Interview: Building a Wuxia Sandbox RPG With Up to 10,000 Dynamic NPCs

How do you build an RPG where the protagonist isn't necessarily the most important character? In The Scroll of Taiwu, indie developer ConchShip Games has spent eight years constructing a sandbox where thousands of procedurally generated characters have their own personalities, motivations, relationships, and histories. Players can develop their martial arts, manage a village, practice traditional crafts, start families, forge relationships, and eventually pass their destiny to virtually anyone else inhabiting the world. 

It's an unusually ambitious interpretation of the Wuxia RPG. Between 5,000 and 10,000 dynamic NPCs can populate a playthrough, while more than 700 martial arts skills give players different paths through combat and cultivation. Roguelike systems generate different characters and events, life simulation mechanics ground players in everyday jianghu life, and generational storytelling means the adventure doesn't have to end when one character's does.

We spoke with the ConchShip Games team, including studio founder Zheng Jie, aka Qiezi, about designing a systemic Wuxia sandbox, creating emergent stories from thousands of NPCs, building its hand-painted world, preserving Chinese culture through art and game design, and making The Scroll of Taiwu accessible to Western players.

How would you describe The Scroll of Taiwu to Western players discovering it for the first time?

The Scroll of Taiwu is a vast, open-world sandbox RPG set in a mythological ancient China rooted in Wuxia tradition. Think of it as something like Crusader Kings and Baldur's Gate meeting in the depths of Chinese folklore.

You play as a chosen warrior destined to save the world from a great evil — but you are also the village chief responsible for building and managing a community that sustains your entire journey. There is no fixed protagonist: at any point, you can pass that destiny on to any other character in the world, each of whom has been procedurally generated with their own personality, motivations, and relationships.

The game is built for replayability. Around 5,000 to 10,000 dynamic NPCs generate each run, meaning no two playthroughs are alike. Players can cultivate martial arts, forge weapons, raise families, practice traditional crafts, study classical texts, or simply wander in a living jianghu. The world is shaped by your choices, and with nearly 4.5 million Chinese characters of in-game text, there is always more to discover.

What was the original creative spark behind the game?

The Scroll of Taiwu began not as a commercial venture, but as a favorite story that Qiezi, the game's lead designer and producer, wanted to share. Trained as an architect, he had grown up captivated by classic RPGs and martial arts titles such as The Legend of Sword and Fairy, Diablo, and Jin Yong's Martial Arts RPGs. These games sparked his imagination for the wuxia worlds he later built.

For years, Qiezi developed small projects in his spare time using RPG Maker, including a fantasy RPG called The Apocalypse Manuscript, which gradually accumulated a small but loyal community of over 300 players. These early members then turned into the foundation of ConchShip Studio.

There is a clear creative goal for the team: To write the story of Taiwu, to bring to life a world where every player could carve out their own unique legacy within a vast, complex mix of Chinese history, mythology, and culture. This game was never meant to merely entertain, but to also serve as a living world rooted in Chinese culture that players could truly live in.

How did you approach blending sandbox RPG design, roguelike elements, life simulation, martial arts, and generational storytelling into one model?

The blending of these systems was not the result of a deliberate framework, but rather emerged from a single guiding conviction: To make the protagonist (Taiwu) truly an extension of the player themselves. We combined these genres to maximize freedom and offer diverse ways to play. Through a wide range of interconnected systems, players can make meaningful choices that shape each journey into a unique experience.

Each system was built to serve that philosophy. The roguelike structure ensures that every playthrough generates a distinct cast of characters and events. The life simulation elements such as village management, traditional crafts, and cricket raising ground the player in the rhythms of the jianghu rather than reducing the experience to pure combat. The martial arts system, with over 700 skills rooted in Chinese martial arts and mythology, offers countless ways for players to express themselves. And the generational storytelling element allows the player to pass their destiny on to any NPC in the world. With such a radical expression of freedom, your story will never end with one single character.

The game places great emphasis on scale and systemic richness. Only through that scale that the sandbox can truly come alive and breathe, and that each player's experience can feel irreplaceable.

The Scroll of Taiwu has a very distinct visual identity rooted in Wuxia and traditional Chinese aesthetics. How did your art team define the game's look, and what references or principles guided that direction?

The visual identity of The Scroll of Taiwu is defined by a commitment to traditional hand-painted aesthetics. From the outset, the art direction drew on the visual language of classical Chinese ink painting and illustration, seeking an authenticity that reflects the cultural richness at the heart of the game's world.

The game's setting spans mythology, martial arts, and Chinese fantasy, so the art team worked hard to ensure every visual element, from character design to environmental detail, felt rooted in that cultural landscape. More than 126 classical works on traditional Chinese arts and crafts informed the creative decisions, resulting in a world shaped by history rather than merely decorated with cultural motifs.

Cultural authenticity guided every aspect of the project. Every character, location, and item was designed to reflect Chinese history and culture as a living heritage rather than cultural window dressing. This commitment to originality led the studio to create all creative content in house, resulting in the game's most distinctive visual quality: a sense of cohesion that could only come from a team deeply immersed in the world it was building.

Could you walk us through your art production pipeline for The Scroll of Taiwu, from concept and character/world design to implementation in-game? Which tools or software were most important to your workflow?

The game was developed using Unity 3D as its core engine. What makes ConchShip's production pipeline particularly distinctive is not the toolset but the team's methodology: The studio insists on handling all aspects of creation internally, teaching themselves the necessary skills and finding their own solutions rather than outsourcing to specialists or following industry conventions.

Qiezi taught himself the programming fundamentals needed to keep the project alive when programmers left the team during a critical phase. Through years of architectural work, he developed expertise in systematic design and spatial planning, skills that proved invaluable in building the vast and intricate mechanics of The Scroll of Taiwu.

One of the most revealing examples of this approach is the team uses CAD tools for game design communication. It’s an unconventional choice that reflects the founder Qiezi's architectural background and his practical approach to building systems from the ground up.

The result is a production pipeline that may seem unconventional by industry standards, yet remains remarkably cohesive, shaped by a team guided by conviction rather than convention.

Given the game's scale and systemic nature, how did you manage asset production across characters, locations, UI, combat visuals, and narrative content while keeping everything visually cohesive?

Visual cohesion at this scale is fundamentally a question of cultural rootedness rather than technical process. Because every element from characters and locations to items and worldbuilding, was designed with the same underlying commitment to authentic Chinese history and culture, a natural sense of cohesion emerged across the game’s enormous breadth of the game's content.

The game includes 15 vast open-world regions, hundreds of unique characters, 18 distinct identities drawn from traditional Chinese culture, and thousands of items and worldbuilding inspired by extensive historical research. The thread that holds all of this together is not a conventional style guide, but a shared set of cultural values embedded in the studio's creative DNA.

All content was produced entirely in-house, which also played a significant role in maintaining that cohesion. With no outsourcing and a shared vision of the world being built, the visual language of the game remained consistent at every level, from overall environmental design to the smallest in-game objects.

What do you think made the game resonate so strongly with Chinese players after its 2018 Early Access launch?

The Scroll of Taiwu arrived at a moment when Chinese players were hungry for a game that genuinely reflected their cultural heritage, not through surface-level aesthetics, but through cultural core in the gameplay, the world, and storytelling.

The game offered a rarely seen original world rooted in Chinese mythology, martial arts, and folk traditions. It is created with unmistakable sincerity. Every element, from the combat stances and cricket fighting to the classical texts and procedurally generated characters, reflects a shared cultural memory. Players could feel that they were not playing a Western game with a Chinese skin, but something that could only have been created by a Chinese team drawing from its own cultural roots.

The studio’s own story also played an important role. We are a first-time development team without prior industry experience, working without salaries, driven purely by the desire to tell a story and share it with players. That spirit of independence and sincerity resonated deeply. Its success directly inspired a new generation of independent games and development in China, and is widely regarded as the catalyst for the growth of the Chinese indie game scene.

How did Wuxia traditions influence the world, systems, and player fantasy of the game?

Wuxia is not simply a genre for The Scroll of Taiwu, it is the structural foundation of the entire experience. The jianghu, the martial world, is a vast, living society governed by codes of honour, self cultivation, and the eternal tension between righteousness and desire.

These wuxia traditions shaped the game's systems at every level. The combat system, with over 700 skills rooted in Chinese martial arts and mythology, is not merely a mechanical framework but an expression of the wuxia fantasy — the idea that through relentless cultivation and practice, a player can achieve greatness. The 18 distinct identities drawn from traditional Chinese culture each carry their own philosophical weight and relationship to the jianghu.

Beyond gameplay, Wuxia traditions shaped the game’s central fantasy. The core narrative is a classic wuxia archetype: a lone warrior destined to face a great evil.  However, The Scroll of Taiwu subverts and enriches it by making the entire world, rather than just the protagonist, the focus of the story. The antagonist, Xiangshu, symbolises the sum of all sentient beings' desires and obsessions. Only those who achieve true selflessness, the very meaning behind the name of Taiwan can resist Xiangshu’s influence.

What should Western players understand about Wuxia before playing The Scroll of Taiwu?

At its heart, Wuxia is a literary and cultural tradition centred on the figure of the wandering martial artist, someone who lives outside conventional society and follows a personal code of honour rather than by law or institutional authority. The jianghu refers to the social world these figures inhabit. A moral landscape shaped by sects, alliances, vendettas, and hidden knowledge.

Before entering the world of The Scroll of Taiwu, there are a few key concepts worth understanding:

• Neijin / Internal Cultivation (内功): In Wuxia tradition, the highest form of martial arts are not purely physical but also involves the cultivation of inner energy. Spiritual and intellectual achievement are considered just as important as physical prowess.
• Sect and Loyalty (门派): Sects are the social units of the jianghu. Each sect has its own heritage, philosophies, and rivalries. Loyalty, betrayal, and the bonds and responsibilities between master and disciple are central themes within those sects.

With these foundations, we hope the Western players can find the world of The Scroll of Taiwu more approachable and come to appreciate it as a civilization with its own deep internal logic, one well worth exploring.

What were the biggest challenges in creating the revamped full English localization?

The sheer scale was the first challenge: The Scroll of Taiwu contains nearly 4.5 million Chinese characters of in-game text, which is more than four times the amount of text found in Disco Elysium. Localising a text of this scope into English is, in itself, an undertaking of considerable complexity.

But the deeper challenge was cultural translation rather than linguistic translation. The Scroll of Taiwu is built upon Chinese martial arts traditions, classical literature, folk customs, and mythology. Many of the game's most important terms — the combat stances, the sect names, the cultivation concepts — have no direct Western equivalents. The question was not simply how to render them in English, but how to preserve their cultural significance for players encountering this world for the first time.

Our goal throughout the process was to create an English version that would allow Western players to access the same depth and richness that Chinese players have experienced for years and to help them feel that they are stepping into a living world, rather than reading a translation of one.

How do you design systems that produce emergent, player-driven stories?

At its core is a belief that stories in The Scroll of Taiwu should emerge naturally from player interaction rather than being written in advance. The game is designed so that the systems themselves — not a predetermined script — are what generate meaningful narrative.

Between 5,000 and 10,000 dynamic NPCs populate each playthrough, each generated with their own personality traits, motivations, relationships, and life histories. These characters pursue their own goals, form alliances, develop rivalries, and react to the player's actions in ways that create genuine dramatic situations rather than scripted events.

The game then layers further systems on top of this: the generational storytelling mechanic, which allows the player to continue the journey though any NPC; the open-world structure, which gives players the freedom to pursue entirely different paths in each run; and the deep RPG systems — martial arts cultivation, village management, traditional crafts — that provide the tools for players to express their own agency and build their own legacies.

Designed for replayability, the game generates new characters and new experiences in every run. The proof is in the community: over 200,000 players have each spent more than 3,000 hours in the game, and no two players tell the same story.

 What do you hope new international players take away from The Scroll of Taiwu when it reaches 1.0?

We hope that international players leave with a genuine sense of having lived in a world, not simply visited it, but shaped it, and been shaped by it.
The Scroll of Taiwu was built on the belief that even the smallest human actions can leave a lasting mark on the world. Through the eyes of an ordinary person navigating a jianghu under extraordinary pressure, forging connections, and discovering what it truly means to act with conviction and hope.

We also hope that international players gain new appreciation for Chinese culture, not as something distant or exotic, but as a rich, living heritage that has much to share. From mythology and wuxia traditions to folk traditions, classical crafts, and philosophical ideas, the game draws upon elements that have shaped Chinese civilization for thousands of years. For us, the 1.0 launch is also an invitation: to explore, to discover, and to find your own place within this world.

Above all, we hope players feel the sincerity behind the work: eight years of development, 4.5 million Chinese characters, and a team driven by the simple, enduring desire to tell a great story.

ConchShip Games, Developers of The Scroll of Taiwu

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