Noita – roguelite where every pixel is simulated
noitagame.com
noitagame.com
Sadly the developers never had a real breaktrhrough and stopped working on new versions some time before the whole indie game craze (Minecraft, Terraria, Steam Greenlight, etc.) started.
If you want to have a look: http://clonk.de/?lng=en
Sadly I never got around to implementing more of it though.
Playing this game in local coop was probably the best way to use your family pc.
Am still impressed by how well the voxel based physics are performing (water flowing, earthquakes, sand) compared to modern 2d games, which often can't handle stuff like that even on multicore systems.
Always felt a little sad for this legendary shareware dev to have missed the era of the early indie-games boom on steam.
Yeah the physics were pretty interesting, although a tiny speck of concrete was super annoying :)
Have a look at the indie game King Arthur’s Gold. Played this a few years ago for 500 hours or so. Online, faster, more interesting gameplay. But might be addictive for a former Clonk player.
And somehow there are hundred million people who love it.
Then there is a whole community of online servers which can run a variety of plugins that completely change the game, from a wide variety of minigames that may not involve any mining or crafting at all, to a game where you're resource-starved on a floating island, to a game where the resources available are totally different.
I rarely play it, but I can totally see why my son, nephew and all their friends are addicted.
The common game loops are "I want to build X, so I need to find area Y to defeat mob Z to get the resources", and "I need to mine resource X, so I need to get resource Y to build tool Z to be able to do so", as well as building resource farms and some rudimentary automation.
So there is enough structured activity to drive actual gameplay beyond just having a pile of virtual blocks to stack, but it contains an additional unrestricted sandbox mode as well.
I really enjoyed testing the limits of the engine and using the wand system to craft interesting physics things.
Also I'd recommend going over the pit instead of down it.
e.g. in Bloodborne you can rush the Cleric Beast, spend the echoes to open the gate and go straight to Amelia. Something that using the standard progression route you'll do much, much, later. If you're good enough, this is great.
It's a true indie studio btw with just three guys who all had some independent success with their previous solo efforts.
1) The basic physics of sand, water and gases is quite simple. I was impressed by the fact, that he implemented most of it in Q-Basic way back. Thinking about this a bit more, Q-Basic looks like the perfect environment to play around with such pixel simulations, albeit a bit slow I guess.
2) The hard part is mixing rigidbody simulation and pixel simulation. Also updating the world using multiple threads.
3) Procedural world generation uses something called Herringbone Wang Tiles [1]. It reduces visible seams and the algorithm itself does not look too complicated.
[1] https://nothings.org/gamedev/herringbone/herringbone_tiles.h...
It's easier if you have a bunch of random linear algebra and calculus knowledge lying around in your head, but trying to study that stuff isn't the most direct route.
But yeah it wouldn't really matter in-game unless you're trying roll time backwards/forwards as a game mechanic.
Also of note, all games can be considered simulations, with varying complexity and rules (and players given a way to interact with the system) -- from that perspective, the only requirements to implementing a game simulation is whatever is required to implement any game.
This is the approach used in a lot of RTS games. Starcraft 1 and 2 both work this way. I believe the original doom used this method as well.
You can get away with not having deterministic simulations via having the server run the simulation, and sending the data required for clients to render the state of the world that they can see. This requires a lot more bandwidth and complicates the network code quite a bit (or at least demands a certain architecture for the code). You still need to run some of the simulation on the client just for having acceptable visuals due to how long it takes for data to travel from server to client (level collision might also be simulated on client for example), but this client side simulation is just for visuals. Still though it's perhaps easier to get a reliable solution working like this due to how hard it is to get deterministic simulations.
The big downside to lockstep, beside it being hard to get deterministic simulations running across machines, is that it opens you up to certain types of hacks. Because the simulation is running on everyone's machine, this allows malicious players to hack the code to do things like let them see through walls or reveal the entire map.
Some games like (some) fighting games use an approach where they just let the simulation run on the client, predicting what they think the inputs will be, and if they get data from the server which doesn't agree with the predicted inputs, the game will revert to the last known good state, and just re-run the simulation with the correct inputs. This sounds insane but if for example a player is holding down W to move forward, it's more likely that W will continue to be held down rather than being released on any given frame.
The Nature of Code: Simulating Natural Systems with Processing - Daniel Shiffman
You can read the entire book online here: https://natureofcode.com/book/
It has mod support, excellent music, and is still an early-access labor of love by the developers with new things added often (I just discovered a ’Moon Stone’ for the first time which is a little moon with a gravitational field that you can throw and see how it affects the environment!)
Here is a stream of a recent version played last week: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=geRWwycLCO8
macOS and Linux represent less that 1% of lifetime revenue most games. They unfortunately aren’t worth the opportunity cost or support tickets.
Some really good games do get ported. I think premium mobile is probably a distant 5th after PC / PS4 / Switch / Xbox for most games. But it’s probably a nice revenue bonus for multi-million unit sellers.
I had been looking forward to this game for years before it was released, but it ended up being quite a different game then I had intuited from the trailers. I expected an environmental sandbox where you would have to combine quick thinking with the manipulation of interacting environmental elements (water + electricity, or fire + coal) to survive, similar to my favorite roguelike Brogue. When the game came out, I realized it was designed more in the style of Binding of Isaac or Risk of Rain, emphasizing combining slotmachine-esque random weapon modifiers into hideously overpowered weapons that for the most part did not meaningfully interact with the environmental simulation in a meaningful way.
It is still an interesting experience, the weapon combination system is a strong source of emergent play, but that emergent weapon design does not meaningfully influence the player's strategy in how he/she approaches the game across runs.
I think there is a better game trapped inside of the pixel simulation of Noita, waiting to be unearthed.
While you absolutely can just slot machine until you get a rigged build (which seems to be a requirement for a mass appeal roguelite), it's possible to win more consistently with other play styles. Wand editing adds a lot more actual decision making compared to BoI or RoR, so you have to actually think about building a game-winning kit of items. The focus on building a kit from random components reminds me more of Shiren The Wanderer, Brogue, FTL, or my own roguelike Hero Trap. The game ends up being about how many different ways you know to build a broken wand, which is something I can respect.
The biggest problem with Noita to me is its emphasis on resource extraction. Good play involves grinding for 600+ gold in the game's first area, when a casual search for the bottom will get you under a hundred. Couple that with monsters that can usually be slowly killed without taking damage, but will deal large amounts of damage if your attention lapses, and you get a game where optimal play involves an awkward mix of long periods of focus with low interest.
I think Noita would benefit from harder monsters, with much higher gold drops (or cheaper shops), and a tight hunger clock. Though that's somewhat at odds with the cool side dungeons (which are already at odds with the rest of the game).
But I also think Noita has enough cool exploratory stuff in it doesn't necessarily have to be a roguelite. It'd also be a good game with some fast travel options and a system of respawn points.
The physics simulation is on just the right side of fun/realism, insane contraptions work but the system is flexible enough that players jury rigged turrets.
Lots of games in a similar vein have followed, but I haven't found any to be as easy to play and as fun.
My favorite creation was the "wall-driving car". You could just make a car, and put a propeller on top pointed upward, and it would press you against whatever surface you were on so you could drive on walls or even the ceiling. That worked. And I'm almost certain the devs never imagined it.
I also made a working pod-racer by putting tiny propellers underneath a pair of jet engines (and under the seat), and connecting them to the seat using those flexible coupling-beams. And it drove like a pod-racer. It looked exactly like something out of the film, the way it moved. It was amazing.
Maybe I need to boot that game back up :)
Starsiege: Tribes
For context: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zIAWzG-wOKY&t=4m11s (~1999, probably)
The core feature of a playable, entertaining emergent game is a set of flexible gameplay rules, able to bend and tolerate the unexpected without breaking.
In the case of Tribes, there weren't any gameplay rules predicated on movement speed or height. Consequently, skiing only enriched gameplay. I would argue that EVE Online features the same style of emergent-tolerant rules.
In contrast would be something like Braid, where the available actions and rules, while seeming free, are in fact extremely rigid and intolerant of the unexpected.
Failed emergent games typically fail by innovating in their gameplay, but attempting to apply inflexible or overly-specific rules on top of that.
That said, HN probably beats the average on finding those folks too. ;)
Tbh, I expect most of the downvotes are from people who weren't gaming in the late 90s.
I think some of this could be solved, or at least mitigated, if there was "meta" progression, like in Dead Cells. That way, even bad runs could result in something worthwhile, rather than a total waste of time.
Enter the Gungeon was the absolute worst offender. Rare health restores at every level meaning you need to play well even on easy early levels. Hugely important max hp boosts granted only for flawlessly completing each level boss. Items have no indicator for how useful they are unless you get a feel for them or look them up, then have a bunch of hidden synergies which are also unexplained; and even then you have no agency in getting other items to make your crappy loot more viable than permanent garbage. And lastly, a single rare item which doubles the length of a run but vastly increases your chances of long term success.
People love rare OP combos but they kind of suck.
I'd rate Risk of Rain 2, Dead Cells, and Dungeon crawl having the best implementations of this.
I'd put Risk of Rain down as the one of the best generic rogue action games to recommend. The first one is a 2D shooter. The second one is a 3D shooter and is especially good for online co-op. I would recommend starting with the second one.
I concur with pretty much everything you've said, however I wanted to add 2 things.
My mental model for playing has settled on "paying" for gold/wands with HP. As you progress though a level you will inevitably get hit by monsters and evironmental effects and there has never been a game as stingy as this one for letting you replace lost health.
The "hideously overpowered weapons" you mentioned are the best part of the game. Finding spell components and building a crazy wand give this this game a fantastic (and fantastical) power curve :)
There was an era of gaming where it was reasonable to think your game could become a hobby for tens of thousands of players, with all the requisite fame that comes from creating it. Spelunky opened the door here, and a lot of high profile indies like Vlambeer and Spryfox led the surge.
What I think actually happened is that so many games started coming out, that there's more content than any one player can consume. The hand generated stuff floats to the top and a new class of indies now sits the throne. Anyone distracted by procedural gen lost their spot.
For another parallel where players choose hand generated content over procedural, look to the prevalence of multiplayer where humans generate challenge for each other on the fly - versus AI baddies that can be cheesed by easily shared internet guides.
Procedural generation has nothing to do with multiplayer. There are games that have competitive multiplayer and procedural generation, e.g., Heroes of Might and Magic III: Horn of the Abyss. Interestingly, this game offers both human-created and procedurally-generated maps, but players compete nearly exclusively on procedurally-generated maps.
That is, Dwarf Fortress is the one true video game.
Multiplayer games on the other hand are like a game dev cheat code — you really don’t need to do much at all to produce a “fun” multiplayer game, because the player-interaction will bring all of the complexity and emergence facilities you need. All you need for multiplayer to work really is to not stop players from doing interesting things with the system, apparently a herculean difficulty for most companies.
The ideal game is somewhere in the middle where the designer focuses on mechanics which combine to produce more than their sum, and then anchor it in handcrafted content meant to show the best angle of the mechanical emergence.
One way to split the hair would be to say the mechanics are procedural (I would rather reach for the programming metaphor of composition, however) while the environments are hand crafted.
Nintendo is the king of this, but I also mentioned multiplayer games because they intentionally focus the designer on the mechanics and the levels while leaving the challenge generation to the players (and a whole conversation about how best to matchmake them.)
In a more shallow simulation, procgen falls on its face, and mostly wastes time as it fails to note any interesting aspects of the sim (or repeats itself, or only points it out once every so often). Hardcoded levels wins out here: its more concise.
That is, as simulation complexity increases, the amount of procgen can be increased. The scaling between megaman (weak sim, all hardcoded) to roguelikes (decent sim, mixture of hardcoded/procgen) to DF (sim porn, procgen porn).
Of course, you can also have a complex sim with hardcoded levels, but this is unsatisfying as it leaves a lot on the table -- you don't play a grand strategy for the campaign mode.
Nintendo games are intentionally fairly weak sims (few general behaviors, usually explored throughout the full game), and thus hardcoded levels works well -- there's little of the simspace remaining to explore when you finish a title -- so procgen would just be a noisy, verbose explanation by comparison
It's very much not a binary choice between procedural vs handcrafted. Procedural content creation is truly great at some stuff, while the same is true for handcrafted creations. The real trick is to blend handcrafted and procedurally generated in such a way that both tools get maximal utilization in the domain they excel in.
Might as well say "Schindler's List" is an "Indylike" or a donut is a "Pizzalike"
Good examples of Roguelites would be Wizards of Legend, Flinthook or Moonlighter. To my understand (having not played), Noita would fall under a roguelike as the game resets after your death and you don't carry anything over to the next playthrough except for your newly accumulated wisdom of how you died and how to avoid that :)
Bones levels have been a staple of Roguelikes since Nethack, where you can find the area that one of your previous characters died. Usually this means a huge power boost if you can deal with the threat of your ghost and/or whatever killed you.
Angband is an ancient and classic Roguelike but it has a "monster memory" that accumulates the knowledge of the enemies you have fought, both in your current playthrough and all previous playthroughs. This represents a significant assistance as you progress through the game, both because the knowledge that "this beast has killed your ancestor" is a big caution sign, and also that you eventually "know" the stats of all the monsters.
I recently played a pretty decent game that was a card game in its essence. They called that one a roguelite due to essentially its bones files. But it’s a card game, not really an RPG even. Rogue is a very specific style of RPG. So what’s the definition of roguelike and roguelite?
* Permadeath / "ironman mode", generally enforced by the game
* Procedural generation of game levels/encounters
* "Progression" elements, where the encounters get more difficult but the player is gaining resources to allow them to overcome those challenges (as opposed to simply gaining mechanical skill at the game)
These three elements combine to make a game where you lose early and often, but starting over gives you the opportunity to experience the game differently, due to the procedural nature as well as because you have the opportunity to invest your resources differently, hopefully making better decisions.
I don't think they need to be strictly RPGs, but the progression elements are key. Those elements are present in FTL, for example, if you consider that the ship itself is the main character.
Just like there are people who care about the definition of 'roguelike', there are people who care about the definition of 'rpg'.
I personally don't think the distinction matters that much, except to pedants and purists.
[0]http://www.roguebasin.com/index.php?title=Berlin_Interpretat...
For example, Rogue Legacy is almost entirely focused on metagame progression between runs, whereas your character barely develops at all mid-run. Classic rogue-lite.
It's both an incorrect term (because, as you mentioned, the overlap with rogue is limited) and absolutely the correct term (because people generally understand what it means, even if they've never heard of rogue).
I think it's important to remember that language evolves, it's more important to be understood than to be correct. Shouting into a hurricane isn't going to stop the storm, no matter how right you are.
What other "~lite" or "~like" in the entire language as a similar property of being nothing like the "~" part?
Another common genre is Souls-like, stemming from the mechanics of Dark Souls. It's a term for a game that has bonfire like mechanics, high difficulty, punishments on death, etc. There are many games that are souls likes that share none of the visual themes or moment to moment combat mechanics of Dark Souls.
And as several other people have commented, the games are similar to rogue, just at a higher level of abstraction than you are looking at them.
Whether the genre is RPG, action or economical simulation doesn't matter nowadays. The only relevance is whether there is a complex gameworld, to tell apart from the simple randomized game-boards which solitair or bejewled offer.
The game may be difficult, and in fact, too difficult, but I still enjoyed it. Finishing it seemed unimportant, as just making progress feels like an incredible accomplishment.
If you’re going to reply to someone’s comment, at least reply to what they said.
“Ignore the haters” to me isn’t dismissive as much as a way of conveying that something is rather polarizing so the reader should check it out themselves before forming an opinion. I do concede that others may have a different interpretation, though.
One of the earliest games (a Java applet) was somehow made to work in HTML5: https://dan-ball.jp/en/javagame/dust2/
This is the most feature-rich falling sand sandbox game with built-in Lua scripting: https://powdertoy.co.uk (their website appears to be down)
Although most of the cave flying games were from the dos era, probably the most famous one, wings, had a "new" version [1] made that runs on windows and linux.
Also, Liero/NiL might fit the bill, as the game involved extensive digging (more so than in eg. Worms): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liero
> Q: What does "every pixel is simulated" mean?
> A: Basically every pixel in Noita is made of some material. The different materials are simulated. E.g. Water will behave like a liquid, gasses will rise, sand will pile up, rigid bodies will rigid body... In addition to that we run simplified simulations of various chemical reactions, electricity, thermodynamics and so on.
I'd also mention that development is pretty fast, new stuff is added all the time.
Cortex Command is another perfect example of this kind of effect.
Any game that makes cool physics possible is a win for me.
Others interested in this topic should check out Teardown
Official site with a few options including an open source version https://www.liero.be/
Can't remember how, but I went through and manually found all the variables for powerups using the default mods so I could have a mega wand on game start.
https://github.com/victorqribeiro/fireEffect
https://github.com/victorqribeiro/rippleEffect
I figured that editing wands outside of the Holy Mountain was what the game designer intended. I can agree that maybe the game designers conception of an acceptable difficultly level doesn't mesh with what many (including myself) think is acceptable difficulty.
If in the first section, for example, you get hit with a shotgun blast, taking the health damage is fine. But there should be an opportunity to heal and get back up to a safe level, even if it requires careful, patient searching and back tracing to do so. At the moment, a few early game missteps spells probable disaster for that entire playthrough way more than midgame mistakes. Difficulty should ramp up rather than down in my book
I also made myself a custom mod that enables a few extra quality of life tweaks such as editing wands everywhere, starting with vampirism enabled, poly-morph potion immunity (in mid to late game it's basically the most deadly thing and frustratingly uncounterable in events where if you're holding an electric charged item in my book) and an extra flask of water starting off to deal with early game toxicity and fire but I haven't figured how to get it up to the workshop yet.
I'm super spoiled:-)
That word was well defined long before the people who will soon inevitably whine at me were born
That statement, on its own, is meaningless buzzzwords to me. What would it mean for it not to be true: where does one find _unsimulated_ pixels? Surely all pixels are digital simulations by their nature?
What is seems to mean is that the pixels are the output of some physics engine rather than being hand-drawn art.
> What is seems to mean is that the pixels are the output of some physics engine rather than being hand-drawn art.
... whereas I wouldn't understand your description if I didn't knew what you were trying to say already.
Is this a term of art that games industry insiders know?
I understand what weather forecasters mean when they talk about "hurricanes" vs. "simulated hurricanes" . So how does that apply to pixels?
I apologize if I came across as dismissive of the headline, but there is a genuine comprehension gap here. OK, you understand it just fine, but that reply doesn't help me close the gap.
The sprites might be drawn based on more or less involved simulation, think the mushrooms that move and change direction when they hit an obstacle. But the pixels making up the mushroom is just drawn based on the mushrooms location, same as always.
In Noita you can think of each pixel on screen as being a 1x1 sprite. Each one simulated.
So we're talking about "every pixel is _individually_ simulated", as opposed to "pixels simulated in groups"?
In this respect Noita is like Minecraft, in that each pixel (block) can change. However in Minecraft the state of each block in the world changes while its position is fixed. In Noita each 1x1 sprite (pixel) can move around on its own.
That's not a statement that I find a lot of meaning in. The sprites are not imitation sprites? The sprites are not fake? ( https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/simulated ) Do you use a different definition? What words would you use as synonyms of "simulated" here? "Animated" ? "Interactive" ? "run through the physics engine" ? it does seem to be a term of art here.
This is unlike say the turtle shells which bounce around depending on what it hits. Its motion is dynamic and dictated by what the player did and the environment it's in.
The distinction between animation and simulation can be a bit fuzzy, but for me an animation is typically a predetermined motion while simulation is dynamic and reactive. However, especially in modern games, animation is blended with simulation to increase realism making this distinction less clear, see for example https://youtu.be/yTniZCOCY7o
So coming back to Noita, think of every 1x1 sprite in the game world as a Super Mario turtle. They can change state and motion in a dynamic and reactive way.
Judging by the videos, they means that the everything in the level has physics capability. In one preview clip, they show weapons destroying part of the ceiling, and then a large chunk comes down and lands on the ground. It's pretty obviously using physics to do it. There's also water and sand shown.
So I think what they really mean is that every single pixel can move, unlike most games where the background tiles are locked in place and the player can never affect them.
In 3D games, they usually say something like "Fully destructible environment".