DayZ creator Dean Hall reckons "our industry is rotting from its core, outwards in every direction, and it has been for some time," and that rot has only been accelerated by the rise of AI agent-led development, reverse-engineering, and recompilation. "These have pushed things over the edge," he says, so he and studio RocketWerkz have prepared and shared a new, open source game engine alternative meant to help developers "break free of Unity" and mainstream offerings like Unreal Engine as providers like Epic Games dive headfirst into AI.
In a lengthy post to the gamedev subreddit, Hall explains the origins and intent of "Brutal," a free C# (C Sharp) framework that is technically not a game engine – a collection of software and tools used to make games – but can be used to make games or applied as a base to build custom game engines.
RocketWerkz's upcoming game Kitten Space Agency uses Brutal directly, and Hall says mega-hit colony sim RimWorld had its entire engine reworked by developer Ludeon Studios and creator Tynan Sylvester using this framework as a foundation.
Just this week, Ludeon Studios announced its transition to the Waylith Engine, "our own in-house engine built by Ludeon Studios. The game looks and plays exactly the same, but in our tests performance is improved by 2-4x." This new build of RimWorld is already available to players via a beta branch in Steam, and purportedly doesn't break mods.
"RimWorld isn’t the only game on Waylith," the studio adds. "We’re working on something new! It may be a little while before we can share more details, but we couldn’t resist telling you."
Hall says "their team amazingly extracted the last bits of Unity out of RimWorld to create their Waylith engine," and highlights RimWorld as proof of progress. "An established studio with a very specific set of problems can take the framework and build an engine designed around their own game, instead of spending years building the underlying foundations," he observes.
What's more, the creator of Kerbal Space Program, Felipe Falanghe, says he's used Brutal to make his next game. "I had left KSP with no rights to it 8 years prior, and had to battle uphill to do a job that was feeling more and more untenable," Falanghe says in a reply to Hall's post. Thanks to Brutal and a fresh crash-course in game development, he says his project is "very very close to being showable."
Hall is very clear about a few things. Firstly, this project wasn't just his baby; loads of people at RocketWerkz built this thing, and he says collaborators like Falanghe were invaluable. Additionally, after years in development, "we also have new people joining us from some of the world's largest game companies, bringing their experience to this effort."
Secondly, this is not a "tool that everyone should use to make a game," even if it might be dreamy for the right people and project.
Falanghe described Brutal this way: using it is like "sitting on a bar stool while everyone else using engines like Godot was sitting on comfortable couches." I'm interpreting this to mean: it might not be as big or comfy as traditional game engines, but it might be just what you need. Hall later clarified that he thinks Godot, the game engine used by Slay the Spire 2, is a great bit of tech. Rather, he pushes his crosshairs toward Unity, Unreal Engine, and Epic CEO Tim Sweeney.
"I have watched Unity and Unreal consistently fail to be accountable to developers," Hall writes. "And I think this problem could get much worse as agentic workflows begin undermining the competitive advantages that have protected established software companies.
"My concern is that as those advantages erode, the companies involved will increasingly look to extract more revenue from developers who feel they cannot switch. Whether through royalties, subscriptions, or more restrictive licensing."
We've already seen this play out in an incident also cited by Falanghe as a warning sign to developers: Unity infamously adding enormous install fees in 2023 before being bullied out of this decision.
Hall recalls listening to Sweeney at the GDC 2025 Tencent Summit talk. He asked the CEO "whether he thought Unreal was accountable to developers, particularly around performance and stability." He says Sweeney responded by emphasizing "making more demos and putting them on social media to counter people describing games as 'Unreal slop.'"
"I was not satisfied with his answer, and I continue to believe Unreal is not accountable enough to developers," Hall continues. "Particularly when it can take a 5% royalty on game revenue above its licensing threshold. I don't think developers should have to simply accept that relationship without questioning it."
Hall skewers Epic for chasing trends rather than focusing on its product or audience. "The metaverse one year, AI the next," he says. You can imagine Hall's response to Epic Games proudly announcing that it "vibe coded" its new storefront because "programming is hard."
Hall argues "you are only as independent as your tools are," so a framework like Brutal is "how we fight back."
"You can use BRUTAL for free, including in commercial games," he clarifies. "There are no royalties and we don't want a percentage of your game's revenue." All that's required to use the open-source project is proper attribution: include the copyright notice in credits, show the Brutal logo on startup, and include the Brutal notice in project files. "If you don't want to do that, we can arrange a separate commercial licence," Hall says.
There are a lot of layers to this onion. The key takeaway is that some of the most celebrated and technically skilled developers of our time – as Hall notes, Kerbal Space Program is so robust that it is referenced by actual "scientists and astronauts" – have come together to agree that the tides of the games industry are indeed changing, but rather than following companies like Unity into the AI mines, you can just make things yourself instead.
"This technology is a small step towards changing the balance of power," Hall adds. "If the tools are public, if you have the source code, and if you're free to build your own systems on top of them, you have options. And if one day we stop being accountable to developers ourselves, they should have the ability to fork the framework and go their own way. That's important to me."
