Dialogue with ByteDance Games: Cultivation Theme, Realistic Art Style, Global Release — Bu Wen Fan Chen Aims to Create an Interactive Film Game Only Possible with AI | Creation Notes

This article is reprinted with permission from “Game Artist.”

Not long ago, ByteDance officially announced Seedance 2.5 at the 2026 Volcano Engine FORCE conference, expected to launch in July. In addition to revealing upgrades such as native 30-second video output, joint generation of 50 full-modality assets, and consistency-preserving local editing, ByteDance also put forward judgments like “video generation is one of the paths to a world model.”

Every technological iteration naturally sparks discussion about the boundaries of its application. Whether it’s the expansion of AI video technology’s real-world use cases or the future innovation of AI-driven interactive entertainment, interactive film and gaming (interactive film-games) is one of the most watched directions right now.

Not long ago, ByteDance Games’ Jiangnan Studio publicly disclosed the Bu Wen Fan Chen project. This cultivation-themed product, developed based on AI video models like SeeDance, has its characters and scenes entirely generated by AI to create photorealistic images.

The sheer volume of video performances makes it look like a well-produced interactive film-game. Yet after talking with the team, you realize it’s a complete-loop cultivation interactive product.

This product uses turn-based combat, features multiple main storylines and dozens of endings, and includes complete cultivation loop mechanics such as sect development, pill refining, equipment crafting, auctions, and world bosses. It’s understood that the full content is expected to last around 30 hours and will be released on Steam within this year.

Currently, interactive film-games have attracted participants from many quarters. Film and TV teams take interactive storytelling as a breakthrough; AI-native teams start from technology application; platform players try embedding lightweight interactions into information feeds… The backgrounds of entrants vary, and the product form is not yet settled.

What makes Bu Wen Fan Chen worth noting is that its production team provides a way of thinking that starts from gameplay and industrial pipeline construction and works backward.

Before Bu Wen Fan Chen, producer Xin Jie had already led his team to develop three AI interactive products. But it was only after they “imagined the form of a world model after its implementation and built a content engine accordingly,” deeply integrating AI video technologies like SeeDance with the product’s original gameplay pipeline, that they truly discovered the feasibility and necessity of AI interactive products.

In Xin Jie’s view, what this direction may bring in the future is a content engine based on real-time task calculation, one that better understands context and can better present content based on interaction, eventually having the chance to become the content carrier of the next era. And the boundary between film and games will grow increasingly blurred in this process, eventually converging at certain points.

Recently, Game Artist / Things Entertainment had a detailed conversation with Xin Jie, producer of Bu Wen Fan Chen, around topics such as the product boundaries of AI interactive content, the construction of AI technology pipelines and product landing paths, and the potential differentiation and future opportunities of AI + interactive film-games.

“Bu Wen Fan Chen” is your fourth AI interactive product, and it already has a strong “AI interactive film-game” feel. How would you define this product?

Xin Jie: My definition of an AI interactive product is: could this thing have been created without the age of AI? Bu Wen Fan Chen is precisely a product that can only be made using AI. We often joke internally, calling it a “live-action cultivation” interactive product. It doesn’t have the common anime or 3D art style; from the first glance it sets itself apart in terms of experience.

Secondly, it’s a cultivation-themed title. Cultivation is very much like China’s native version of anime culture – it is rooted in the core of Chinese culture and has formed a sense of community gathering and emotional resonance. There are many popular cultivation anime and TV series now, but not many interactive products, especially those offering rich gameplay content. We hope its ultimate experience is “free cultivation,” like a “playable cultivation novel,” without being too large in scope.

In essence, we are building a content engine based on AI video. Bu Wen Fan Chen is the first work produced by this engine at the current stage of technology that can satisfy both us and the players.

How do you distinguish the content boundaries of AI interactive film-games, AI RPGs, AI visual novels, etc.?

Xin Jie: I think the core lies in what the player’s consumption target and actual experience are.

For most interactive film-games, the main focus is still “watching.” They are rooted in series experiences, like early works such as Black Mirror or The Invisible Guardian, where you accompany the protagonist through different choices and see the outcomes, but the choices are limited – you mainly “watch” a great story.

But Bu Wen Fan Chen emphasizes “playing.” Every moment presents dense choices – where to go, which sect to join, whether to fight someone – these choices accumulate in non-narrative ways, affecting your stats and how the entire world reacts to you.

For example, if you kill an NPC, your alignment changes, good people in the city may refuse to trade with you, but other villains might recruit you. You decide most things; you are cultivating “your” path to immortality, not watching someone else’s story.

So the boundary lies in the mode of participation and interaction. For instance, playing means experiencing “making sufficient choices in this world” and “having to bear the consequences of my decisions.”

Does that mean the cultivation theme itself is more suited to this kind of rich, free-form gameplay, giving it a better chance in the AI era?

Xin Jie: Yes. The cultivation theme emphasizes free exploration; it is more sandbox-like. The player imagines being thrown into this world, choosing sects, learning techniques, making friends or enemies with various people. It’s unlike some anime themes where the main storyline is a linear journey with companions – cultivation is more like a “sandbox.”

More importantly, cultivation can essentially be seen as China’s sci-fi genre. Unlike wuxia’s flesh-and-blood combat, it is full of high-concept, grand-scale fantasies. These conceptual designs are extremely difficult to realize in traditional film or games – expensive and hard to deliver. As a result, a large portion of the user base accumulates in literature. And for a good genre, people naturally want to see its movies, TV shows, and games.

AI happens to solve this problem, visualizing the cultivation scenes and combat skills in people’s imagination cheaply and effectively – not just making them, but making them to a degree that satisfies players.

Rebuilding the content engine and industrial pipeline, using AI video models

Traditional live-action cultivation interactive film-games have huge costs and production difficulties. How about the cost of Bu Wen Fan Chen using AI?

Xin Jie: Let’s look at two aspects. First, what we are building long-term is a content engine; the infrastructure and technology investment themselves are much higher than simply setting up a single project. Moreover, as a complete interactive product, besides video interaction, we have a dozen additional systems including combat, pill refining, equipment crafting, sects, auctions, world bosses, etc. This is heavy industry in the content domain – system, progression, stats, and story are all indispensable – so the cost naturally rises.

Second, in terms of content production, we have set a very high quality standard, definitely at the leading level in the industry. Part of that is hiring people who are very good at AI content, and part is our own strict internal requirements, resulting in a high waste rate and investment.

What is the difference between using an AI video engine and using traditional engines like Unity or Unreal Engine?

Xin Jie: From a technical logic perspective, a traditional engine is a “spatial engine.” You place objects in 3D space and then render them back into a 2D image for the player via the graphics card.

What we do is more like a “temporal engine.” It replaces the core physics and rendering issues in parallel on a technical architecture. It renders based on AI, slicing the expressive content of all possibilities along a timeline, forking, overlapping time, or fusing video, then presenting it to the player. The difference in technical logic is that the latter combines AI video gameplay with interaction.

We chose this path because its visual expression can surpass most interactive products, offering stronger immersion, while serving more players with better content presentation. However, there are some short-term limitations, such as action-oriented gameplay with strong interaction, which may have to wait until the world model is implemented before gradually migrating.

AI video technology like SeeDance is also widely used in AI micro-dramas, AI movies, etc. How is it different when used in interactive products?

Xin Jie: The biggest difference is that you have to build an entire product pipeline from scratch. How does the video-based story play? How is the logic implemented? How is content managed? Most interactions are video-based – how do you design gameplay around video? This is very different from traditional development.

Currently, most of our video is still pre-generated. But as costs decrease and quality improves in the future, there will be more online real-time generated content. How to create a good feedback loop between player choices and real-time generated video will bring completely new experiences. I predict that by next year, we might see some decent online-generated content. This will have a huge impact on film, games, interactive entertainment, and so on.

This touches on a concern many developers have. AI technology evolves so fast that a newly built workflow might be upended by new tech soon. What’s your take on that?

Xin Jie: I felt this deeply earlier this year. Those companies doing Agent work or AI engineering architecture for B2B instantly follow every new model – this has become the new normal. What matters more is which team has delivery capability at which stage, and whether they can quickly follow new tech, produce something, and commercialize it.

Back to the question, the key is whether your team builds the pipeline on top of AI, or merely uses AI as a tool. If your pipeline’s connecting points are all human, and you only use AI to improve efficiency within traditional software, then the bottleneck will always be people.

A true AI team integrates many steps. For example, AI-generated video merges scene, set design, lighting, cinematography, directing, acting, costumes, and props all into one person. Going further, let Agents participate in the mass production process – while you sleep, they are doing review and optimization.

How do you know if you’re doing it right? Just ask yourself: when a new model three times more powerful appears, are you happy or sad? If happy, it means you did it right – you can immediately use it to accelerate production. If sad, it means you’ve been building a “shell” on an unstable foundation.

Has the Bu Wen Fan Chen project itself ever had to overturn its original creative plan due to model updates?

Xin Jie: Rarely, because from the very beginning I imagined the form after the world model’s implementation and built the entire content engine accordingly.

But it’s not nonexistent. The most typical disruptive node was the emergence of SeeDance. Before that, we were more like making an animated film, connecting keyframes. After it appeared, our work mode completely changed – more like a director: you tell it the script and design, and it can give back something decent. Such disruptive technology nodes bring pipeline iterations.

When transitioning from traditional interactive content creation to AI-native content creation, have you or your team experienced conceptual disagreements? What was the biggest disagreement, and how was it resolved?

Xin Jie: Definitely. Most of the disagreements centered on judgments about the pipeline. I tend to be more aggressive in predicting AI development. For example, the idea for this project was proposed last September. At that time, SeeDance hadn’t come out, and people didn’t recognize Agent capabilities. Choosing that direction at that point was quite a gamble.

Because the window for AI content products is about half a year – you have to predict what the tech will be like when you mass-produce half a year later. If your prediction is too aggressive, you might not finish. If too conservative, what you produce might lack appeal. This is a real challenge for current AI teams.

The biggest disagreement was not about AI itself, but about product direction. I was still more determined to first make an AI-based interactive product – that was the entry point and gameplay approach I envisioned from the start. Within the team, this kind of issue is fairly normal.

The Bu Wen Fan Chen team has fewer than 20 people. How is the work divided? Compared with traditional development, are there any new roles or workflow changes?

Xin Jie: The core is still programmers, designers, and artists – you can’t skip them. But there are changes in implementation details. For example, since coding is not a bottleneck, we require designers to also output HTML interaction prototypes for validation.

Additionally, we have two very key roles: one is the engineer who builds internal AI tools and pipelines; the other is the director. Now that AI is combined with film and TV, I very much hope that directors who understand cinematography and performance can spark with AI, expressing the design of story and interactive content.

The development rhythm has also changed. Traditional AAA games follow a very strict pipeline: half the time in pre-production, then a full schedule of mass production for the next year or two. But for AI single-player products, it’s not like that. You need to set up the pipeline, but at the same time, every two or three months you have to adjust gameplay and pipeline according to changes in AI technology – more like an agile development model.

When a large amount of work is taken over by AI, what do you think is the core value of human creators?

Xin Jie: This is like after the camera was invented, painters no longer needed to perfectly record reality, which gave rise to Impressionism and Abstraction, liberating everyone’s way of creating content. AI is the same.

First, it lowers the threshold for creative implementation. Everyone has a desire to express themselves. AI helps people release their inner thoughts, making expression easier. Just like Douyin’s success owes a lot to the massive content provided by mid- and long-tail creators – people discovered that videos don’t have to be masterfully produced to be consumed.

Second, it will bring new content carriers. Interactive content has always been a basic human need – when I watch something, I also want to make choices. But in the past, due to costs, timelines, and traditional investment logic, it was difficult. AI makes it possible.

Third, looking further ahead, with the development of world models, it may give birth to the content carrier of the next era, completely overturning past experiences. Even being a bit more radical, maybe not all expression is exclusive to humans; AI itself can generate good content for consumption. Setting aside productivity and social structures, for consumption alone, this is something to look forward to.

It’s said that 95% of the AI-generated material for Bu Wen Fan Chen was scrapped, and only 5% was usable. What criteria were used to select that 5%? Has the team formed a reusable “aesthetic consensus”?

Xin Jie: A 95% waste rate roughly means we set a quality bar far above the current average capability of AI. To reach that quality, you still can’t rely entirely on AI automated production.

This “aesthetic consensus” was brutal – we only truly found it one month before SeeDance emerged. For four or five months before that, there was nothing that made the team feel “at least acceptable.” Once we had usable technology, the consensus was built based on those clips that the team collectively approved of.

But there’s another layer above that: design. What a character looks like, what clothes they wear, what scene they’re in – all of these need separate design. AI can make the design land quickly, but that doesn’t mean design is unimportant.

What your male lead wears, what background an NPC has, whether a fire-themed sect uses magma as its main body or has a volcano erupting behind it, how clothing reflects hierarchy from sect leader to underling – all these still require effort in design. AI cannot think these through for you.

If I lowered the quality to what current AI can output directly, I wouldn’t need to spend time on this. But essentially we want to make good content. Actually, it’s also a matter of product choice: do you make a good AI content now, or wait a bit? Many problems that bother you now, like character expressions not looking human enough or repetitive movements, may not be issues by next year.

Bu Wen Fan Chen has multiple main storylines and dozens of endings, and also supports dynamic NPC dialogue and personalized interactions. In AI-driven open-ended content generation, how does the team keep the worldbuilding and character settings from collapsing?

Xin Jie: This part is still firmly controlled by humans. Most of the text and copy is still designed and written by people. It’s difficult to let AI generate complete and rigorous content right now. For example, the several sects, their histories, hierarchical relationships, character connections – all have to be designed first. This not only affects the story but also impacts gameplay and plot.

The boundary between film and games will get increasingly blurred in the future

Are you worried about players complaining about the “AI feel”? Are there any specific designs to address this?

Xin Jie: We don’t shy away from the fact that it’s AI-made. When we released the first trailer and asked players, “Can you accept AI?”, the comments were roughly split 50-50. Then we invited players for internal experience testing and found that after actually playing, the acceptance of AI rose to around 90%.

This shows that when players are immersed in a complete, high-quality experience, as long as the content is good and doesn’t feel out of character (OOC), they accept this style. An OOC experience can be jarring for players. Even though it’s AI-made, we try to minimize that.

I believe “AI style” in the future may become like anime style, Ghibli style, or 3D animation – just a new visual style brought by a new production paradigm. Whether you shoot on a phone or on film, it’s still a movie. Ultimately it comes down to whether you offer good content. What people dislike is not AI, but shoddy production.

From a creator’s perspective, with the boost from AI, will interactive storytelling and film/TV storytelling converge or remain independent? What new creative possibilities do you hope to see from their collision?

Xin Jie: My judgment is that in the future, the boundary between film and interactive content like games will become increasingly blurred.

For example, a film/TV team that makes a first interactive film-game will likely want to add progression mechanics and different gameplay elements to it. Conversely, a game team that builds an interaction framework will want to fill in more NPC backstories and narrative expressions. Given enough time, these two will converge at some point.

But “interactive film-game” may not be a stable new category. Why does it exist? Partly because live-action art style differs from rendered graphics; partly because it has interaction, but not enough to be called a simulation management or RPG game, yet it’s released on Steam, so it gets the label “interactive film-game.”

Looking forward, if its interaction becomes richer, it might be a “story-rich simulation management” or “story-rich RPG.” I think everyone will gradually discover that games have such good gameplay models and monetization methods – it’s a shortcut for those making interactive content. And when you take that shortcut to a certain extent, the problems you encounter will be similar to what we face now.

But interactive content has always been a real human need. As products continue to be produced, it will certainly find its own audience.

“Bu Wen Fan Chen” counts as an in-depth attempt at AI interactive film-games. As a creator, how do you see the future development prospects of such products?

Xin Jie: I am very optimistic about the prospects. AI is still developing rapidly. Many of the difficulties we are discussing now may not be issues six months from now – though new problems may arise then. If the waste rate can be reduced, the entire production and delivery will be faster, and we will have more resources to make better products.

What plans does the team have for new gameplay, new products, and commercialization going forward?

Xin Jie: The most important thing now is to make Bu Wen Fan Chen a great product. We will release another trailer in July, showing gameplay that hasn’t been revealed before, including auctions, sect tournaments, world bosses, etc., to let everyone know that we don’t just have story – we have built a solid, complete loop experience for a cultivation interactive product. For the next product, we may continue with other themes and gameplay modes.

Regarding commercialization, for the first product we hope it is both well-received and commercially successful. But choosing the Steam platform is not purely a commercial decision – it’s for global distribution, to validate the market for a product going from 0 to 1.

After that, there are indeed many more commercial approaches, but that depends on subsequent products. For now, nailing the 0-to-1 step for this user base is the most important thing.