Feng Ji's Ten Game Science Principles Reveal How Black Myth: Zhong Kui Will Be Judged

The 15-minute Black Myth: Zhong Kui gameplay presentation offered the clearest look yet at Game Science's next action RPG, Black Myth: Zhong Kui. On the same day, studio founder and CEO Feng Ji shared something less visual but just as useful: ten internal principles drawn from the team's experience making games.

Feng did not present them as a universal design manual. He described them as lessons shaped by past mistakes, other creators and the realities of development. A contemporary report and transcription by IT Home preserves the full list, which Feng framed as a promise that players could compare against Game Science's future work.

Taken together, the reports describe a decision framework rather than a feature list. The analysis below does not reproduce the ten points one by one. It groups them by what they reveal about Game Science's creative priorities and connects them with the evidence players can watch for as development continues.

That makes the principles more than general career advice. They provide a set of questions for judging Black Myth: Zhong Kui while it is still in development: What does the team believe is worth making? How does it decide whether an idea works? Where will it spend limited production resources? And what evidence should players expect before accepting the studio's ambitions?

Begin with conviction, then find the audience

The first cluster of principles starts inside the development team. Game Science wants to make games its own developers can understand, enjoy and believe in as players. The point is not that personal taste automatically produces a good product. It is that a team without genuine enthusiasm loses one of its most useful instruments: informed creative intuition.

Feng pairs that inward conviction with an outward test. A project still needs an audience, market feedback and a sustainable business. His proposed route is not to design for everyone from the beginning, but to find people whose interests overlap with the team's own and expand outward from that core.

For Black Myth: Zhong Kui, that approach matters because the game has several possible audiences at once. Some players arrive for demanding action combat. Others are interested in Game Science's visual craft, the Black Myth series or the older stories surrounding Zhong Kui. A project that tries to flatten all of those interests into the safest possible fantasy game could lose the identity that made the choice of Zhong Kui meaningful.

The related principle is to find a distinctive strength before trying to remove every weakness. No large game can optimize every goal at once. The more useful early question is whether the experience contains something players cannot easily find elsewhere.

A playable build must overrule the document

One of Feng's clearest ideas is that an experience running in front of the team carries more weight than an impressive plan. Documents, data and meetings can explain intent, but they cannot reproduce the combined feeling of movement, combat, failure, sound, timing and visual response.

This gives the public gameplay presentation a specific role. It is not only promotional footage or a catalogue of features. The studio wants viewers to be able to imagine how the game would feel in their own hands. That is a demanding standard because cinematic staging cannot fully hide unclear interaction, weak feedback or an encounter that looks disconnected from player input.

Feng reduces the final test to a simple floor: the game must be fun. If an internal build does not meet that floor, the answer is more investigation, iteration, rebuilding and play—not a better explanation of why the design should work.

This principle should also limit speculation. A single presentation can show direction, but it cannot prove the quality of an entire game. Future footage becomes more valuable when it demonstrates sustained play, readable systems and consequences rather than isolated spectacle.

An official gameplay still highlights the grounded physical detail behind the studio's playable-first standard. Image: Game Science.

Beauty has no permanent formula

Another group of principles concerns aesthetics and production value. Feng rejects the idea that one visual formula remains powerful forever. Repeated signals lose their force, even when they were once surprising. Beauty therefore depends partly on disciplined craft and partly on discovering an unfamiliar form of expression.

That is especially relevant after Black Myth: Wukong established a recognizable combination of monumental environments, detailed creatures and dramatic lighting. Black Myth: Zhong Kui cannot create a new identity by repeating those signals at a higher resolution. Its folklore, social world, colour, movement and atmosphere need their own visual logic.

Game Science's official still pairs an unfamiliar character silhouette with a restrained rural setting, illustrating the search for a visual identity beyond repetition.

When a team cannot find a single transformative idea, Feng argues that it can increase the effective density of strengths that have already proved valuable: more precise feedback, richer animation, denser environments and more varied creatures, provided players can still perceive the difference.

The qualification matters. Density is not the same as uncontrolled scale. More detail only helps when it strengthens an experience the project has already shown to be important.

Study the leaders without becoming an imitation

Game Science's principles also describe how the team looks at other games. Developers should know the leading work in their field closely enough to understand where it succeeds, where it frustrates players and what production methods support it. That knowledge establishes the level a new project may need to reach several years later, not merely the level visible when development begins.

The danger is turning a benchmark into the destination. Learning from a leading game is useful; aiming only to become a comparable copy is not. Feng's longer-term ambition is to build a standard that belongs to the project itself.

This connects to his emphasis on difficult, hard-to-replace value. In a mature market, easy improvements are quickly copied or crowded. Work that makes players wonder how it was achieved is usually rare precisely because it demands time, skill and persistence.

For Black Myth: Zhong Kui, the idea should be treated as an ambition rather than proof. The relevant evidence will be the parts of the final experience that could not have been produced by changing the protagonist and reusing a familiar formula.

Action is the evidence behind a principle

The final principle is the one that gives the other nine weight: an idea is cheap until action tests it against reality. A principle may be incomplete or wrong. Development exposes that weakness, forcing the team to revise what it believes and try again.

This is why Feng's list should not be read as ten confirmed features. It is better understood as a public framework for evaluation. Players can return to it when later demonstrations, interviews and eventually the released game make the results visible.

Does the combat feel coherent when played rather than merely watched? Does the art direction discover forms beyond the studio's previous successes? Are the most distinctive ideas given enough density to matter? Has the team learned from genre leaders without letting them define the ceiling? Those are observable questions.

How Feng Ji's principles differ from Yang Qi's five improvements

The ten principles do not repeat the five production priorities previously described by Game Science co-founder and art director Yang Qi.

Yang Qi's five improvements are concrete: more convincing overcast lighting, more credible combat interaction, more disciplined visual design, less stage-like storytelling and fewer invisible walls. They identify specific weaknesses and production targets.

Feng's principles sit one level above them. They describe how the studio decides which problems matter, why playable evidence should outrank a design document and why distinctive strengths deserve concentrated effort. Yang's list is a practical checklist; Feng's is a decision system.

Read together, they create a clearer picture of the project without revealing its story. Black Myth: Zhong Kui is trying to learn from the studio's previous game while avoiding a simple repetition of it. Whether that attempt succeeds will depend on execution, and both developers have now given players unusually specific standards with which to judge that execution.

What to watch next

The principles suggest four useful signals to watch in future Black Myth: Zhong Kui updates:

• longer sequences that show how combat and movement feel across a complete encounter;
• visual ideas that belong specifically to Zhong Kui's world rather than repeating familiar Black Myth imagery;
• dense detail that improves interaction, atmosphere or storytelling instead of existing only for scale;
• visible follow-through on the concrete issues already acknowledged by the team.

The official release date remains unannounced, and the current footage represents a game still in development. That makes restraint important. Feng's principles do not answer when the game will arrive or guarantee what the finished product will contain. They do something more useful for the present: they explain what Game Science says it values, giving future evidence a standard to meet.