DayZ creator Dean Hall releases free Brutal framework and criticises engine giants
DayZ creator Dean Hall has released a free, open-source tool for making games and criticised the companies behind the industry's biggest engines while doing it.
Hall announced Brutal on 15 October 2026 through his studio RocketWerkz and a commercial entity called Ahwoo, according to the release post on the Ahwoo forums. Hall is best known as the creator of the survival game DayZ, alongside Icarus and Kitten Space Agency.
Brutal is free to use, including for commercial games. Anyone can download it, tinker with it and ship a game on it. The only requirement is attribution, meaning credit to the project. There are no royalties and no cut of game revenue, according to Eurogamer.
Hall paired the launch with blunt criticism of the current engine business. He said the games industry is rotting from its core, driven by greed, and singled out Epic, maker of Unreal, and Unity, maker of the Unity engine.
A game engine is the ready-made software many studios licence to handle graphics, physics and sound. A framework is looser. It provides core code and tools but leaves developers to assemble more of the structure themselves. Hall has argued that frameworks, not engines, will be the future of game development, in comments reported by Game Developer.
Brutal is already in use. RocketWerkz built Kitten Space Agency, its space simulation game, with the framework. That game is in pre-alpha, a very early test version, and free to download. RimWorld developer Ludeon has also used Brutal alongside its Waylith game engine.
Under the bonnet, Brutal is built for programmers working in C#, a widely used coding language for gameplay, with access to custom libraries in C++, a faster language often used for performance-heavy tasks. It includes a Vulkan graphics pipeline, the part that talks to the graphics chip to draw images on screen.
What makes this stand out is the combination of price and principle. Free engines already exist. Hall is betting some developers want something smaller, more open and free of revenue share, even if it means more building work themselves.
