Exploring the Tech and Design of Noita
Exploring the Tech and Design of Noita on HackerTube: recommended by 7 Hacker News commenters across 7 separate months, 2020–2026.
In this 2019 GDC session, Petri Purho of Nolla Games explains the technical side of Noita's physics engine, including scaling a falling-sand simulation to large continuous worlds and adding destructible rigid bodies. It also shows how the emergent physics drives the gameplay.
What HN commenters said
10 Hacker News comments link this video. Each one links back to its thread.
hopfogAug 2026Strongly recommends
Thank you! It's funny because I really wanted to introduce more things like that, but the very simple things I've added so far have received a bit of pushback ("I want to play a factory game, not solve puzzles!"). So now I'm reconsidering it, but I think there's a lot of room for really interesting Noita-style secrets when combined with the automation and processing tools. Overall it's a much simpler and more controlled experience than Noita though, so don't expect anything like it. By the way, this talk by the Noita devs has been instrumental when building my engine: ▶ this video Highly recommended!
in “Ask HN: What are you working on? (August 2026)” · View on HN
hopfogApr 2024Strongly recommends
Thank you! If you haven't played Noita it's basically a "falling sand" or powder physics game where every pixel is simulated. You need a special cellular automata that is not your typical game physics engine, so I don't think Babylon.js would be a good choice but I may be wrong. I've modeled my architecture after this fantastic GDC talk by the Noita devs: ▶ this video ("Exploring the Tech and Design of Noita")
in “Web Game Engines and Libraries” · View on HN
panzerboilerMay 2022Strongly recommends
Nice work, Jason. I enjoyed a lot a talk [1] at GDC by Petri Purho (Nolla Games and before that Kloonigames) that explains the "Falling Everything Engine" used in their game Noita (that I would love to play on my mac...). Highly recommended if you want to dive deeper into the topic. [1]: ▶ this video "Exploring the Tech and Design of Noita"
in “Making a falling sand simulator” · View on HN
thezipcreatorFeb 2026Recommends
this doesn't answer any questions about this game, but I found this GDC talk about Noita pretty interesting: ▶ this video
in “Sandboxels” · View on HN
bo0tzzMay 2022Recommends
Here's a talk from the creator of Noita about the underlying tech. From 9:20 he talks about their multithreading implementation. ▶ this video
in “Making a falling sand simulator” · View on HN
ImpossibleJul 2021Recommends
The Noita team explored some game ideas along those lines and had challenges. If you haven't seen the GDC 2019 talk about tech and design of Noita I recommend checking it out. They show some early prototypes focused on building ▶ this video
in “The Powder Toy” · View on HN
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zubspaceNov 2020Recommends
I owe Basic a lot. It got me into programming on our first family pc, a Compaq Presario around '94. QBasic was accessible on every windows installation from the command prompt. You could read the programming guide built into the editor and have your first running code shortly after. That was its true power. One of my first programs was teaching me french words, asking me to translate them in a random order until I got them all right. It was truly magical. I also made pixels move, trying to write games, but I quickly ran into limitations and problems organizing my code. If you like a small challenge, watch a few minutes of this video about a game called Noita, where in the beginning Q-Basic was used to create some simple physic simulations [1]. It was hacky yes, but I think if you're starting out, it's much more important to get something running quickly than learning how to do it the right way. When people speak of basic, they always seem to have the impression that you're spoiled for life after touching it, but I think that's wrong. You can always learn more and improve. It's breaking down barriers of entry, which is key. A simple editor, with an inbuilt help page and a run button is all you need. [1] ▶ this video
in “30 years later, QBasic is still the best” · View on HN
endgameMar 2020Recommends
Noita does interesting things with terrain deformation, and this is a good GDC talk about how it does so: ▶ this video
in “Lemmings 2: The Tribes” · View on HN
itishappyOct 2024Cites it
Noita is a game based around the concept of a chemistry engine running at the pixel level. It uses a custom rules engine written in C++. It's one of the more interesting games I have ever played. [link] ▶ this video
in “Game Programming in Prolog” · View on HN
dmitriidNov 2022Cites it
jai's author, Jonathan Blow, always creates a game from scratch. His games: Braid (highest rated XBox Live title when released, "Xbox Live Arcade Game of the Year", [link] ) and Witness (while not winning significant awards, regularly appears in Best of Decade games lists, [link] ). Besides that there are multiple games where people use their own engines: - Possibly among some of the most technically complex ones are Factorio (e.g. [link] ) and Noita (where every single pixel in the humongous world is simulated ▶ this video ) - Among the AAA-level crowd there's Decima (Death Stranding [link] and Horizon Zero Dawn [link] ) and REDEngine (Witcher 3 [link] , Cyberpunk 2077 [link] ) - There are smaller ones like Monkey X (Crypt of the Necrodancer, [link] ) - There are bigger ones like Clausewitz (basically all of Paradox Interactive's games like Crusader Kings [link] and Stellaris [link] ) In general, once you know what you're doing it sometimes pays to develop your own engine that is specific to what you're doing. Unity and Unreal are generalist enines that you still to bend to your will to do what you need to do and may have opinionated setups of things that are hard to work around, or maybe are omitted from the engine, or just plain don't allow you to do.
in “Porting 58k lines of D and C++ to Jai” · View on HN