Who would have believed that a 3D puzzle game voiced by a psychopathic female AI would become one of the games of 2007? Designer Kim Swift gives Jamie Sefton the hole truth... (This the second part of a feature on Orange Box. You can read part one, which focuses on Half-Life 2: Episode Two, here).
The games world has gone bat shit over Portal. By the time you read this, there will be around 23,456 more blogs about the Weighted Companion Cube and over 1.2 million references on forums about "cake", beating the previous record set by "the knights who say 'Ni'" by 67 per cent.
Despite Valve's sci-fi spatial puzzler clocking in at less than three hours, Portal has become a phenomenon, built on a fantastic game idea, a teasing Half-Life universe setting, memorable characters, and the funniest writing and best-performed dialogue this side of Psychonauts.
"I think the main reason people like the game is that it's just got a great personality," says designer Kim Swift. "When you hand people a lot of story, it makes people lazy, it's all there for you, and you don't have to discover anything: you're basically creating apathy. Sometimes it's best to be a little bit vague with your story, and people can have all sorts of fun filling in the gaps that you've left for them."
STUDENT GRANT Portal began life as Narbacular Drop, a portal-based game created by Kim and a group of friends at the DigiPen Institute of Technology in Redmond, Washington. Through that experience, the team learned a lot about what makes an interesting and enjoyable title.
"One of the reasons we kept Portal as simple as Narbacular Drop, is that we found out that the more complications you add to a game, the more you're increasing the chances that you're going to do something stupid. We'd be trying to do a lot of different stuff, rather than focusing on one concept. We found that having a simple game design allows you to spend your time polishing that idea."
Valve saw Narbacular Drop and were immediately impressed by the Portal concept, snapping up the talented graduates and teaming them up with the Half-Life crew in the hope of creating something unique to add to Gordon Freeman's universe. "We're all big HL fans, so why not! We met up with Marc Laidlaw, the lead writer on the HL games, and just made sure that everything fitted in OK. We talked to the other Episode teams, to see how we can get the games to fit together - so in Episode Two, there's a mention of the Aperture Science facility."
DIGITAL LOVE The star of Portal is GLaDOS, the mixed-up psychopathic female AI boss of the testing facility - but how did the idea of this quirky, robot enemy happen? "We eventually had a game that was fun and interesting to play, but was just very dry," continues Kim. "So we talked to Eric Wolpaw, who does our writing, and he was able to bring a lot of personality to the table.
"We tried a few different timings of when she should start to go batty, and we basically came up with that particular evolution of her personality. You know you've succeeded when someone completes a puzzle, smiles, then completely stops what they're doing to listen to GLaDOS talk, laugh, then get into the elevator." Another major... er... personality in Portal is the Weighted Companion Cube, but apparently the cuddly cuboid never had any voice of its own.
"We tossed the idea around a little bit, but nah. There's something amusing about imbuing this completely inanimate object with a personality that isn't there, but everyone is impressing upon it these qualities - that it's your best friend, it's wonderful."
HUGE SUCCESS Portal required major playtesting to ensure the balance of gameplay, character and storyline to get it just right, using hardcore Counter-Strike fans, people's wives and partners, and even Gabe Newell's children.
"I guess we just wanted to see how many kinds of people we could get to have fun," adds Kim. "If people are laughing, we've done our job. If they're ripping off their headphones and looking at us in disgust, then we need to make some adjustments. A lot of our dialogue and narrative came from inside jokes, and if other people enjoyed it too, it stayed in the game. I miss the days of point and click adventure games where they were just funny, a laugh riot..."
Before we leave Kim to begin planning her next secret project, we wondered what she and the rest of the Portal development team felt like, knowing that millions of Portal fans are now quoting lines of dialogue to anyone who will listen?
"It's horrible! Why would I like people enjoying my game that I put my blood, sweat and tears into for two years?"
Its a darn good game based on a simply but wonderfully executed idea, with some of the best narrative, clever puzzles, and involving gameplay in a while. Sit down with it for an hour, finish it, try the challenges. Play about in some of the larger levels seeing how long you can keep yourself flying through the air before you hit the ground.
Anyone who claims that portal is a load of "s**te" clearly doesnt understand how beautifully simple it is. I loved it, as did thousands of others.
This was a triumph. Im making a note here, HUGE SUCCESS.
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