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Lumberyard demo shows off Amazon’s free triple-A game engine with dancing archer

Lumberyard

The demoreel for Amazon’s free AAA game engine has made its way onto YouTube after wowing crowds at GDC last month.

Lumberyard, as the engine is named, is a cross-platform 3D software which lets indie developers tool around with high-fidelity environments such as this lush forest the concept character Rin is walking around in.

The engine is backed up by the full weight of Amazon’s well-connected tentacles in the gaming sphere, bringing in Twitch integration (acquired in 2014) and using Amazon Web Servers for computing power and storage.

It’s not just the power of the engine which had developers impressed, but the way it allows non-codemonkeys to create fiddly bits of cloud-based content and menus, like news feeds, through a simple drag-and-drop visual script system.

Some of the dance animations in the demo look a little…*janky* but do you go into libraries and start complaining about how Moby Dick starts a little slow? No, you put it right back on the shelf and go home to play Counter-Strike, don’t you?

Anyway, you can start messing around in Lumberyard now and grab an AWS account while you’re at it so you can put in a leaderboard of how many pots you’ve arrowed and things.