In the end, there are many important decisions after this that were critical to GladOS working as well as she did, such as her entire personality. We had little in the way of art production on the team, so it being a character that largely spoke to you via voice over was a straightforward production solution. The antagonist could start as a narrative tool for introduction & reward, and over time become the thing that pushed back on the player, eventually giving them the core goal of the game-"I want to learn all this because I need to be able to defeat X". We talked about various solutions, and in the end decided that introducing an antagonist made the most sense. There was no real failure, no cost to mistakes, nothing overall to fear, no larger goal to strive for, and hence no real reason to advance. Nothing in the game pushed back on the player. After much discussion, we settled on the idea that it was the lack of threat or pressure. Considering the entire game was really just a process of learning about the core gameplay mechanic, this scared us a lot, making us worry that we’d have to create a whole other section of the game afterwards.īut first, we asked ourselves what it was that was causing players to consider everything as training. Players were having fun, but they seemed to consider everything they played as just training leading up to something else. The playtest response we kept seeing could be summed up as "This is really fun! When does the game start?". There was no GladOS, the player just moved from puzzle to puzzle without any sense of progression or reward beyond the increasing complexity of the puzzles. We had been working on Portal for about a year, and at that point we had 14 levels of the game in a state where they were being regularly playtested. One decision that ended up being very important was the one behind GladOS. In any game's development, there are too many decisions to count, and many of them will ruin the game if made incorrectly. We paired them up with some experienced developers at Valve, and let the team loose. When we hire those kinds of teams, we’re fundamentally more interested in the people than the thing they’ve built, and in our discussions with them, the Portal team seemed like a group of people with a huge amount of potential. Can you recall that process of the Narbacular Drop team joining Valve, and the key decisions that eventually made that game what it is?īy the time we saw Narbacular Drop at the Digipen student day, we’d already hired multiple groups of inexperienced developers who had built interesting things. Portal became incredibly influential to the indie games scene-its length, storytelling and environmental design are felt in a lot of today's games.
By putting it in the Orange Box, we didn’t have to do the heavy lifting of explaining to people why they should buy this thing that was unlike anything they’d played before-instead, we could lure them in with Episode Two & TF2, and surprise them with the game they had the least expectations for. The Orange Box really solved Portal’s biggest challenge, which was to explain itself to players. There wasn’t much of a history of first person puzzle games, let alone ones that combined a new gameplay mechanic with comedy. We’d put it in front of enough play testers to be confident that players would have fun with it, but Portal didn’t fit any existing model of a successful game for us to know how it was going to really turn out. We didn’t really know what to hope for with Portal.
Were you surprised by the response to Portal, in that a lot of people considered it to be the highlight of The Orange Box at the time?
0 kommentar(er)
