J. Carlos Roldán

I've become a huge an of a platformer game called Noita, where every pixel is a dynamic part of a simulation. These pixels can interact with each other and the player in complex and often unpredictable ways. You're plunged into a procedurally generated cave, that you have to explore and descend into its depths. It seems like the game was governed by realistic physics material interactions: oil ignites, ice melts, metal rusts, gases explode, and acid dissolves almost anything, including the player. And mostly everything kills you.

This intricate simulation is powered by a custom-built game engine fittingly named Falling Everything. I was curious about how it would handle such a vast array of interactions, and I was surprised by the elegant simplicity of its design. Basic particle interactions, governed by a few rules, result in rich, emergent behaviors. This inspired me to create a simplified version of the engine.

Drag to add sand

Consider sand in our simulator: it moves to an empty pixel below or, if blocked, to the diagonals. This basic rule simulates gravity and creates piles of sand in which new grains slide down. Since sand always goes down and never up, you can just scan the map from top to bottom and move each grain down until it's blocked.

Drag to add water

Water follows a similar logic: it tries to move down like sand, but if blocked, it tries to move sideways; this is, swapping places with a pixel to the left or right if it's empty. This creates a fluid that flows downwards and sideways, stabilizing into a flat surface. We can allow sand to swap places with water but not the other way around, so sand can't sink into water. This is how the game handles liquids and their interactions with solids.

Choose particle types with the left palette

Expanding this system is equally rewarding. Gases are just water that flows upwards. Walls don't interact with anything. Fire just disappears if random() > 0.8, spreads through gas, and when touching water both become gas particles. It's not hard to imagine how this could be extended to other elements that follow simple rules like grass, lava, ice, or electricity.

Feel free to check out the fullscreen version of this tiny simulator. It only contains these six basic particles but it's already fun to play with. You can also extend it if you want, the whole thing is a single HTML file, but don't expect the cleanest code ever as it was a 3 hour hack.

In general, I think this is an interesting approach to world designs with so much untapped potential for videogames, probably due to its unpredictability. And it would be interesting to port this to a 3D world, probably using higher-level memoizations akin to Hashlife to process more than one pixel at a time.