The conventional tooth surface of a face gear is difficult to manufacture, and the cutter for the face gear cutting is not uniform even though the parameters of the pinion mating with the face gear slightly change. Based on the analysis of the geometry features of the tooth surface, a new developable ruled surface is defined as the tooth flank of the face gear, for which the most important geometry feature is that the flank could be represented by a family of straight lines, hence it could be generated by a straight-edged cutter. The mathematical models of the new ruled tooth surface, the cutter and the generation method are presented, the deviation between the ruled surface and the conventional surface, the correction of the ruled surface to reduce the deviation are investigated through numerical examples. The manufacturing process is simulated by VERICUT software, and the results demonstrate that even when the principle deviation is added to the machined deviation, the absolute deviation is on the micro-scale. The meshing and contact simulation shows that the new surface could obtain good meshing performance when the number of face gear teeth is greater than three times the number of pinion teeth. This research provides a new method for manufacturing face gears.