How the physics in Hazard Heights works

Every brick in Hazard Heights is a real rigid body. It has mass, it has friction, and when it lands it is simulated exactly like the bricks under it. The game never fakes a landing by snapping a piece to a grid. That one decision drives everything you feel while playing.

Friction is the whole game

Bricks and floors share one friction value, tuned so a piece placed half over an edge stays put but a piece placed a third over starts to slide. That gap is where the skill lives. Most towers do not fall because a piece was dropped badly; they fall because three slightly-off pieces added up.

Why a wobble sometimes freezes

Real physics has a nasty habit: a piece can rest in a spot that is technically stable and still jitter forever, because the solver keeps finding tiny corrections. We treat that as a bug in the game, not a feature. A landed piece that is supported on a clean grid line is allowed to settle and sleep. A piece that is genuinely overturning is left alone to fall. The rule for telling them apart is written down in the project's physics contract and has survived a lot of arguing.

Pockets and nudging

Some floors have one-cell niches carved into them. Sliding a piece into one feels great and is deliberately lenient: the collider corners around a pocket are rounded so a slightly misaligned piece shaves past and slides in, instead of catching on the lip. The pocket floor itself stays grid-exact, so once you are in, you are in.

The fog

Everything below the floor is fog. A piece that misses the tower sinks into it and is gone, and the fog heaves where it went under. The fog is a shader, two layers of drifting noise sampled in world space, so when the camera pans the layers slide against each other and read as depth. It is the cheapest thing in the game to render and the thing people notice most.

Hazards are physics too

A Boulder is four times the mass of a normal brick, and the tower under it knows. A Feather is a quarter, and later pieces shove it around. A Vine welds itself to whatever it touches, which is either the save you needed or the reason your whole overhang came down as one piece. Bombs delete their neighbours and let gravity do the rest; there is no blast impulse, because a blast that throws pieces is chaos, and a hole that lets pieces fall is a puzzle.