Dean Hall Releases BRUTAL Framework, Backing RimWorld's New Engine
Hall is positioning BRUTAL as an alternative to Unity and Unreal Engine on contract terms, royalties, and account restrictions, and RimWorld's move to an engine built on it gives that argument a working reference.
Reporting from 1 source: Game Spark.
Dean Hall, creator of DayZ, has released the BRUTAL game development framework and its source code through his studio RocketWerkz. BRUTAL is used in RocketWerkz's Kitten Space Agency and was provided as the foundation for Waylith, the engine built for Ludeon Studios' RimWorld. It is open source under the MIT License and free for commercial works, with conditions: credit, copyright and logo on the startup screen, and the NOTICE file.
BRUTAL was developed in secret in-house as RocketWerkz's own custom framework before the studio decided to release it for free. Hall cited contract issues with widely used engines, including royalties, terms of service, and account restrictions, and technical workarounds needed to implement certain features, as reasons to offer developers another route. The framework is not a general-purpose tool for all game production; the name reflects its origin as a template that anticipates specialized uses. Source code and terms are on GitHub.
Synthesized by Yomimono from the 1 cited source below, including Japanese-language reporting where cited, then editorially reviewed before publishing.