Exploring the Tech and Design of Noita

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!

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]

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.