Amazon Lumberyard demo shows it can hang with the big boys

Amazon is a company with many tentacle, with many fingers, in many pies, but game development seemed like a surprising choice for the long-time retailer. More surprisingly still, it announced its own game engine, Lumberyard and now we have our first look at what you can make with it. It's time to stop being surprised, as this demonstration shows that it has what it takes to deliverer some high-fidelity experiences.

This is the same demo that was shown to attendees of the Games Developer Conference in March (thanks PCGN) and likely they were as impressed as we are. Sure there are some elements of our main character's movement that aren't quite as smooth as some developers might be able to deliver, but considering how fresh this engine is and how little devs. have worked with it, this is an impressive start.

[yframe url='http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y8QyMdAjN6o']

What it shows, is that Lumeryard is capable of looking almost as good as some of the other AAA engines out there and that that, combined with its ability to easily utilise cloud storage and processing capabilities and its neat Twitch integration, makes this a very competitive engine in an already impressive line up.

It seems likely that with its decent feature set, Lumberyard could easily offer an alternative to the ever popular Unity or Unreal Engine. It's certainly as cheap for fledgling developers to try out – I.E. free – which is certainly a major plus point in itself.

If you want to download Lumerbyard yourself to have a play, you can grab it for free here.

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KitGuru Says: It's interesting to see how engines have become cheaper and easier to pick up in recent years. I wonder if Amazon's will have its own effect on that. I don't know if the creators can take any less of a cut at this point. 

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