The industry veteran says that engines Unity and Unreal have "consistently" failed to be held accountable to creators

Industry veteran Dean Hall has rolled out Brutal, an open-source game development framework made in collaboration by two of his companies, Ahwoo and RocketWerkz.

The tech is built in C# and is free to use, even in commercial games. It has no royalties; developers only need to list a Brutal copyright notice in a game's credits. Work on Brutal started in 2022 and has already been used in six projects across three different studios; these include RocketWerkz's Kitten Space Adventure and the new Waylith engine that powers Ludeon Studios' Rimworld. Kerbal Space Program creator Felipe Falanghe is also building something with Brutal.

In an extensive post on Reddit, Hall emphasised that Brutal is not a game engine, but a framework. That being said, you can make games directly using the tech, as RocketWerkz did with Kitten Space Agency, or developers can use it to make their own engine, as Ludeon Studios did.

The core of Brutal is a custom interoperability layer which gives C# "access to native APIs and libraries". There are a number of libraries that support this. Hall adds that Brutal has been created with an "obsessive focus on reducing allocations and unnecessary overhead", with the core focus being "doing a few low-level things extremely well".

Part of the motive behind creating Brutal is what Hall sees as engine giants Unity and Unreal "consistently fail to be held accountable to developers".

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