Noita and his pixels

[Midastouch]

Hello everyone
I played Noita and i wonder how they did it, to create an interaction with pixels lie that.

All the pixesl can burn, dissolve...
Do you think they used for a game like that a type of ds_grid?
And how 2 pixels can interacte like that? For exemple if the left pixel burn, the right pixsel will burn too?

 

[Nidoking]

I'm not watching a 47 minute video to find out what your question is. Pixels are graphical elements. You draw a color at a screen location. If you want to burn/dissolve "pixels", you draw them in other colors. That's about the most informative answer I expect a question like that to get.

 

[NightFrost]

Going by what I recall having read elsewhere, Noita is basically running a 2D voxel engine.

 

[Roldy]

I'm not watching a 47 minute video to find out what your question is. Pixels are graphical elements. You draw a color at a screen location. If you want to burn/dissolve "pixels", you draw them in other colors. That's about the most informative answer I expect a question like that to get.

As @NightFrost stated, Noita is a material based voxel game. Where each voxel is the size of a single pixel and each are physically simulated. Alchemy is a big part of the game so materials can transform from liquid, gaseous, solid at the resolution of pixels. Each materials can 'alchemically' react with one another so there is alot of physics and transformation going on. The world is infinitely programmatically generated.

It is a rogue-like minecraft on steroids, with spellunky style secrets and mysteries.

@Midastouch question is valid, as his audience (this forums) are game developers and he can reasonably expect his audience to either know what Noita is or find out, because it is impressive, and is an indie title that has sold over a hundred thousand copies and just entered 1.0 coming out of early access.

As for the OP's question I would suggest listening to the Spellunky/Eggplant Show-like podcast. They did a 4 part deep dive on the game and the last episode they talk to the developers about the games development. It is a Finnish game that has alot of ancestry to older Finnish games. The word 'Noita' means 'witch' in Finnish.

 

[NightFrost]

This interested me a bit so I went looking more closely, and found this GDC talk on the tech and design. TL;DR: the tech is pixel physics simulation, intelligently selecting where to do updates, and multithreading (and box2D for rigidbody elements).

 

[samspade]

This interested me a bit so I went looking more closely, and found this GDC talk on the tech and design. TL;DR: the tech is pixel physics simulation, intelligently selecting where to do updates, and multithreading (and box2D for rigidbody elements).

I remember this. Unfortunately, and this is rare for a 2D game, I would say this is probably not possible in GM unless you are very, very skilled. At least not on the scale of Noita. But it could still be very good to learn about as many of the ideas about efficiency how how they handled that could translate to other things related to making games in GM.

 

[Joe Ellis]

It seems like after I watched it for a few minutes I realized that it breaks the rules of pixel art, it actually moves them at fine resolution, at least the "cool" looking parts where you're like "How did he do that?" I noticed certain parts aren't pixelated like the crosshair, and then realized the super smooth movement is basically the pixel graphics moving at high res coordinates so they look really smooth.
Perfectly doable in any engine, but does take skill to look good

Ohh, sorry, just remembered what the op is about, yeah all destructible. Still that is quite simple, just a huge buffer filled with a byte per pixel, what material it is, which includes nothing\destroyed, there is also a shader or some kind of system which renders the edges of the solid parts.
All of this is completely do able in gm, you've just gotta do quite a lot of research or basically work out how to do it.

I did this: (I never ended up finishing it, at least in a way that I thought was acceptable to share, it probably could be useful though for someone interested to see how you start off with this kind of thing)
https://forum.yoyogames.com/index.php?threads/2d-destructible-terrain-starter-kit.47954/

And I made a shader about a year after that: (haha this is funny looking back, it's about the same game Noita, and I posted pics of my shader that read an image and added grass and under parts (basically the edges I was talking about) to it:
https://forum.yoyogames.com/index.php?threads/advanced-pixel-perfect-mining.70452/#post-416853