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Exploring the Tech and Design of Noita

GDC Festival of Gaming

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  • Recommended by 7 people: 7 on Hacker News.
  • A classic. People kept recommending it from 2020 to 2026.
  • Presented by Petri Purho, co-founder of Nolla Games
  • May be out of date. Uploaded 6 years ago, in an area where tools change fast.

Advanced. Deep dive for people who know the field.

287K views6 years ago7 recommendations

Game developmentGraphics and audioUnity, Unreal and GodotBuilding a game engineRendering

Petri Purho explains the technical implementation of Noita's falling-sand physics engine, including cellular automata scaling and multithreading.

In this 2019 GDC session, Nolla Games' Petri Purho talks about the technical details of Noita's physics engine, including scaling up the falling sand simulation to support large continuous worlds and integrating destructible rigid body physics, while demonstrating the emergent physics based gameplay. Register for GDC: ubm.io/341ZiaZ Join the GDC mailing list: gdconf.com/subscribe Follow GDC on Twitter: twitter.com/Official_GDC GDC talks cover a range of developmental topics including game design, programming, audio, visual arts, business management, production, online games, and much more. We post a fresh GDC video every day. Subscribe to the channel to stay on top of regular updates, and check out GDC Vault for thousands of more in-depth talks from our archives.

Why it's here

7 people recommend this

What people say. Highly recommended for its detailed breakdown of cellular automata, falling-sand physics, and multithreading in game engines.

panzerboileron Hacker News • Recommends

On “Making a falling sand simulator”

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: link to this video "Exploring the Tech and Design of Noita"
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hopfogon Hacker News • Recommends

On “Web Game Engines and Libraries”

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: link to this video ("Exploring the Tech and Design of Noita")
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hopfogon Hacker News • Recommends

On “Ask HN: What are you working on? (August 2026)”

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: link to this video Highly recommended!
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endgameon Hacker News • Recommends

On “Lemmings 2: The Tribes”

Noita does interesting things with terrain deformation, and this is a good GDC talk about how it does so: link to this video
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zubspaceon Hacker News • Recommends

On “30 years later, QBasic is still the best”

…earning 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 link to this video…
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Impossibleon Hacker News • Recommends

On “The Powder Toy”

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 link to this video
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bo0tzzon Hacker News • Recommends

On “Making a falling sand simulator”

Here's a talk from the creator of Noita about the underlying tech. From 9:20 he talks about their multithreading implementation. link to this video
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thezipcreatoron Hacker News • Recommends

On “Sandboxels”

this doesn't answer any questions about this game, but I found this GDC talk about Noita pretty interesting: link to this video
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dmitriidon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Porting 58k lines of D and C++ to Jai”

…ink] ) 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 link to 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 [li…
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itishappyon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Game Programming in Prolog”

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 link to this video
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