Amazon launches free game engine Lumberyard

To start with, Amazon Lumberyard will only support Windows Vista, Windows 7, 8, and 10, as well as PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.

“As a game engine, it supports development of cloud-connected and standalone 3D games, with support for asset management, character creation, AI, physics, audio, and more. Amazon GameLift will help you to deploy and scale session-based multiplayer game servers for the games that you build using Lumberyard”, explains the Amazon blog.

Lumberyard, as Amazon calls it, is based on Crytek’s famous CryEngine, and can be used to develop games for both PC and consoles.

Lumberyard’s drag and drop interface is integrated with the AWS C++SDK, allowing developers to hook into AWS services via straight C++.

The GameLift service costs $1.50 for each active 1000 participants, on top of standard AWS fees for resources consumed, such as compute instances and bandwidth.

It’s a shrewd idea – developers are already using Amazon servers. With Amazon GameLift and Amazon Lumberyard, developers can create multiplayer back-ends with less effort, technical risk, and time delays that often cause developers to cut multiplayer features from their games. For more details you can check out Lumberyard’s launch site. Amazon acquired Double Helix in 2014.

Amazon Lumberyard is free, and available today in beta for developers building PC and console games, with mobile and virtual reality (VR) platforms coming soon.

And, of course, the native AWS and Twitch integration are differentiators between Amazon’s toolset and others. The company wants developers to focus on creating unique games that can support huge communities from the beginning, rather than getting bogged down with the complexities of building a custom engine or firefighting server issues.

The new platform also offers deep Twitch integration, so developers can build in impressive new features to games.

Sure, that sounds great for developers, but what does it mean for you?

“Many of the world’s most popular games are powered by AWS’s technology infrastructure platform”. The former basically lets Twitch users stream at the engine level, while the latter enables viewers to jump into online games being made with the engine. To run Lumberyard, you will need at least a quad-core processor, 8GB RAM, 200GB free space on your hard drive, and a high-end video card with 2GB VRAM. “We expect to get feedback from customers”, says Frazzini.