Their enthusiasm was contagious. Once you grasp how Brutal actually works, it becomes clear that every new feature represents a genuine achievement—even for two highly experienced developers. “It’s called Brutal for a reason,” Hall joked after Felipe likened working with it to sitting on a bar stool while friends using engines like Godot relax on a plush couch.

Brutal, as a Rocketwerkz representative put it, is simply a framework that “leverages the latest .NET features while exposing low-level API access to high-performance C++ libraries and tools, including Vulkan.” That’s the entire pitch—nothing more, nothing less.

Rocketwerkz built the framework to power Kitten Space Agency, a spiritual successor to Kerbal Space Program. Falanghe was invited to join a steering committee advising on the project, which naturally led to his involvement in shaping the engine itself. Brutal is slated to become open source under a commercial entity called Ahwoo.

Hall understands why developers might be uneasy about such an approach. Still, he made a bold claim during our conversation: the future of game development lies in frameworks like Brutal, not traditional game engines.

Brutal forces developers to create workflows from scratch.

Brutal exists because Rocketwerkz concluded that scene-based rendering couldn’t support Kitten Space Agency’s needs. “In Unity or Unreal, you work in an editor scene, hit play, and everything becomes relative to that scene’s 0-0-0,” Hall explained. “That model is so ingrained that it’s hard for people to imagine anything else.”

“In Kitten Space Agency, everything is contextual. Objects are drawn relative to other objects. The camera itself never moves—it’s always at 0-0—and the world is drawn into it.”

To make this work, Rocketwerkz resolves positioning on the GPU. “We send pairs of numbers that effectively act as double-precision values to the shaders, which then calculate camera-relative coordinates,” Hall said. In Unity—the engine Falanghe used for Kerbal Space Program—achieving something similar requires brute-forcing the system by shifting every object in the world at once.

What’s important, though, is the mindset behind the solution. The question wasn’t “Unity can’t do this, so we need something else,” but rather, “Our game needs a floating origin—how do we implement that?”

During a follow-up call, Hall walked us through additional Kitten Space Agency systems built using Brutal. Some, like a volumetric lighting setup for engine glow, were fairly dense, but his approach to mathematically driven UI systems was easier to grasp.

Kitten Space Agency features semi-realistic spaceflight interfaces that can be resized, rearranged, and even moved across multiple monitors. Most game UI relies on textures, but Hall opted for math-based elements so they could scale and reposition cleanly. He also feels they appear sharper and less “washed out” as a result.

These systems are technically achievable in other engines, but building them from scratch forces developers to answer “what am I trying to do?” before jumping to “how do I do it?”

According to Hall and Falanghe, this approach was enabled by a fortunate parallel development: the rise and mainstream adoption of large language models.

“An LLM essentially breaks language into tokens, then builds relationships between them using vectors,” Hall said. “What’s better for that than an extremely structured language?” Vulkan and modern C# fit that description, with strict syntax and clear rules.

Falanghe noted that developers wary of OpenAI could likely replicate this workflow using open-source models like DeepSeek, though he hasn’t tested it himself.

Brutal workflows stand in contrast to vibe-coding.

This method doesn’t translate as well to Unity or Unreal, which are “highly spatial” due to their visual scripting systems. Because each project’s scripts differ, LLMs trained on web data struggle to produce consistent solutions.

It’s also not “vibe coding,” where an AI generates entire systems from vague prompts, nor is it code completion. In Brutal’s case, LLMs simply speed up access to information, replacing hours-long tutorial videos with faster research.

“You don’t need to pay someone to have that experience anymore,” Hall joked. “You can just do it with an AI—and still be frustrated.”

How can frameworks transform game development?

Hall’s broader thesis about what he calls “the death of big engines” is straightforward: if LLMs lower the barrier to language-based coding, visual scripting loses much of its advantage. Developers working in Brutal are responsible for understanding every piece of technology in their game—but they don’t have to learn parts of an engine they’ll never use.

Despite Brutal’s difficulty, Hall said Rocketwerkz has found it easier to hire programmers for this workflow than for Unreal. High-level Unreal development demands specialized knowledge not just of the engine, but of specific game genres. By contrast, a developer comfortable with C# can adapt to Brutal—if they’re willing to accept its, well, brutality.

“I don’t want Brutal to become some kind of universal Swiss Army knife,” Hall said. “I suspect someone else will build something similar one day, but simpler.”

Hall’s vision of the industry runs counter to narratives pushed by UGC platforms and some AI evangelists. Instead of simplifying tools to make development easier, he imagines a future where LLMs make language-based programming easier to understand.

Skeptics might argue that language-driven development could never match the speed of engine-based workflows. But if that were true, Kitten Space Agency’s alpha wouldn’t exist yet.

Spaceflight simulators must handle extreme distances, a rendering challenge often referred to as “floating origin.” Falanghe said he independently arrived at a similar solution for his own project, which he calls “first-order floating origin.” In this approach, object positions are resolved relative to the camera as late as possible in the rendering pipeline.

“You end up with essentially the same behavior,” he explained, “but you can use high-precision numbers much deeper into the game’s execution.”