Portal

Allow me to go slightly off-topic for a moment ...

Valve has introduced Portal 2 on the E3. Not much of a surprise since this was very much expected, though people hoped it would still be released in 2010. Now we are looking at a release date of 2011 (which is generous enough to even work on Valve Time). But looking at the teaser and especially on the in-game videos (some of I’m not sure if we will actually recover in the final game since they could just as easily be proof-of-concept levels) this will definitely be a game worth waiting for.

The new game mechanics suggest the game’s puzzles will be much more complex with the different means of manipulating movement, speed and direction. Which is fine. The first Portal was not that difficult and actually quite leisurely paced. I think we all want a sequel which is a bit more challenging in that regard, and I’m quite happy that Valve is apparently not taking the easy way out by just ramping up the difficulty level by demanding insane precision and flawless timing (as too many of the custom maps did). In fact I very much enjoyed the fact that the first Portal allowed you to take your time, to figure out how to proceed - if necessary by try and error – at your own time and kept the levels highly navigable [1]. The videos suggest that Valve has kept that design principle alive and has rather ramped up the complexity to combine the various means at your disposable to get through the levels. In short, it looks like Portal will remain rather a thinking man’s (or woman’s) game than a next gen test of mere skillfulness.

But let’s look once more at the first Portal. In retrospect it looks like a stroke of genius, a precious little pearl skillfully designed and executed almost to perfection (okay, I’m exaggerating, but only a bit).

However, I have a few theories of my own saying that Portal originally was never devised as a game.

I suspect Portal started as a tech demo. I think Valve was initially looking for a cool new weapon/device to top off the gravity gun for a future HL game. One of those concepts they came up with were portals and some programmers sat down to see if they could realize that idea. The dev commentary talks a lot about the technical difficulties they had to face to make portals work, so it’s safe to assume there was a lot of tinkering involved.
I imagine to test the portals (the initial technique, the physics and the consequences for the graphics) they build simple rooms; test chambers. I guess once they cracked the initial challenges of the portals they started toying around with the possibilities that came with this cool new feature. For that, more test levels were created. They advanced that into other objects moving through portals. They discovered the possibilities of applying the properties of the physics engine to portals (fast thing goes in, fast thing comes out).

I don’t even think they had massive puzzle solving in mind when they started this project. I guess that took shape while they toyed around in the test levels. I think it’s no coincidence that the test chambers are shaped as generic as they are, featuring rectangular structures with very even patterns/blocks. It’s safe to assume that during testing the levels had those simple and generic shapes, and later they made the conscious choice to simply refine these designs into proper levels (once they had a theme).

I think that one day somebody was jumping through portals and flying through rooms and he thought: “Hey, this is pretty cool all by itself”. Did that person wore a hat? We will probably never know.

I think that was when they decided to build a puzzle game around this cool feature. And at some point they decided to build a storyline around that puzzle game. Perhaps because puzzles alone were not interesting enough. I could imagine that once they started bringing the test chambers into some useful order they felt they were creating a gaming arc which would ask for a big finale. And in a stroke of genius (or simply the urge to break conventions) the decided against simply creating more complex and complicated puzzles, but rather turned the puzzle into (some kind of) action game.

A tech demo which evolved into a full fledged game.

But this design of the game allowed for something else. Valve has always worked very hard on carefully and comprehensibly introducing game elements and making the player familiar with its various aspects, and then increasing the challenges at an appropriate pace. You can see this very prominently in HL2 and its sequels.

The modular design of Portal lent itself to make this into a textbook example how to lay out game elements and to make the player familiar with these elements, their properties and its possibilities. By design Portal is offering a step-by-step introduction to the portals and the puzzles. At times its so minute it sometimes slows down the pace of the game. But once the player leaves the test chambers for the finale act he has a comprehensive knowledge of the game mechanics and can easily apply this to the new environment he is entering. There are very few spots in the last segments which are (potentially) confusing and may leave the player perplexed how to proceed. This is very skillfully done and I’m in awe of how Valve implemented it and what they’ve achieved with it. I’m sure that was never the intention when they turned Portal into a game. But I think the structure they were dealing with enabled them to put some of the knowledge they already had into a highly sophisticated systematic how to guide players.

You can clearly see similar efforts in L2D, which is another excellent example of giving a player a lot of guidance by offering clear designs and making essential information clearly comprehensible.

Portal 2 will definitely be constructed differently. I think this time the game will be entwining its different elements. I dare to claim this will be a game featuring puzzles to tell a story, instead of a story to justify the puzzles. The story being the core instead of the icing of the cake. This is the prospect which intrigues me the most about Portal 2 and I’m really looking forward to it.