Noita 1.0 Launch Trailer

When I asked the creators of Noita for permission to make a case study about the launch trailer, Olli Harjola asked: "is it going to focus on how impossible the game is to capture :P ?" My answer was: "lol, yeah 😂"

If you've never played it, Noita's Steam description is:

Noita is a magical action roguelite set in a world where every pixel is physically simulated. Fight, explore, melt, burn, freeze and evaporate your way through the procedurally generated world using spells you've created yourself.

Translated, that means whenever you die you start over at the beginning of the game with no powerups or upgrades from the previous run, the layout of each biome has shuffled around, and all the physical materials in the game behave like they do in real life (e.g. wood burns, ice shatters and melts, water evaporates when heated, fires create carbon monoxide, acid eats through solid objects etc.) On top of that, you use dozens of spells to create wands which can create a dizzying number of offensive, defensive and world altering effects.

Translated to someone making a trailer for Noita:

This game has a tremendous amount of room for player expression, and also dozens if not hundreds of chaotic random elements which threaten to ruin every single game capture take ^_^;

I don't normally show this amount of HUD in a trailer, but the game is PC only, so I figured that audience would appreciate seeing it (and there's no other way to show wand editing)

Conversation

I got this gig because Petri Purho knew me from my work on Spelunky 2, and I also received a recommendation from fellow game trailer maker M. Joshua. In my initial conversation with Petri and Olli we surfaced a few key points we wanted to address in the launch trailer which weren't covered in previous marketing materials:

The wand editing system
The game's combat (it's not just a physics sandbox)
There are no permanent upgrades (you die a lot figuring things out)

They also mentioned the two largest audiences for Noita are people who enjoy playing in the game like it's a physics sandbox, and people who enjoy difficult games like Spelunky and Dark Souls.

This was all incredibly valuable information to help me think of concepts for the trailer based on the ideas we wanted to communicate, and who we're saying them to!

A debug option let me play the game at higher resolution for "wide" shots.

Research

After receiving a build of the game, I dove into what I knew was going to be an extensive amount of research. The things I needed to learn were:

The most memorable in-game experiences
The public perception of the game
How the systems of the game work
Scope of the game's world

To start I had to play a lot of the game just to get used to moving in the world and get accustomed to its systems like the wands which function like sets of programming instructions. For example, a wand might contain spells which:

Create a magic missile that...

Wiggle through the air
Turn nearby ground to sand
Travel faster than normal
Create trails of acid in its wake

This is a relatively simple one using only 5 spells; more high level wands can combine over a dozen, and within the game there are dozens of spells you can discover. Whenever you receive a new wand, it has a random assortment of spells assigned to it, and that first test fire can be as risky as combining a random assortment of liquids you find in a chemistry lab. Noita's spell system is like stumbling upon a new language, except you're free to use the letters in any combination you want.

This title card was a late change because I realized the ice shattering would look better than the exploding text I had originally.

There are also a lot of powerups you get throughout the game that do things like add more blood, change what you bleed, affect your flying abilities, give you insect legs and a lot more. Then there's the system of magical liquids which you can carry in jars which cause status effects like faster movement, berserk status or change you into different creatures.

Another reason I had to first play with the systems before diving into debug options or YouTube guides is because I needed a baseline so I could know what I needed help learning or cheating my way through. Once I had a very basic feel for the game, I consumed as much information as I could.

The Eggplant podcast (formerly known as the Spelunky Showlike) did a four part dive into the game which I listened to in its entirety while playing the game. It was incredibly useful to hear veteran game designers talk about the game. In the episode with the creators of Noita I got to understand some of their design decisions, and what about the game gives them joy. This helped me find key differentiating features and how to speak to people already familiar with the rogue-like genre.

I also watched a lot of YouTube tutorials by Simosimo whose soothing soft-spoken voice guided me through many facets of the game. The Steam guides were a valuable cheat sheet, and the Noita subreddit was very helpful for spell recipe ideas. The Noita wiki was usually open in at least one of my browser tabs during a lot of my research and capture.

This is by far the most time I've spent getting familiar with a game for a trailer (Subnautica being a close second.) With all this research under my belt it was time to think of ideas for the trailer!

The footage was captured at 4K so I could zoom in without losing resolution.

Concept & Ideas

To be clear, my process isn't as linear as I'm making it look. During the research phase I was almost certainly writing down notes and ideas for the trailer as they came to me. One other thing I did in my research was watch all the previous trailers for Noita (made by Nolla Games) to see their messaging and the variety of footage they've already shown.

Their first video was the Nolla Games logo made in-game and then set on fire, exploding, crumbmling, burning and falling apart in a way which delightfully showcases the game's simulation systems. I knew we had to use this function of creating custom interactive material in the trailer somehow.

Just about all of their previous trailers use the text: "An action rogue-lite where every pixel is simulated." The first time I read this I understood was a "rogue-lite" was, but it wasn't until I saw footage of the game did I understand what it meant by simulated pixels. Since the launch trailer was intended to re-introduce people to the game, I thought it was time to make a trailer which used less video game jargon. Fortunately, the Steam description of "Fight, explore, melt, burn, freeze and evaporate your way through..." gave the perfect format. This is how I ended up on the montage of:

"Dive deep into a world where every pixel burns, crumbles, flows, shatters, shocks, slimes, poisons, melts, freezes, evaporates, solidifies, explodes, bleeds, spills, corrodes, intoxicates, transmogrifies, suffocates, bleats."

I thought this was a much clearer way to show how alive and "real" the world is while also giving a sample of the breadth of what can happen in the game, even if somewhat subliminally. This also gave the perfect opportunity to create custom text in game which reacted according to the verb. I considered making the text all in-game, but for the sake of readability I thought it better to just make a handful of title cards in-game, and the rest as graphics layered on top of footage. Also, not all materials would maintain their shape once inserted into the world.

The opening of the trailer with the dangerous wand being created was another early idea. In early cuts my placeholder for this section was the scene from Iron Man when Tony Stark tests his rocket boosters and comically flings himself into the ceiling. It's a great scene which I thought perfectly encapsulated the feeling in Noita of: "I wonder what this will do...?" and the experience of getting a new wand and firing it for the first time. In the Spelunky Showlike interview, Petri said whenever he's in someone's Noita stream, he delights in encouraging people to fire new wands before looking at the spells it contains (even though it could cause their immediate death).

I thought of this scene almost immediately when I thought of how to show a player experimenting and then blowing themselves up.

The other core idea I focused on after many hours of play was how one small thing in the game can result in a cascading chain of events of fire, water, gas, explosions and usually death. I really wanted a stopdown moment which started with a lantern smash which causes a fire and a bunch of other catastrophic events. Something like this always happened to me when playing Noita, so it felt essential to conveying the experience of the game.

The other idea I wanted to focus on was the sheer amount of power you can wield in the game when you have a really great wand combination, but also how that leads to incredibly volatile situations which can quickly result in the end of a run, forcing you to start all over again from the beginning.

These were the most important ideas to focus on, and everything I could fit into the cracks would be "content" shots which showed a variety of enemies, powerups, biomes etc.

I tried to make the composition of each of these frames as easy to read as possible even though they were all on for a mere fraction of a second.

Outline

All my trailers start with a basic text outline which blocks out the sections of the trailer. Here are how the sections:

Quick montage to hook the audience
"Iron Man test scene" to illustrate wand editing and give a good laugh (hopefully)
Pedigree card for the creators
Montage to show how the game is about progressing downward through the world.
Section introducing the idea of the dynamic materials and physics of the game (but in simpler language)
Chain of catastrophic events leading to a death
Starting over from the beginning
Amazing wands resulting in fun, and then death
Montage

During the outline phase Petri suggested showing the player dying while editing a wand, which I happily added for another comedic beat. This early phase is also when I came up with the idea of the player creating a massive wand combination only to become a harmless creature who is then killed. I originally wanted the wand itself to cause the morph, but I couldn't find a way to do that, so I settled for falling into polymorphine liquid which turned them into a duck (who then got killed by an enemy)

These two new comedic beats helped break up the monotony of the repeated montage I had in my original outline, which gave me the confidence to get into the massive task of capturing footage. It was very encouraging that even in this placeholder text phase, Petri and Olli already found the trailer funny ^_^

Only a few of the shots in this montage have continuity, but hopefully it still communicates the "that escalated quickly" vibe.

Capture capture capture

Similar to Spelunky, Noita's moment to moment gameplay can be incredibly harrowing due to how one small thing can activate a chain of events which results in the player's death. For example, there are a lot of flammable materials in the game, things that explode, liquids which leak and flow everywhere they can, and creatures which each have their own unique way of attacking you (and each other). This made capturing footage incredibly time consuming.

Noita has a LOT of debug options which took a lot of practice to get used to, and some were added to my builds to make things much easier. The most helpful debug options for Noita allowed me to:

Access to all spells, upgrades
Spawn a random wand, and save it to a file
Teleport to a specific biome
De-spawn the character and quickly move around the world
Delete specific entities in the games like enemies
De-activate enemy AI (they'd ignore me in-game)
Player invincibility
Lock camera position in place
Offset the camera position
Change in-game resolution
Remove "fog of war" (removes shadow from unexplored areas)
Capture footage directly from the game for CPU intensive scenes

Some of the in-game powerups I used most frequently

Unlimited spells
Fly for longer
More blood

I turned up the blood, and chose a spot where the blood would mix with water so we could show more interaction between the liquids on top of the gag.

For the in-game text, Petri gave me some Photoshop files formatted in a way to create the text in-game with the proper materials like wood or ice. All I had to do was enter debug mode, press Ctrl-O to open the file in the game, then place it in the scene.

Learning a game's debug options is very much like learning a new piece of software. It takes time to get into the flow for what options you need to activate for each take; this is especially so for games where you die a lot and have to start at the beginning. By the end I got pretty fast at starting a new take, but it still took a lot of time after resetting.

I usually sort my shot lists based on how difficult I think each shot will be so I can either focus on the quick and easy ones or focus on a difficult one with a lot of moving parts. The easiest shots were ones where I just had to shoot an enemy with a special wand or affect the environment by doing something like using a flamethrower spell on a pile of snow. Even simple shots took several takes to make sure the frame wasn't too cluttered, and the focus had good eye trace with its adjacent shots.

Coming up with wand recipes took a significant amount of time firstly because I had to learn what each spell did, and then figure out what combinations of the spells would result in. By the time I finished the trailer I still think I only scratched the surface of what is possible to do in the game. Because there are so many possibilities, I wanted to make sure to repeat spells as little as possible, but I did usually go back to some favorites. I was also conscious of repeating the look of particular wands, but I'm sure I leaned more heavily on some of the starter wands. The sheer breadth of content in Noita meant I just wanted to repeat things as little as possible.

A lot of shots had to be thrown out because of the sheer amount of chaos on screen.

The three most difficult shots were:

Iron Man wand experimentation shot
Dying while in the wand editing screen
Duck shot

The Iron Man shot took a very long time because I had to find a good combination of spells that when fired would kill my character, and send the body flying through the air. Sometimes the body didn't go flying, other times the explosion wasn't big enough, and mostly the combination of spells just didn't give the desired effect. For this shot I locked off the camera position because I thought it would be funnier if the camera didn't follow the body.

Dying while in the wand editing screen took a while because I couldn't have player invincibility turned on since I had to die in the shot, which meant there were many takes where I died in the wrong position of the level or I had trouble getting an enemy to "hit their mark." I also spent far too much time finding a recipe for the wand I'd be making in the shot; it didn't really matter what the recipe was, but I wanted there to be one anyway.

The polymorphine duck transmogrifying shot took a while to get because I had to find just the right spot where I could jump into the liquid, turn into some cute animal and then get killed. It's completely random what you'll turn into when you jump into the liquid, so that added an extra amount of randomness to the shot.

The section in the middle which during production I called "A series of unfortunate events" was originally conceived to be a section with as few shots as possible so you could see how a single lantern breaking could cause a huge fire, which caused an explosion, which caused a deluge of water to escape and somehow ended in the player's death. But I ended up cutting the sequence up into multiple shots so each one could have one single idea like "Lantern falling" and then when cut together, the series of events could feel like they were all part of one event even if they were separate takes, and not even in the same level. As long as the sequence communicated that things escalate quickly, I was satisfied.

In the end I captured nearly four hours of footage, but getting that footage took about a week in total (if not more).

I put this shot and the above ground skull shot into the end montage to break up all the underground footage, and get the audience thinking.

Polish & Graphics

The music in the trailer is all taken straight from the game. There were several hours worth because each track has varying levels of energy, which I think dynamically changes based on what is happening in the game. Since the music wasn’t custom made for the trailer I got help from composer and sound designer Niilo Takalainen to smooth out some of my music transitions during the stopdown moments, and also some sound effects here and there. Once the capture was finished, I went back into the game to record sound effects for various shots, and also used some of the raw sound effects files to make sure each moment felt nice and punchy.

I wanted to keep the text pretty simple and easy to read, but wanted them to look like they were affected by the light of the environment. I made them in After Effects using this light wrap tutorial by OG indie game trailer maker Kert Gartner. I spent a LOT of time thinking of the composition for the gameplay behind each title card, though in retrospect the title cards are so fast, I probably spent too much time obsessing over each one and lining up the eye trace between them.

Always good to finish with a boss battle which reads very easily.

Reception

I'm really happy with the reception of the trailer! I saw a lot of comments on YouTube from people who felt seen because of the sheer number of deaths depicted. Seeing people who feel that the trailer accurately represented the experience of playing the game is one of the highest compliments for me to receive. If the veteran fans says it feels authentic, then that hopefully means new potential players will be able to see that too.

I didn't set out to make the trailer specifically for veteran players, because we knew they'd already purchased the game, but I think it's still valuable for the community to feel seen in the marketing materials. It also informs new players that what they're seeing in the trailer can be trusted.

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