Revision 10

Overview

CyancookGames is an independent game development studio based in Shanghai, China. The studio's public Chinese brand is 青庖游戏 (Qingpao Youxi, also styled Cyan Cook Games on Steam), and the registered legal entity is Shanghai Qingpao Network Technology Co., Ltd. (上海青庖网络科技有限公司). CyancookGames is developing Of Peaks and Tides as its debut title. The studio's announcement materials describe the team as video game veterans with experience at Tencent and on titles such as Naraka: Bladepoint and Diablo Immortal.

CyancookGames is not affiliated with Cyan Worlds, the American studio known for the Myst series. Despite the similar naming, the two studios are entirely separate entities.

Studio Origins

CyancookGames did not begin as a game studio. Its early output was 整活视频, elaborate stunt videos built around technical gags, and the best known of them was a co-operative version of Elden Ring that the team built itself in fourteen days. In 2024 it posted a development log video whose title named 肺鱼计划, the Lungfish Project, which points to that as the internal codename of the prototype that became Of Peaks and Tides. The studio worked on the project for roughly two years before the August 2025 reveal.

The studio tags the game SOC on its own Chinese channels, short for Survival Open-world Crafting, the label the wider industry uses for the genre. That tag is the studio's own self-description rather than a category applied to it from outside.

Team Background

CyancookGames' public messaging emphasises the team's background on large-scale game projects. The press release for the August 2025 reveal describes the team as composed of video game veterans whose prior work includes Naraka: Bladepoint and Diablo Immortal, with broader experience at Tencent. The studio has not published a full team roster, but the chief technology officer is named in announcement coverage and provided the on-record design quote at the reveal.

Founding and Ownership

Three different founding dates are on record and none of them has been reconciled by the studio. The chief technology officer has said the studio was founded in August 2022 and started with five people. A Chinese trade profile published in August 2025 gives February 2023 as the date the company was established. The studio's own Steam group records its creation date as January 21, 2023. As of 2026-09-12 no first-party statement addresses the gap between them, so all three are recorded here and none is treated as settled.

Team size figures come from two different kinds of record and should not be averaged into one. The chief technology officer described the team as roughly 70 developers in September 2025, grown from the five people who started it. A business registry summary reported in August 2025 lists 33 social insurance contributors at the end of 2024. The two numbers count different things over different periods and both can be accurate at once.

The studio has an outside backer. Hypergryph, the Chinese developer behind Arknights, is reported to have invested in the Shanghai entity through 开拓芯 (Kaituoxin), its support arm for independent studios, in November 2023, taking a stake of roughly 12.7 percent. That figure appears in a single Chinese trade report and has never been confirmed by either company, so the size of the stake should be treated as unverified. The existence of the relationship is better supported than the percentage attached to it.

Key People

The two official language versions of the same August 2026 announcement describe Cao Xiaowen's role with words that do not mean the same thing. The English text calls him the game's Founder. The Simplified Chinese text calls him 主创, which means lead creator or chief creative rather than founder. Both are first-party, and they are recorded here as published rather than merged into a single title. A Chinese trade profile published in August 2025 separately calls him the studio's 创始人 (founder) and chief executive, which is what supports the English wording.

Development Philosophy

CyancookGames has emphasised physics-driven gameplay and freeform player agency as the studio's signature design pillars. The CTO has stated that the team aims to deliver "an incredibly immersive and interactive experience with an aesthetic fantasy setting," with a custom design editor built within Unreal Engine 5 to support that goal. The game's Steam store page carries no AI-generated content disclosure, which is the section that appears when a developer declares that generative tools contributed to a shipped game. The studio has published nothing further about how its art is produced.

Studio Details

Public Presence

CyancookGames announced Of Peaks and Tides on August 14, 2025 from Shanghai. The game was first presented publicly at Gamescom 2025 in Cologne, Germany (August 20 to 24) with a playable demo. The studio runs two separate community funnels by language. The English storefront page links out to Discord, X (formerly Twitter), Facebook, YouTube and a community forum. The Simplified Chinese storefront text carries a Follow Us block that the English text does not have at all, and it lists only the official QQ group 755589919 and the studio's Chinese social handles, both registered under the name 山外山游戏. The studio also maintains TikTok and Chinese microblog accounts. The Steam group operates under the name 青庖游戏 - Cyan Cook Games.

Japanese-language announcements for the game are issued by 株式会社東方不敗エンターテインメント (Toho Fuhai Entertainment Co., Ltd.), a Tokyo company founded in February 2024 and represented by 魏宇翔 (Wei Yuxiang), which acts as the studio's regional partner in Japan. English-language press work is handled by a separate agency, so the studio runs three publicity channels that do not always carry the same material.

Event Appearances

CyancookGames has exhibited Of Peaks and Tides three times. Gamescom 2025 in Cologne, from August 20 to 24, 2025, was the studio's first time on a show floor and carried the game's first playable demo. The studio followed it with a booth at Tokyo Game Show 2025, which ran from September 25 to 28, 2025 at Makuhari Messe, where the chief technology officer took part in a live interview on site. CyancookGames stated that the main purpose of the Tokyo appearance was to collect player feedback, and that the project would afterwards enter a closed development phase. The third appearance is the TapTap Game Fest in Shanghai on September 12 and 13, 2026, the studio's first offline playable showing inside China.

Development Update Series

In 2026 the studio started a numbered development update series, published in parallel in English and Chinese and narrated through Little Spirit, its rabbit-like community mascot. The updates are the studio's most detailed public writing about the game's systems to date.

Making the Game by Playing It

CyancookGames has described a development loop that runs through its own editor rather than through design documents. Designers try an interaction, change parameters, and adjust the environment directly until it feels worth keeping, and the studio says a number of its mechanics started life as bugs that turned out to be fun and were kept and polished instead of fixed. It frames the editor purpose as letting a small team chase a large ambition, on the grounds that whether an idea is fun can only be settled by building it and playing it.

The team has also said publicly that it is small for the scope it is attempting, and that it was recruiting experienced level designers around the time of the reveal.

The studio does not separate designers from programmers. Every designer also writes code and tests their own mechanic inside the in-house editor built on top of Unreal Engine 5, a principle the studio states as 策划者即开发者, the designer is the developer. That is the concrete process behind the chief technology officer's description of a custom-built design editor within the engine, and it is why a mechanic can be tried, kept, or thrown away without a handoff between disciplines.

Studio Communications

CyancookGames uses the official Steam News feed as its primary direct-to-player channel. Two notable February 2026 posts established the studio's communications cadence:

Related Topics

• Of Peaks and Tides

• Offline Playtests 2026

• Physics System