Today, Wu Yunyang (Yunfeng) posted an article on his personal blog, saying that he will leave Lingxi Interactive Entertainment on May 20 and is ready to develop an independent game on PC.
Yunfeng has an important influence in the field of domestic game technology. According to an interview with a new programmer, Yunfeng was born in 1979 and has been more than 30 years old. At the age of 20, he developed the 2D game engine Wind Soul series, which was later used by many company teams in game production.
Yunfeng, source "New Programmer"
After joining NetEase in April 2001, Yunfeng participated in the research and development of NetEase's "Westward Journey 2" and "Fantasy Westward Journey" and other projects, and said on his blog that the Wind Soul series engine "once saved the "Westward Journey" project by accident.
During his tenure at NetEase, Yunfeng has shown many moments of true temperament. On his blog, he would be glad that NetEase did not have "that kind of indoctrination training" when he joined the company; will complain about the company's canteen queuing system, saying that "it took more than 20 minutes to receive rations, and when I look back, the queue has not decreased"; When traveling to Guangzhou, take Ding Lei's badge to enjoy the highest authority of unlimited access......
When he left NetEase in 2011, Yunfeng said on his blog that he had communicated with Ding Lei for several months, and when he finally confirmed his departure, Ding Lei gave him a box of moon cakes, and he shared a rock climbing video with Ding Lei, "Lao Ding quipped, today, Jobs (or referring to Apple founder Steve Jobs) is retired, you are also retired, and I still have to sit here."
Yunfeng and the former COO of NetEase, Zhan Zhonghui (Ding Dong), and the former vice president Chen Wei'an, who left at the same time, jointly founded Jianyue Technology, which developed projects such as "Momo Battle" and "Heartbeat Manor" in the early days, but its market performance was average.
In 2017, Alibaba Games, which was looking to develop its game business, acquired Jianyue Technology, and subsequently established a new brand in the game business, Lingxi Interactive Entertainment. Under the leadership of Ding Dong, Lingxi Mutual Entertainment developed "Three Kingdoms · Strategic Edition", a popular project - in March this year, Dingdang released an internal email, saying that he would step down on March 31, and the position of the head of the original Lingxi Mutual Entertainment was taken over by Zhou Bingshu (Uncle Cake), the producer of World War III.
As for Yunfeng personally, he gradually faded out of the company's management after Alibaba's acquisition of Jian Yue, and concentrated on game and engine research and development, and incubated and operated an engine project called Ant Engine.
Yunfeng said in his blog that the reason for this departure is related to "the company's closure of the Ant Engine project", and said, "I feel that the company no longer wants to develop its own game client engine, at least I don't agree with my development plan for Ant Engine."
However, some Lingxi insiders said that Lingxi Mutual Entertainment's main R&D investment is in another self-developed engine, and the Ant Engine engine has little to do with the company's actual business, and the company will still invest in the research and development of game engines and other infrastructure for a long time.
Looking back on Yunfeng's work experience, we can find that he is not a "worker" in the traditional sense. He once said on his blog that he had many resignation plans during his time at NetEase, hoping to retire as soon as possible and return to the life of Xianyun Yehe, and when he left NetEase in 2011, he wrote a letter of resignation to Ding Lei with thousands of words.
After that, although he did not resist the warm invitation of his old friend Dingdong to start Jian Yue, he gradually faded out of management affairs after the company was acquired by Alibaba, and said on his blog, "Life is short, and learning how to manage many people to do things is not the direction I expect to develop."
When he was suffering from kidney stones, he also expressed his views on the management of the company on his blog, saying, "The only thing I learned from this (illness) was that I had a valid reason to cancel a management meeting that night. Attending these meetings is probably more painful for me."
After learning of Yunfeng's resignation, Cheng Cheng, the owner of a game company, commented on him: "Linghu Chong in the field of domestic game technology development can be proud of the rivers and lakes." ”
The following is the original text of Yunfeng's personal blog:
Today is my last day at the Alibaba Center in Guangzhou. Although the last day is set for May 20th, it will be all holidays after that, and I don't think I will be coming back here. I haven't used my annual leave in these years, and it is always automatically invalidated at the end of the year, but this year it is considered a full (half).
Looking back on my career, I started my own business in Beijing before 2001 and then worked for a short period of a few months. After that, he worked at NetEase for ten years before leaving in 2011. At the end of 2011, we founded Jianyue, which we thought would continue to run, but by various circumstances, it was acquired by Alibaba at the end of 2017. After that, I quit the management of the company and focused on developing game engines.
Each experience confirms a different state of mind. Luckily, every start and end is my own choice. I am grateful to those who tolerate my waywardness, and I am obsessed with my own ideas while giving back to those around me.
The beginning of graduation is due to the many friends who love games made in college, and the young and energetic children dream of making their own games. When I felt that I was not capable enough, I was unwilling to spend my energy on things I didn't like very much just for the sake of salary, so I chose to leave and improve myself alone.
I entered NetEase because I have been developing the Wind Soul Engine since I was in college. By accident, I saved another failed game project (Journey to the West) and worked for ten years. And to leave, is to start over. When I found that I couldn't do more of what I wanted to do at NetEase, it was a great temptation to be able to take the lead in doing things myself.
Founding Jian Yue was easy and natural, although it was a business, but I hardly felt the pressure. This should be the confidence that the whole team has experienced success. Although the first two years were not successful, and two projects failed in succession, they miraculously caught the fast train of mobile games and survived.
I think the biggest inspiration from this entrepreneurial experience is that to start a business in a team, we must first determine the equity and benefit distribution plan, and then give it to someone who can be trusted to execute, so that everyone can do things without worries. Until the time of discussing the acquisition of the company with Alibaba, our founding team still followed the original agreement, so that almost all the partners who persevered to the end obtained a decent financial return. And because of our joining, Ali has reaped several times the return on investment in just one year, a win-win outcome.
Since 2018, I have decided to do what I want to do and what I am good at. Life is short, and learning how to manage a lot of people is not the direction I want to go. Especially after I gradually integrated into the open source community, I found that a lot of the software infrastructure in this world is often supported by one or two people. Back in 2011, I was skeptical that a software project that required a lot of people to work together might be a scam, so when you're in a stable environment and you're capable, it's rare to try to do something.
The game engine is something I've wanted to do for years. When I started writing my own games on campus more than 20 years ago, I realized that I had to have some good underlying infrastructure to support it. My interest has always been to challenge specific problems. The game engine is made up of a series of specific problems, each of which is not easy to get right. This matter needs to be done step by step, step by step trial and error, and problem by problem.
When we were at Jane, SkyNet, the underlying infrastructure of the game server part, was developed as open source from the beginning. It's been maintained almost by myself for many years, while absorbing a lot of contributions from the development community, making it a successful project, even in a lot of other areas outside of gaming.
The game client side, on the other hand, has not been able to build its own infrastructure. Although I wrote Ejoy2D in 2013 when we were transitioning to developing mobile games, it was just a gadget that was quickly customized to support the game at that time. In the past few years since it was used for the Three Kingdoms Strategic Edition, the structural design has been overwhelmed and I owe a lot of technical debt.
Although the company I started has been completely sold, I still have a lot of affection for this business. I think if a gaming company wants to grow in the long run, it makes strategic sense to have its own underlying infrastructure. Self-development is a slow process, and you will not see any returns in the early stage, and it is likely to fail, but once successful, the benefits are huge. But it has to be done by someone who doesn't want short-term returns and has a strong sense of self-motivation. Who else but myself?
I ended my work at Alibaba today because the company shut down the Ant Engine project. I don't think the company wants to develop its own game client engine anymore, or at least I don't agree with my development plan for Ant Engine. Of course, these are personal inferences and only represent my personal opinions. In fact, many of Ali Games' current games, led by the Three Kingdoms Strategic Edition, are still based on their own developed code, and they have no plans to migrate to commercial engines such as Unity. It is still under constant maintenance by a large technical team. Hopefully they can do better in the future.
Fortunately, I left Ali at the beginning of the year and did one last thing before leaving, which was to help me open source the Ant Engine that I had developed over the years. Since April, after Dingbell left, I have been working hard within the company to promote the development of the engine. Because I really feel that in the past six years, my small team and I have made a solid progress in the development of the Ant engine. I can give the engine an 80 and there were a lot of mistakes made during development, but in the end, the technical problems I wanted to overcome were all solved within my ability. It's not easy to develop your own engine, but it's a rare opportunity to spend six years dedicated to it, and today should be the time to start making it come to fruition.
Throughout April, I had a long talk with people from various project teams in the company, including project producers, programs, planning, and art...... It feels like I've been saying more in a few weeks than I've been in the past year. I passed on my beliefs. The quality of the engine is also demonstrated by the games we make: Lua-based rapid development while ensuring high performance on mobile platforms, and the current generation graphics pipeline delivers fairly refined graphics. And, I think most importantly, there is no technical debt.
I think I convinced quite a few people, but alas, the current corporate decision-makers eventually gave up on it. Perhaps Ali Games has more urgent things to do now, and it can't wait for three or five years from now to bring benefits. After these communications, I have no regrets about leaving. I've done everything I can and I've learned a lot from the past few years, so I have a clear conscience.
Since then, the development team has been able to develop the engine full-time, but there is still a lot of affection for it. Fortunately, the main functions are all done, and the engine itself is designed to be easy to extend, and my idea is to focus on maintaining the most core parts like Skynet. The engine is open source, so it doesn't matter if it's a full-time developer, and the main developers will do their best to maintain it in their spare time.
And I'm going to start the next part of my journey. The initial idea was to make an indie game for the Windows platform. While we've been working on a Factorio-like game for the past year, that's mostly to show the quality of the engine on mobile, and there's still a lot of work to be done on the gameplay side of it. I don't think mobile is a good indie gaming platform that needs to focus on PC. Engine support for Windows and Steam will be my job for a short time. These will be refined as I write the code for the game myself.
What kind of indie game to make is still in the pipeline. The only artist on the engine development team also left with me, Ali is a generalist who shares my great interest in indie game development, and in the coming months, we will conceive together.
The above content is reprinted from Yunfeng's personal blog, and the original title is "Restart"