BRUTAL Framework, which we used to make Kitten Space Agency, is now Open Source and free to use
Our industry is rotting from its core, outwards in every direction, and it has been for some time. Driven by greed, driven by a race to the bottom on price. It is my position that the games industry was already heading somewhere unsustainable before reverse-engineering and powerful agentic processes became widely available. These have pushed things over the edge.
But I think one of the biggest problems is something we don’t discuss enough. Developers have surrendered an extraordinary amount of control over their work to companies whose interests aren't necessarily aligned with their own.
 
You've may have heard us talk about us moving our games away from engines like Unity or Unreal before, into our own Framework called BRUTAL. It's the C# framework we built Kitten Space Agency on, and the foundation Ludeon used to build their Waylith engine and move RimWorld off Unity. This has been a massive undertaking for the studio, and allowed us to build Kitten Space Agency. Rimworld developer Ludeon have just used this framework to build their own engine. Now we are giving this away, free, to use for your projects. You can make games with this right now.
 
As of today the source code is public and you can use it for free, including in commercial games. There are no royalties and we don't want a percentage of your game's revenue. We ask that games using BRUTAL display the BRUTAL logo and a credit.
BRUTAL is a framework. It gives C# direct access to native APIs and Vulkan, with libraries for interop, memory, concurrency, maths, strings and job scheduling around that, and you build your own stack on top. There's no editor and no renderer. In some ways it's much harder to use than Unity, Unreal or Godot. In other ways, particularly if you're doing something unusual, it's considerably easier. You are only as independent as your tools are.
 
I've written up why we're doing this, how Ludeon used it, and who built it:
https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/co [...] at_helped/
 
Please SIGNAL BOOST this for us. This is a huge leap of faith, we believe that this may help others to break the chains of what I see as a industry that has become rotten from its core.