TapTechNews reported on May 11th that Yunfeng, a game developer, has announced in a recent blog post his departure from Alibaba and his future plans create independent games for the Windows platform.
Public records indicate that Yunfeng, a graduate from Central South University in China, was a core member at NetEase Games and the director of the Hangzhou Research Center. He was a key developer for NetEase’s games such as 'Journey to the West Online' and 'Fantasy Westward Journey'.
He began developing the Fenghun Engine during his college days and achieved minor success. He joined NetEase in 2001, where he served as the main developer for several online games including 'Journey to the West Online', 'Fantasy Westward Journey', and 'NetEase Bubble Games'. He left NetEase in 2011 to start his own business.
In late 2017, Yunfeng’s startup, Jianyue, was acquired by Alibaba. Afterwards, he stepped down from company management to focus on developing the game engine AntEngine.
The decision to leave Alibaba was made because the company shut down the AntEngine project. I feel that the company no longer wants to develop its own game client engines, at least not in line with my vision for AntEngine, Yunfeng stated.
In January this year, Yunfeng announced the open source release of the AntEngine, which is specifically designed for mobile gaming platforms and developed using Lua. The engine is intended to avoid the historical overhead of engines like Unity and Unreal, focusing on optimizing memory usage and energy efficiency.
Yunfeng expressed, My small team and I have been very stead in developing the Ant Engine, achieving a solid 80 percent rating. Although we made many mistakes along the way, we managed to overcome the technical challenges within our capability. Developing our own engine was not easy, but devoting six years to its development was a rare opportunity. Today should have been the day to reap its benefits.
Regarding the decision to abandon the project, Yunfeng also stated: I think I convinced quite a few people, but unfortunately, the current decision-makers in the company ultimately decided to drop it. Perhaps Alibaba Games now has more pressing matters to address, unable to wait another three to five years for the potential returns. After these discussions, leaving has left me with no regrets. I have done everything I could, and the past few years have been quite rewarding, leaving me with a clear conscience.
As for his future plans, Yunfeng said, My initial idea is to create an independent game for the Windows platform. Although we have been working on a game similar to Factorio for the past year primarily to showcase the engine's quality on mobile platforms, its gameplay still needs a lot of work. I don’t think mobile is a good platform for independent games; I need to focus on PC. The engine's support for Windows and Steam will be my short-term work, which will gradually improve as I start coding the game myself. What specific type of independent game is still brewing. The only artist in the engine development team has left Alibaba with me. He is a versatile individual, as passionate about independent game development as me. In the coming months, we will brainstorm together.