DayZ creator Dean Hall releases free open-source BRUTAL framework
Dean Hall’s Ahwoo and RocketWerkz teams have released BRUTAL, a free open-source C# framework for making games or building a game engine.
BRUTAL, the free open-source C# framework developed by Dean Hall’s companies Ahwoo and RocketWerkz, is now publicly available for developers building games or their own game engines.
Hall announced the release on Reddit, describing BRUTAL as a framework rather than a complete engine. Its core is a custom interoperability layer that gives C# direct access to native APIs and libraries, including Vulkan-related tooling. The project is intended to let developers work close to the underlying platform while still using C# for game and engine code.1
The framework is already being used in RocketWerkz projects, and the team says Ludeon built its Waylith engine for RimWorld on top of BRUTAL. That does not mean BRUTAL is replacing Unity, Unreal Engine or Godot across the industry: Hall has explicitly positioned it as a lower-level option that will not suit every team. Its appeal is more specific — developers who want a free, source-available foundation and direct control over native systems can start from the same technology used by the studio’s own projects.12
The official repository describes BRUTAL as free and open source, with support for making games or building a separate engine. It also lists a broad set of libraries and modules covering areas such as collections, concurrency, graphics, input and platform integration. The project is maintained under AhwooTech’s GitHub organisation, with contributions and issue reports handled through the public repository.1
The licensing model is also part of the announcement. Hall says BRUTAL can be used commercially provided developers meet the project’s attribution requirement. That makes it a different proposition from a conventional engine subscription, although teams will still need to assess the licence, the project’s maturity and the engineering cost of assembling a game around a framework rather than adopting a finished editor-led toolchain.1
Our opinion
BRUTAL is interesting because it is unusually honest about what it is. This is not a polished all-purpose engine promising to solve every production problem; it is a foundation for developers who want to make those choices themselves. The early use in RocketWerkz projects and RimWorld’s Waylith engine gives the release more weight than a weekend experiment, but the public repository is still a young project and its low-level approach will demand more technical work than a mainstream engine.
For developers who value control, the free commercial-use terms and access to native APIs make BRUTAL worth watching. For teams seeking a ready-made editor, asset pipeline and huge third-party ecosystem, the established engines remain the safer choice. BRUTAL’s first challenge is not convincing everyone to switch; it is proving that this focused alternative can keep its promise as more developers build on it.