Dean Hall, the creator of the survival multiplayer online game DayZ, has made his studio's framework for game development publicly available. The project, titled BRUTAL, is described as open-source and free to use, including for commercial games, as long as the framework is credited. 

In a detailed Reddit post, Hall shared his thoughts on the game development industry and outlined the main features of BRUTAL. The project has been in development for about four years. Hall emphasizes that BRUTAL is a framework and not an engine, which means that developers can make a game directly using it or use it as the foundation for an entirely separate engine. A custom interop layer is at its core, giving C# access to native APIs and libraries. There are also multiple supporting libraries, including mathematics, memory management, strings, job scheduling, logging, localization, and others. The framework runs on Windows and Linux and is built on the latest versions of C# and Vulkan.

Dean Hall now runs a New Zealand game studio, RocketWerkz, known for Stationeers and ICARUS, and a new gaming distribution platform, Ahwoo. Hall's team has used BRUTAL to replace engines in several games currently in development. BRUTAL is the same framework RocketWerkz used to make a spaceflight simulation game, Kitten Space Agency, and which developer Ludeon used as the foundation for their new Waylith engine for the strategy sim RimWorld.

Hall describes BRUTAL as a response to what he sees as developers' growing dependence on a few large engine makers. "You are only as independent as your tools are," he says. Hall argues that Unity and Unreal aren't accountable enough to developers, but he also adds that developers shouldn't abandon either engine, since both remain the right choice for many projects, and that BRUTAL isn't meant to replace what they provide.

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