Yet another move by Amazon to broaden their empire: The team over at Amazon have come up with a new 3D game engine that touts some interesting features. Some of the notable ones include tools to create ‘audience participation’ and easier ‘online feature’ building. The trailer for Lumberyard makes it quite clear that the engine’s developers have the online community on their mind.
Lumberyard will be a free engine that you can download and tinker with right now. The engine is part of a new service provided by Amazon called the ‘Amazon Web Service’ which will be a ‘cloud’ service that allows developers to have access to various features including the Twitch integration feature. Despite being free, in order to have access to the AWS within the engine, you’ll need to pay the subscription fee for the Amazon ‘GameLift’.
The Lumberyard engine was first worked on as an upgrade to the original CryEngine. However, the upgrades and various changes saw to it that the engine would eventually diverge from its original source, creating a whole new branch of the game engine. Currently, a team of development veterans who worked on Darksiders have come together to form Gunfire Games and created a demo showcasing this engine. The team is currently working on ‘Chronos’, a VR adventure game.