Rocketwerkz CEO Dean Hall and Floating Point Origin Interactive founder Felipe Falangue sound downright giddy when they talk about a new C# platform called “Brutal.” During a recent conversation with a game developer, the brains behind DayZ And Kerbala space program couldn't stop making random comments to each other about what they accomplished with the tool and how they inspired each other's work.
Their joy was contagious, because once you understand how Brutal works, you'll realize that every new feature is a real achievement, even for this pair of experienced developers. “It’s called Brutal for a reason,” Hall said after Felipe compared working with it to the feeling of sitting on a bar stool while all your friends who use engines like Godot are sitting on the comfy couch.
According to a Rocketwerkz spokesperson, Brutal is a tool that “leverages the latest .NET features while providing low-level API access to high-performance C++ libraries and tools, including the Vulkan graphics API.” That's all. That's all you get.
Rocketwerkz has created the basis for development Kitten Space Agencyspiritual successor Kerbala space program. The company invited Falange to join the steering committee advising on Kitten Space Agencywhich led to him consulting him about the engine. Brutal will be made open source through a commercial organization called “Ahwoo”.
Developers who remember the days of XNA and homebrew engines may shudder at this prospect. Visual scripting tools like Unity and Unreal Engine were supposed to speed up development and allow designers to think more about their game rather than blocks of code. Why would we go back to a world where everyone makes their own game engines?
Hall understands the nervousness. But in our conversation, he made a rather bold prediction: the future of game development will be in frameworks like Brutal, not game engines.
Brutal forces developers to build workflows from scratch
To follow Hall's thinking, you need to think about Brutal in terms of developer workflows, rather than what it can or can't do compared to third-party game engines.
Rocketwerkz created Brutal to stimulate development Kitten Space Agencybut that's because they decided that scene-based rendering was not sufficient for the task. “If you take Unity or Unreal, you have this editor scene and you press play, it becomes a game scene, and everything in it is relative to the 0-0-0 of that scene,” Hall said. “This is how you draw things, and it's so ingrained that it's hard for people to imagine anything different.”
“IN Kitten Space Agencyeverything is contextual. Thus, the object is drawn in relation to something else. The camera is actually always at 0:0, it never moves, and everything is pulled into it.”
Space flight simulators depict large distances, a rendering concept sometimes called “floating origin”. Falange said he rethought his approach to this in his new project and came up with a solution similar to Rocketwerkz, calling it a “first-order floating origin”, where the system determines the position of objects relative to the camera as late as possible before rendering. “You still get basically the same functionality, but you can make the most of high-precision numbers when running the game,” he explained.
“In our case, we solve them on the GPU. We send a couple of numbers to the shaders that act as double precision values, and then the shaders determine the relative coordinates of the camera.” To do something like this in Unity (the tool Phalange used to create Kerbala space program), you'll have to overhaul the existing system by telling it to move every object in the game world by the same amount.
Image via Rocketwerkz
For developers interested in optimizing performance in Brutal, Rocketwerkz explained that Space agency kitten The C# code runs in the Common Language Runtime (CLR) and is JIT compiled when the game starts, rather than pre-compiled natively. This was done in part to make the game “easier to mod” by making managed code “more accessible” to players.
However, pay attention to the process. The thought wasn't “Unity can't do this, I need a tool that can do it.” It was “our game needs a floating origin to work this way, how do we do that?”
According to Hall, this type of thinking comes naturally to Phalanx. “One of [Falanghe]His superpower, which I think he doesn't quite realize he has, is that he's always thinking about how he wants to do something, especially if it's not something he's very familiar with.”
On the second call, Hall showed us other Kitten Space Agency systems built with Brutal. Some of them, including one that used volumetric lighting to create the engine glow, were a little confusing to me, but the Hall system for the UI math functions was easy to understand.
Kitten Space Agency allows players to simulate space flight through a series of semi-realistic user interface elements that can be expanded, reduced, and even moved to other monitors. A video game's user interface is typically based on textures, but Hall wanted it to be mathematically based to allow for scaling and repositioning. He also thinks they look sharper and less “washed out.”
They are among the series Kitten Space Agency systems that are technically possible in other game engines, but by building them from scratch, developers can answer the question “what am I trying to do?” before they ask, “How am I trying to do this?”
Hall and Falange said that this was made possible by a series of very serendipitous events that occurred simultaneously with the creation of Brutal: the advancement and popularization of large language models in generative artificial intelligence.
Brutal workflows are the opposite of vibe coding.
“It's hard for me to talk about this without sounding like a cult member,” Hall said sheepishly, describing how he uses ChatGPT while working at Brutal. But he and Falange agreed: Using LLM made the task of language-based coding easier.
No What much easier, to be clear. They both said that when querying the LLM, they rarely copy and paste the code it generates. Instead, they ask questions about C# libraries or Vulkan documentation, and the software is able to provide quality answers. Answers that typically require programmers to spend hours poring over documentation or scouring ancient forums looking for that one post with a solution (which was probably written in 2014).
“LLM is essentially tokenizing a language and then putting a ton of vectors around it to build relationships between those tokens,” Hall said. “What could be better than a highly structured, essentially cruel structured language? Vulkan and the latest version of C# are very “highly structured, with very clear syntax.”
Developers critical of ChatGPT maker OpenAI should be able to replicate the process on open-source models like DeepSeek, Falange said (though he hasn't tried it himself).
This process doesn't work as well with Unity and Unreal because they are both “highly spatial” thanks to their visual scripting tools. A solution to a problem in one game may not work in another due to different elements of the scenario. LLMs browsing the internet are unable to provide consistent answers.
It's also the opposite of Vibe coding, a method where programmers tell the LLM what they want the system to do and it generates code – and it's not code completion, where AI tools “predict” what someone is typing and complete the line to speed up the workflow. The only thing LLM does for Brutal developers is speed up access to information, allowing them to do research without watching a 40-minute YouTube video.
Falange said he once even tried “vibration coding” using ChatGPT, but found it inadequate. He compared the experience to being a “project manager who is not a programmer” and having trouble communicating with a programmer about how to build an application. They'll give you something that's almost right, but not quite what you wanted, and you'll just go back and forth, repeating and making things worse and worse.
“You don’t have to pay someone to get that experience, you could just do it with AI and be disappointed,” he joked.
How can frameworks change game development?
Hall's theory of what he calls the “death of big engines” can be boiled down to this: if LLM makes language-based programming more accessible, then visual effects-based scripts will lose their edge. Brutal developers take responsibility for understanding every technology behind their game.
This is a difficult task, but it does not require them to understand the parts of their tools that Not go to their game.
And despite the complexity of using the framework, Hall said Rocketwerkz had an easier time recruiting programmers using the tool than using Unreal. High-level Unreal programming requires highly specialized knowledge tailored not only to the engine, but also to the types of games being created. A programmer already familiar with C# can master the Brutal workflow if they are willing to accept its… well, brutality.
Hall rejected the idea that Brutal would be the sole entity driving the end-game engines. He was even a little irritated by the idea that some companies might establish themselves as Brutal experts who could build tools for other developers based on the framework, similar to developers creating plugins for Unity and Unreal. “Brutal was created to create a very specific, challenging game where you have to sit down and ask a bunch of questions. [about how it works]”
“I don't like the idea that the Brutal will then become an all-purpose pocket knife because I don't think that's true. In my heart of hearts, I think someone else could create something else that takes a similar approach but is simpler.”
Hall's vision for the future gaming industry is almost exactly the opposite of that promoted by UGC platforms and artificial intelligence advocates. Instead of a world where game development becomes easier with simplified tools, it becomes more accessible with easier understanding of language programming through LLM.
Skeptics might dismiss this by arguing that language-based coding will never be able to evolve as quickly as engine-based game development. If it were true Space program for kittens it would take years to create an alpha, right?
Hall addressed the issue while flying through his team's simulated solar system, quickly flying through the canyons of Mars after ordering the craft to begin landing on the detailed surface of Earth's moon. “We did all of this in about a year,” he said.
