About Principia

Principia is, in its simplest form, a physics-based sandbox game. In Principia, you can build contraptions and simulate them in the physics simulation. This could be a mechanical contraption, an RC car, or a pinball game. Principia also contains a LuaScript object which allows you to write and create Lua programs that can interact with and affect the simulation.

Principia also features the Adventure game mode. In this game mode, you take control of a small robot which can do whatever you decide it to do. It can take part in a giant battle with enemy robots, or it can take control of the giant robot and wreak havoc on the world.

Principia was originally developed as a paid commercial game by the Swedish independent game company Bithack AB during 2013 and 2014. Sadly, the game was later abandoned due to Bithack not being able to finance the project anymore. It is however still loved by a small but passionate community that still keeps the game alive after all these years, including creating this site.

In August 2022, Principia's source code was finally released onto GitHub and is now being further developed as an open source project. It is now free for everyone to download, as well as use under the terms of the BSD 3-Clause license. The game is available for Windows, Linux, Android, as well as experimental ports to other platforms.

Gallery

(Clicking on an image will give you a lossless PNG version of each)

About principia-web

This website is the community site for Principia, providing a platform for sharing user created levels and interacting with the Principia community.

Principia-web originally started as an unofficial community site replacement by ROllerozxa after the official community site operated by Bithack shut down in 2018. It has since turned into the primary community site for the game after the source code release, created by the community for the community. To read more about the history of principia-web read this blog post written by ROllerozxa.

The source code powering principia-web, as well as related web infrastructure is freely available and open source.