RocketWerkz Releases BRUTAL Framework as Open Source
The release gives studios a royalty-free path to own their technical foundation, and the reported RimWorld migration to a BRUTAL-based custom engine is the kind of concrete case that makes the option legible to other teams.
Reporting from 1 source: 4Gamer.net.
RocketWerkz and Ahwoo, led by DayZ developer Dean Hall, released the game development framework BRUTAL on October 15, 2026. Built on C# and .NET with C++ libraries and Vulkan, it is meant as a foundation for custom engines rather than a complete engine like Unity or Unreal. It is free for commercial use with no royalties, though the license requires credit and a logo display.
BRUTAL does not ship a full editor or tool suite. Developers combine the libraries they need and maintain the result themselves, which the release frames as its main tradeoff. RocketWerkz is already using it for the space flight simulation Kitten Space Agency. Ludeon Studios used it to migrate RimWorld to the custom engine Waylith, and in the studio's own tests performance improved 2 to 4 times over the Unity version.
Synthesized by Yomimono from the 1 cited source below, including Japanese-language reporting where cited, then editorially reviewed before publishing.