A free, open source C# framework for making games, or your own game engine.

BRUTAL is a framework. You can make a game directly with it, or use it as the foundation for a separate engine. We made Kitten Space Agency directly on BRUTAL. Ludeon built their Waylith engine on it to move RimWorld off Unity.

At its core is a custom interop layer giving C# direct access to native APIs and libraries. Around that we've built mathematics, memory management, strings, collections, job scheduling, logging, localization, and bindings for Vulkan, GLFW, Dear ImGui, FMOD, RakNet, Jolt and Box2D. BRUTAL doesn't make the architectural decisions for you. You write your own stack. You can use whatever NuGet packages you want, including third-party ones.

It's called BRUTAL for a reason. 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 actually have to know what you want to do first.

You are only as independent as your tools are.

Developers have surrendered an extraordinary amount of control over their work to companies whose interests are not necessarily aligned with their own. We're not suggesting everyone should make their own game engine. We're suggesting every developer should have the option to, without having to spend four years building the foundations first.

What that means in practice:

• Free, including for commercial games. No royalties. We don't want a percentage of your game's revenue. We ask for credit.
• Open source. The source is here under an MIT-based licence. If one day we stop being accountable to developers, you can fork it and go your own way.
• Deliberately small. We do a few low-level things well: interop, memory, concurrency, maths, strings, and bindings to native libraries, on the latest C# and Vulkan. We avoid allocations and unnecessary overhead and use unmanaged memory and unsafe code where it makes sense.
• A foundation, like a kernel.