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Exploring the Tech and Design of Noita

GDC Festival of Gaming · talk · Watch on YouTube

Game programming & enginesGame design

What it is

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.

Why Hacker News recommends it

It is the go-to talk for anyone building falling-sand or pixel-physics simulations, and several commenters say they modeled their own engines on it.

  • 7 people recommended it
  • 7 different months
  • 3 strong recommendations
  • first 2020, last 2026

What HN commenters said

  1. “Highly recommended if you want to dive deeper into the topic.”

    Explains the Falling Everything Engine behind Noita.

    panzerboiler, 2022-05 · Strong recommendation · in “Making a falling sand simulator”

  2. “I've modeled my architecture after this fantastic GDC talk by the Noita devs”

    Fantastic GDC talk used as architecture model.

    hopfog, 2024-04 · Strong recommendation · in “Web Game Engines and Libraries”

  3. “this is a good GDC talk about how it does so”

    Good GDC talk on Noita's terrain deformation tech.

    endgame, 2020-03 · Recommendation · in “Lemmings 2: The Tribes”

  4. “If you like a small challenge, watch a few minutes of this video about a game called Noita”

    Shows Noita starting with QBasic physics simulations.

    zubspace, 2020-11 · Recommendation · in “30 years later, QBasic is still the best”

  5. “If you haven't seen the GDC 2019 talk about tech and design of Noita I recommend checking it out.”

    Shows early prototypes and challenges of building in a falling-sand game.

    Impossible, 2021-07 · Recommendation · in “The Powder Toy”

  6. “Here's a talk from the creator of Noita about the underlying tech.”

    Creator explains Noita's tech, including multithreading from 9:20.

    bo0tzz, 2022-05 · Recommendation · in “Making a falling sand simulator”

  7. “I found this GDC talk about Noita pretty interesting”

    Interesting GDC talk about Noita.

    thezipcreator, 2026-02 · Recommendation · in “Sandboxels”

Excerpts from Hacker News comments, linked to the originals. Summaries and labels were written by a language model from those comments.

Topics: noita, gdc, cellular automata, physics simulation, game architecture, multithreading

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