Rocketwerkz CEO Dean Hall and Floating Point Origin Interactive founder Felipe Falanghe sound downright giddy when they talk about the new C# framework named “Brutal.” During a recent call with Game Developer, the brains behind DayZ and Kerbal Space Program couldn’t stop making random asides to each other about what they’ve pulled off with the tool and how they’ve inspired each other’s work.
Their joy was infectious because once you understand how Brutal functions, you realize every new feature is a bona fide accomplishment even for this pair of seasoned developers. “It’s called Brutal for a reason,” Hall said after Felipe compared working with it to the experience of sitting on a bar stool while all your friends using engines like Godot are sitting on a comfy couch.
When it comes to game development, engines usually have their own IDE and have many tools ready that make it so you don’t have to code everything - in Godot, for instance, you can create AnimationPlayer and AnimationTree to handle animations.
Frameworks (MonoGame for C#, libGDX for Java, LOVE2D for Lua) can be understood as “pre-engines” or libraries for those coming off webdev, they offer lots of ready made functions to make your life easier (input handling, loading and handling most types of data, showing stuff on screen), but you’ll still need to code pretty much everything else.