hope that the game will eventually sell well, but for me, this is not a matter of sales, but for myself, I want to like playing this game, and this game needs to satisfy myself. This is the state I pursue."
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