A game team that has never disbanded in 20 years finally gets in on the action with a single-player game based on Chinese creation mythology | A conversation with Gu Shen: Feng Li Xi producer Liu Yang

​Recently，Phantom Blade Zero took over the Chinese AAA banner from Black Myth: Wukong, with its official release confirmed for October 29; Black Myth: Zhong Kui released a 15-minute gameplay demo video. And there are more Chinese AAA titles on the way — especially "reserves" of AAA games themed around Chinese culture, all racing toward us.

During this year's Gamescom, Game Artists had a chat with Liu Yang, producer of Gu Shen: Feng Lixi and head of Ancient God Lab.

Many people probably know Liu Yang because of Pangu Online, billed as the first domestically developed MMORPG made by students, born in 2008 when Liu Yang was just 22. His alma mater, Beijing Institute of Technology, even held a dedicated press conference for it.

Now Liu Yang is 40 and still active on the front lines. Many of the core members around him are also the same group of people from 20 years ago.

Gu Shen: Feng Lixi is Liu Yang's latest action game project, aiming to be a single-player game based on Chinese creation mythology. It just unveiled its worldview PV at Gamescom ONL, showing Lingzhuzi with the Red Armillary Sash in his left hand, the Fire-tipped Spear in his right, and Wind Fire Wheels under his feet, amid scenes of gods clashing as the giant Kuafu chases the sun — which drew an enthusiastic response.

The Xingtian boss fight demo at the expo showcased the controls and effects — no traps, no malice, no demanding execution; even ordinary players watching felt confident they could give it a try. It may look steady and unremarkable, but given the current environment for making action games in China, polishing a game like this takes real courage and skill.

After all, this is usually the moat of overseas action games, and from a business perspective, it's a field domestic teams didn't have to challenge.

They tried, didn't give up, and made a demo that actually looks pretty good. That alone is worth sitting down to talk about: why did they want to make this kind of game, and why do they persist?

​A game team that hasn't disbanded in nearly 20 years，still chasing the tide of the times

In 2008, Beijing Institute of Technology held a press conference announcing the official release of Pangu Online, the first domestically developed MMORPG created by students, developed by the "Pangu Soul" game studio, with hands-on play at the event.

Eighteen years later, when Liu Yang talks about this game, he says that at the time he and his team decided to "first hand-build a Pangu 3D MMO engine, then build our own game on that foundation." He considers this a "first-principles" approach: only by building the underlying architecture properly and accumulating enough experience and technology can you possibly create something innovative.

Thus, during the decade spent making the Soul Blade trilogy, Liu Yang's team prioritized building an editor and action game engine on top of Unity, making it easy to implement features like QTEs, mounted combat, dismemberment, and transformations.

And now the new project from their core engine team — Ancient God Lab — is Gu Shen: Feng Lixi, which likewise spent its first two years rebuilding the UE5 editor, including developing a film-grade fluid pipeline and optimizing the action game mechanics the team has accumulated over 20 years.

However, judging from the footage of Gu Shen: Feng Lixi released so far, the "first principles" Liu Yang insists on aren't limited to the simple logic of "hand-building everything from the underlying engine up." What matters more, in fact, is the core team that has existed for 20 years.

The core members of Ancient God Lab are the founding team of BIT classmates from Pangu Soul Studio 20 years ago. Liu Yang says it was all C++ and DirectX back then, hand-building graphics rendering engines starting from rasterizing screen triangles — arguably graduates of the first "Whampoa Military Academy" of game development in China.

Keep in mind that China's game industry has only truly industrialized for about 20 years. Many early practitioners have gone down different paths through the industry's ups and downs; the vast majority of teams have scattered, fighting their own battles, or left the industry early on.

That a team's core members have lasted this many years — not only never disbanding, but continually honing their craft and producing works that fit the character of the times — is itself something of a miracle.

Liu Yang believes his team has actually survived three eras of the Chinese game industry.

The first era was represented by the MMO PC game companies listed in Beijing and Shanghai; the team learned their engine technology and large-scale production methods, mastering how to make a large-scale game.

The second era was the mobile game era, starting around 2013. "We also actively adapted to the game formats and business models of that era, exploring how IP is generated and evolves in gaming. The process and mindset weren't great — there was some helplessness. Because at the time in China, consoles and Steam hadn't taken off yet; they couldn't support the overall revenue of a large-scale single-player game."

After 2024, in Liu Yang's view, we have entered the third era of the Chinese game industry. He found that in China, there is now a genuine opportunity to make a high-quality single-player game the way one makes a film — and even a chance to earn enough to sustain the team. This new era is the opportunity Pangu Soul has waited nearly 20 years for.

If you've heard of or played Pangu Soul's previous work Ancient Soul (also known as Soul Blade 2), you can actually appreciate how "helpless" it was, behind Liu Yang's description, to combine commercial monetization numbers with action gameplay.

The first Soul Blade, a single-player action game, achieved 3.5 million users, which convinced the team that their technical route and gameplay design direction were correct.

As a result, they set the development direction of their next title on "creation myth narrative, combat build complexity, and gameplay variety." They completely abandoned character gacha, because they didn't want action game players to have only 4 skills per character, but instead over a hundred skill combinations, with freely arranged skill chains and soul-card summons.

But at the time they hadn't anticipated that this was too hardcore and "overloaded" for mobile games — a format adapted to small screens and fragmented playtime.

​Making high-quality single-player games，how to break out of the “feature-stacking” trap

"When we were making Soul Blade 2, it felt like forcefully fusing the Nine Yang Divine Skill and the Nine Yin Manual through Qiankun Great Shift. The core of an action game is execution, but the commercial logic of mobile games is still a contest of numbers — you could call it selling stats. Trying to merge or balance the two back then was incredibly hard. To this day, we still haven't seen an action game that successfully merges both."

When making Ancient Soul, the team prepared "overloaded" content on both the "literary" and "martial" fronts.

On the "literary" side, Liu Yang wasn't even satisfied with rebuilding the Norse mythology world from foundational theory; instead, based on Wittgenstein's "meaning is the world," he created from scratch a language system, symbols, and pronunciations evolved from ancient Hebrew. He even turned this into a game underlying system called "Rune Language," used in combat builds and the theme song. At the same time, borrowing the spatiotemporal concept of the "Ten Directions and Three Worlds" from Mahayana Buddhism, he fused the three-dimensional physical space of the Nine Realms of Norse creation myth with three temporal reference dimensions into a four-dimensional spacetime.

On the "martial" side, besides hand-building the engine again, they designed eighteen weapons — because there are three playable characters, each with three class choices, and each class equipped with two weapons, achieving a depth and complexity similar to the console action game Nioh.

But early enthusiasm doesn't guarantee good results. In fact, the vast majority of players never even reach the late-game stage where builds matter. As a mobile game — and one with a monetization system, no less — Soul Blade 2 pleased neither side: it didn't give mobile players a satisfying experience and simple stat-crushing, nor did it give hardcore players pure challenge and perfect optimization.

Liu Yang himself concluded that "showing off" by stacking complexity is actually a kind of laziness in innovation.

"When we made Soul Blade 2, with multiple weapons, skills, and stacking, we thought that meant gameplay depth — but really we just piled things together, essentially presenting players with a garish, light-pollution puzzle on a small screen and telling them to solve it themselves."

By contrast, when Gu Shen: Feng Lixi opened its demo to ordinary players at this year's ChinaJoy for the first time, it attracted plenty of core players.

For Ancient God Lab, the first real test has only just begun — but at least this time they've done pretty well. When players put down the controller, they discuss the game's design philosophy, exchange thoughts on the combat, and many worry whether this is a "special" demo. After all, what was brought this time was only a boss-fight level; how the protagonist obtains the magical treasures, and the story's causes and consequences, remain unclear.

The players' concerns aren't groundless — the game industry has simply seen too many similar situations in the past. To put players more at ease, Liu Yang explained the development philosophy of Gu Shen: Feng Lixi and certain development paths the team has consistently followed.

"The March official recommendation from Epic and the April review by British games magazine EDGE of Gu Shen: Feng Lixi were fairly consistent: a hardcore action take on God of War unique to Chinese mythology could be born. What we want to give players is absolutely not suffering, but exhilaration. Everyone is already exhausted from daily life; I hope Gu Shen: Feng Lixi can bring some ease and delight."

To that end, the game's combat must be smooth and high-speed, while the combat system retains a certain depth. The team chose to place some complex, understanding-requiring build elements before combat, and will even offer official recommended templates. Once combat begins, players can feel the benefits their build brings, and thereby gain a deeper understanding of the gameplay.

Liu Yang says the game's core philosophy is to match both combat intuition and visual/graphics logic. A simple example: conveying information and counterplay in combat should, as much as possible, follow graphical intuition.

For example, a very hairy boss is likely weak to fire, so using a fire blade grants a damage boost. When the boss unleashes a fire tornado, you can fan it out with the Banana Leaf Fan; when he lifts a boulder to crush you, you can disperse it with a water-based treasure. "This has nothing to do with numbers — it's about building the concept of treasures countering each other, and we'll keep researching this area deeply."

​A 40-year-old “old-school handcrafted” game producer，what does he still want to make

At ChinaJoy, the Gu Shen: Feng Lixi demo was mostly about showcasing technology. The focus was on verifying the core technologies in a single boss fight — especially the points the team felt would affect players' feel and visuals. After Gamescom, they will go into seclusion to make adjustments and build content, and development may need another 2 to 3 years.

But even a game made with high quality in mind can't contain everything Liu Yang wants. He has a very long list of things he wants to achieve in his games; with each game made, when one of those achievements is reached, he crosses off an item. Ten years on, there's still plenty left on that list.

For example, when work on Gu Shen: Feng Lixi first began, the top three items on Liu Yang's list were: first, to make an action game that's exhilarating to play, one players can fully enjoy; the second concerned character looks, physiques, combat styles, and even monster design — reaching the current best level while incorporating the team's full aesthetic for traditional Chinese culture.

The third was to create the grandeur of "gods clashing" and the depth of Chinese mythology. So the game will inevitably feature giant beasts and spectacles, as well as myths like Houyi shooting the suns and the Xuanyuan Sword slaying Xingtian. The goal is not only for Chinese players to recognize them at a glance, but also for foreign players overseas to actively learn about these characters and cultures because of these scenes.

As he spoke, Liu Yang pulled out a "Chinese Mythology Universe Star Map" — his vision and inspiration stem from eight characters: "Nüwa molds humankind; gods clash in battle."

"Imagine the first person Nüwa pinched out of clay: the body made of earth, so the body is earth and the soul is water. Visually, when the character's divine power bar is broken, the body cracks; water and earth scatter chaotically, then reform. And to go from human to god, you need fortuitous encounters and magical treasures — which means battle is unavoidable, hence many battles among gods. This is the fundamental narrative logic of the game, and I think it's a logic that can be understood and accepted both at home and abroad."

Beyond developing the game itself, Liu Yang has also thought about unavoidable questions like AI, IP derivatives, and other commercial monetization for games.

AI usage on Gu Shen: Feng Lixi isn't currently high; it's mainly AI tools helping optimize workflows and validate certain features — for instance, in a previous game they set up AI avatars that could perform repetitive labor on the player's behalf while offline.

As for IP, as a game industry veteran of nearly 20 years, Liu Yang has witnessed the development of game IP-ization at home and abroad. He divides IP business models into three categories: one is the Disney model — expanding IP influence through diverse content development, licensed merchandise, and offline theme parks, spreading commercial value globally; one is the Japanese anime and American comics model — radiating IP value outward from the entertainment works themselves; and a third, represented by Capcom, where when the game sells well, the IP naturally becomes valuable.

Liu Yang chose the third, for reasons tied to his own experience.

The first 10 years of Liu Yang's career were spent building things for others — and not just games; the projects he participated in spanned multiple industries, such as the stage choreography system for the Beijing Olympics opening ceremony, a technical collaboration with Huawei HiSilicon, adapting Jin Yong's Condor Trilogy into games (the mobile game Condor Trilogy: Yang Guo and Xiaolongnü), and a decade crafting the Soul Blade trilogy. Whether turning IP into games or turning games into IP and accumulating a fixed fanbase, he's walked both paths.

But the latter excites him and his team more. "Make the game great, then turn it into an IP — that's what we should be doing now."

He started playing games at 3, drawing at 6, programming at 15, decided at 18 to make games his life's work, founded a company at 19 with the goal of becoming a first-tier producer... Now 40, Liu Yang still puts the identity of "game maker" first, and hopes to keep making games until 60.

As for after 60, he says, he could teach game development — and in the end, after he passes, his tombstone will read "a devotee of games."

What kind of work will such a person, and his studio, ultimately create? Perhaps one full of passion, with many impulses that ignore commercial considerations; perhaps one grand in scale and constantly expanding, vowing to incorporate the entire creation-myth star map; perhaps one that public opinion cannot crush and negative reviews cannot knock down — communicating with players while optimizing, never considering giving up.

"So you ask me, besides making games seriously, what should I be doing most right now? Probably working out properly — so I can at least live to 60."

That may also be why, after surgery for pectus excavatum requiring 40 stitches, he could still do 100,000 push-ups over three years — earning the nickname "Liu the Hammer."