Amazon offers its own game engine for free
Amazon has released its own 3d game engine. The Amazon Lumberyard engine is free to use and is based on Crytek’s CryEngine. For online multiplayer Amazon offers its GameLift service with a price attached.
Lumberyard is available in beta and should eventually be used for the development of games for PC, console, mobile and virtual reality. The engine uses Amazon’s proprietary SDK for C++. With Lumberyard, Amazon offers developers an editor with character and animation editors, interface editors, as well as effects such as weather and clothing. Developers also have full access to the source code.
Amazon states that there are no costs associated with using the engine. There is also no need to share revenue with the company if games sold use Lumberyard. The standard Amazon Web Services fees must be paid if a developer wants to use it.
In addition to Lumberyard, Amazon has also announced the existence of GameLift. GameLift is to serve as a service to support multiplayer games that take place in sessions. Through GameLift it should be possible for developers to easily increase and decrease the size of the servers. This is nice for the developers, because Amazon charges an amount per player.
Amazon is also focusing more on Twitch.tv with the game engine. Amazon hasn’t done much with it since purchasing the games streaming service. Lumberyard changes this by adding a number of Twitch features. Twitch ChatPlay allows developers to use a drag-and-drop scripting interface to develop gameplay elements that allow Twitch users to influence the game. A game that already resembles this a lot is Choice Chamber. In that game, users determine how the levels look like. Twitch JoinIn allows developers to create games that allow streamers to easily invite their audiences to play with them.
In the beta it is possible to develop for Windows Vista and higher, for the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. Support for mobile and virtual reality is in the works. Amazon hopes to add that in a few months. For development, Amazon recommends at least a quad-core processor, 8GB of RAM, a high-end 2GB video card that supports DirectX 11 and 200GB of storage space. Also requires Visual Studio 2013 Update 4 or newer and the Visual C++ Redistributables package for Visual Studio 2013.