Integrating Narrative into Game Design: A Portal Post-Mortem

I'm Kim Swift and I was a level designer and the team lead on portal and I'm Erik Wolpaw and I was a writer on portal so we're here to talk to you today a little bit about our techniques for integrating narrative and design sort of phrase as a portal postmortem giving examples of what we particularly did so in case you're wondering post mortem means we will be talking about stuff that's in the game so if you haven't played the game and you're one of those people like it's all really and upset whenever someone tells you something that you hadn't heard about a game then you know you might want to leave the room well you know or not that's my - so here's what we're going to try and cover the PA first of all I'm going to make a little briefcase of why you should care about anything we're going to tell you secondly I'm going to go real quickly into our narrative philosophy which is sort of our crackpot theory of how gameplay and narrative should be

combined and third of all we're going to talk about how we took the crackpot theory and tried to apply it to our development process so in particular why should you care about how we did this on portal well first of all we had a really small team with about only 10 10 people at once working on the game usually was anywhere between like 5:00 and 7:00 and it's been pretty popular and no first prize and you know despite the game being kind of unorthodox so after all some done we actually don't really have any regrets unlike us poor guy so you know now why would you care about how we put together our narrow van design so by itself our story you know wouldn't really make a whole you know great novel you know don't get me wrong so the dialogue is just really really funny he's probably about the funniest

man you'll ever meet just in case you're wondering but in the barber you know the gameplay it's right but honestly on the dry side honestly it would be a race to see which one would fail the fastest on its own but because we had a really tight integration of both our story and our gameplay it seemed to really resonate with people and you know who worked and led Kim said our team size kind of imposed a lot of constraints on our design choices so our design methods from the beginning had to be low impact on both our time and energy budgets but this kind of helped us creatively sidestep a lot of our constraints for instance you know GLaDOS being a disembodied voice might not have actually occurred to us if we'd had ton of animators and a ton of resources to

make her a little robot buddy that followed you around or something and yet it kind of turned out to be just the the perfect solution to the narrative and portal so here's a crackpot theory the idea is that games tell two stories there's a story story which is sort of a sum total of the game's dialogue the cutscenes and then there's the gameplay story which is the story described by the actions the terror player takes in the game world and if you lower the Delta between those two stories the closer you put them together the more satisfying your game will be or at least that was our theory there's a lot of games that I think suffer from high Delta but she's a game developers conference if I run down a lot of them it's going to be like super dick move so I'm going to mention one game that I actually like a lot so it should be non-controversial it's also kind of old

his Clive Barker's undying which is a first-person shooter that was released like six years ago and it's a good shooter and regardless of what you may think about his style Clive Barker and that's him we're super scary pair of pants he's a talented writer who actually in interviews I think seems to care a lot about the story in his games so Clive Barker's undying you play this world war one war hero who goes to Scotland to visit the castle or one of your war buddies and the castle is sort of infested with ghouls yeah and you're shooting a lot of monsters and there's a lot of death and destruction all around but pretty frequently is you're going through the mansion the game all of a sudden stops to play one of these cutscenes when you sort of calmly interrogate one of the members of the staff and you're certain you know what do you do how you doing I feel and stuff like that meanwhile and no point is your character

just grab the help by the label and say you know like there are monsters Byfield on that corner killing everyone they come across you need to run now the two stories make absolutely no sense when you smush them together an idea undying is one of the first times that I remember a good game sort of being undermined by a disconnect between the story the gameplay was telling and the story the story itself was telling so with all that in mind our fundamental portal narrative design goal was that the story story would never ever intrude or contradict the gameplay story for us less was always more and we were ruthless about it we were ruthless trimming the narrative fat tightening our belts and then trimming it even more totals gonna be a lean storytelling machine if it killed us and usually meant killing you killing me because it was a lot of good wines that had to get cut we're really sorry so enough about

how we feel about games like let's talk about how we practically applied these feelings first of all we're going to talk a little bit about our play testing process which by the way in case you're wondering it's really important the second reflecting story in your environment next evolving narrative out of gameplay and then again vice-versa evolving gameplay out of narrative so play testing is probably the most important thing we ever did on portal you know actually sit down and watch people play your game don't just you know have some other company play touch the game and then send your report afterwards it's you know just not gonna be as valuable to you as just sitting down having someone play your game and you watch them and see how they react to it you can find out what your players actually want by watching them in the case of portal we adjusted our gameplay to what players look like they needed did they need more training because clearly they were really confused here you know maybe they needed me like some

more reinforcement of what we train them on because they wanted to use those knows new skills and in addition to that we also adjusted our story to what to enhance essentially what our players were feeling at that time yeah frequent play tests help keep this objective about our design decisions of watching play test is a great way to expose pretty quickly what isn't working one way we had narrative wise was the end of a play test we would ask play testers to just tell us the portal story back beef ID and if they couldn't tell it to us we took that as a real clear sign that they just weren't interested that we were failing and the fix for it almost always was just to cut more story cut more exposition it usually meant cutting something that initially seemed essential to the story and as it turned out it just made it stronger every time you cut something right another thing is play test early

and often on the far side there you can see what the first room in the game actually looked like you know maybe a couple weeks in the development and then on the other side you can see what it finally shipped you know as and we literally started play testing this room the first week that we got to valve and started working on the game we you know have portals together in some horrible way that you know we're glad doesn't exist anymore and we were already making better decisions about what our levels were like so I don't know it's kind of hard to make out but in the first picture there's kind of like this shimmery force field which was you know the original cage for the player and we got rid of this pretty quickly because our play testers you know just didn't understand what it was they would you know walk up to the to the force field and they you know we're wondering why they couldn't walk through it so they would just kind of like trace the edge of the cage like five times and get really confused so we changed it to glass just to fix that

problem so you know not only did our play testing help us get a better narrative and get better gameplay it also helped us refine our art direction you know as you can notice in the later picture it's a lot cleaner it's a lot simpler we extracted any of the elements that you know didn't really have any relevance to the player and it really helped us teach the players what they needed to know so it's just kind of a digression yeah I labeled this wide advice because this is the only one I'm fully behind as advice of anything we're going to say today this is this is actually good advice if you're writing a funny game first of all god help you because it's it's unpleasant because tough-guy dialogue is just about as macho the fiftieth here as the first time whereas funny dialogue is funny once maybe about three years ago I worked on being called Psychonauts

there's more people clapping than bought it now I lost my train we're convinced I cannot double piehole so Double Fine is kind of structured everybody sits in one big room is 40 40 people maybe sitting in one big room and it's you know the two and a half years that I was there we know game development it's 12 hours a day six seven days a week and so I had to sit there in the middle of this pit of people working on Psychonauts hearing my supposedly funny dialogue blaring out of 40 monitors to just grim stony silence and it was just it's it was torture it was psychological torture for me because Tim wisely had his own office somewhere where you have to hear the grim stony silence so this is you

writing a funny game you are going to exist in a black cloud of despair for however long it takes you to make the game but so here's the advice trust your instincts try and remember your initial reaction people's initial reactions to seeing it and you know do whatever you can do to not despair but the the third part the part that helped us a lot again on portal is play test more often you play test the more often you actually get to see someone here in your dialogue seeing the game for the first time and it's honest to God whatever the benefits of play testing are for the design team for a writer it is the only way really to maintain sanity during the the two or three years it's going to take you to make the game are present yeah and all yeah medication so another thing we tried to do when we had to cut exposition was to if we

didn't want to cut it all together was to try and embed exposition in the environment when we were initially talking about we had some email ideas for embedding an email and we were actually using email to talk about putting an email and at some point we discovered that reading email wasn't actually that's fun did you enjoy reading that last emails and now isn't that exciting which approach didn't put it in the game so that was one of our rules and the idea was try and be creative about reflecting story in the environment and again easy to say be creative but if you apply a rule set and then you're ruthless about the rules it's amazing how creative you get the big hurry if it's a choice between coming up with some novel way to embed your exposition in the environment simply cutting it them all together so what we did in Portal was one of the things we did was you have these little wall scribblings in the behind the scenes areas of the game and honestly these are really quick and easy to do like they really only took like one or

two days tops and they were pretty effective at telling story so here's an example of the room and you know put yourself in a position of your characters what would they do in the situation of the game so in this case we had this idea for a character that we called the Rat Man and you know he was supposed to be a fellow it's escaped test subject just like you and he's you know home for loopy and we originally wanted you to actually meet this NPC at some point in the game but you know we had two artists so it wasn't really feasible so rather than just sort of cut our backstory on this guy we decided to you know manifest them here in these rooms so you know I asked myself if I was trapped inside an insidious facility bent on my destruction run by a homicidal AI of what would I do to pass the time so another big tool we use was

to try and evolve our narrative out of gameplay like Kim said we tried to write to enhance what play testers were feeling which required me to try and keep the story as light as possible two big big hurdle to overcome to just not get attached to any piece of writing and yeah because what it was just gonna disappear at any given time and we'd have to think up something else and the same goes for gameplay too don't get too attached to anything like you know you might need to cut it and it's probably for the best so here's an example of that like the weighted companion cube so we're gonna talk about this first from a game design standpoint of one day we sat down and decided we wanted to make what we called the Box Marathon level so we're essentially you've got your tube at the beginning of the map when you take it all the way through to the end of the map and put it on a button supposed to be a big long obstacle course so the first thing that we tried was having sort of this moving platform you know over a goo pit where you'd have to stand on it with your box and avoid stuff kind

of similar actually to the last test chamber that we shipped and you know it pissed players off like to no end they would end up destroying the box by dropping in the goo and they get really annoyed because they have to go back to the beginning of the map and you know they didn't really want to carry this stupid thing with them everywhere so we went back to the drawing board the first thing we did was removed the the moving platforms over the you know so you couldn't destroy the box and we added more gameplay events we're having the box is necessary for you to solve the puzzle so here's a couple examples one one side there you can see that we use the cube to you know kind of make a dynamic set of stairs there to get up those platforms and then on the other side it's a puzzle where you have to you know put the Box on one of these buttons and then you know go stand another button and get this energy ball through those doors into a you know catcher thing and these work pretty well in terms of making players at least somewhat take the box with them and not

hate it and but you know players we're still kind of forgetting it they leave it at one puzzle and then you know go to the next puzzle and go oh crap and then have to go back to the beginning and grab their box so we said okay maybe if we we redesign this room so that way you're always kind of facing this button and taking a look at it so that that worked pretty well at least to remind players by the way you need this at the end of the map but you know we needed something else like players really weren't getting that attached to the box and there is still a few people that would kind of forget it behind and so Eric to the rescue over here though as much as possible we tried to you know put hints for our players you know in the environment whether it be through lighting or geometry you know when all else fails great dialog really was a great tool for us to give a handsome player yeah I had been reading luckily these uh declassified government interrogation manuals and running things

are awesome I recommend them really cool but one of the things they talked about was that isolation leads interrogation subjects to start becoming attached inanimate objects and kind of just something click there's like while you're sort of alone this whole time and maybe if GLaDOS psychologically needles you a little bit you know it would work and crazily I mean they know what they're doing their government interrogation specialist no one ever forgot their box after we put in that dialogue that's for sure and sort of as an afterthought you know we put these pink hearts they're so pretty on the cube just to kind of queue back to the dialogue there's something special about this box and you should take it with you and take care of it and honestly this was a really great thing for us just just because it had a dual function as far as the ending of

this map went and the first thing is well at the time that we were finishing up this map we were also working on our ending boss battle and we had settled at the time on just disintegrating these little parts of GLaDOS and we had an incinerator in the map and we didn't train our players so obviously they had no idea what they were doing and you know they'd have to press the switch to open up the incinerator and they just they completely ignored it and then they would wander around the room and then get really angry at us so we obviously had to train this somewhere and we had a great idea of where to put the training yeah originally up until almost the last minute at the end of the companion cube level you just had to just leave the companion cube you had to abandon it because you couldn't bring it with you into the elevator and GLaDOS made some reference to it being euthanized and it was sort of sad but it wasn't really a good ending to the level so putting the

incinerator there and having you be forced to euthanize it was just an awesome way to end it and in addition to that it was also a great place to train the player because there is no stress there was no pressure the stress of killing well yeah it's a little stressful but but but more like you know there was nothing shooting at you or you know they didn't have a clock ticking down like oh my god I got to do this in 10 seconds and we did that because well players do not learn anything when they're completely stressed out like they just they just won't absorb anything so putting the training there was was pretty good also it provided a really great point to our narrative as well because you know you get to incinerate Gladys the same way she you know she made you incinerate your best friend the whole companion cube saga it was just a really great example of how the game play kind of influenced the sword story which then turned around and influenced the gameplay okay so having said all that

about how its gameplay gameplay gameplay no narrative we did reach a point where we discovered that gameplay wasn't really working by itself and this was the original ending of portal honestly the biggest obstacle to us when making portal was our ending boss battle you know we look at other games okay we know what a boss battle will look like in a first-person shooter or RPG but what in the world is a boss battle gonna look like in a weird environmental puzzle game yeah the first thing you think or at least the first thing we thought was that the boss monster for a puzzle game should be a deviously complex puzzle and that sort of innocuous sounding conclusion really just gave us a lot of headaches and pain so we're gonna show you a few examples of some things that we tried as boss battles and eventually abandoned for one reason or another so

the first one we tried was James Bond lasers so literally like they they were big giant lay that would follow the player around trying to them and wait you know obviously we cut this cheers I know aren't they pretty nice these are training maps that we had for the the James Bond style lasers where essentially you'd have to place your portal in front of the laser and then you know place one in a wall and then redirect the laser at that weird orange thing sitting in that glass wall and you know break through and be able to get to the other side where you would meet GLaDOS that's GLaDOS there and her giant shimmery cube face don't you love temp art it's great stuff and once again you'd have to redirect those lasers at those you know which you find out our orange plugs supplying GLaDOS with power and you know the end but yeah it was not good

the lasers were extremely boring to dodge and kind of difficult to tune because we would make them follow the player kind of fast and then it would be unfair and if we you know slowed them down then they're boring they were also really difficult to aim believe it or not through a portal it was kind of a pain and it was also hard to tell if you're hit by the lasers too so you know we abandon this idea and instead chose to use a rocket launcher so the second attempt that we had was or to comment [Music] sorry I had fun with Photoshop one day so you know we had a lot of players and you know test our game that were hardcore first-person shooter players so they are like we need more action in them and you need to jump around and be a crazy portal ninja and so we were like yeah okay sure we'll give a shot and you

know it didn't really work out very well here is a picture of a level that we actually shipped in the game and this is what it originally looked like so this was supposed to be the first time that you have meet GLaDOS and you can see that there's a rocket launcher there we had put it in at that point and you would have to redirect your portal you know port that redirect the Rockets didn't user portals to you know shoot GLaDOS and face but then that's GLaDOS yeah she's a bunch of roller minds so you know this was okay but we then made it a little bit more complex so she would rise to the top of this room and then all of these little pill boxes would pop open with turrets in them and the rocket launcher was still on and you'd have to try and you know redirect the laser and hit her again and all I mean while the turrets are firing at you the rocket launchers firing at you and so yeah the high intensity gameplay

sucked that sucked so bad that I it's not so much it I go I'm not gonna let him talk I needed it so much no one paid attention to GLaDOS any of our dialogue because there's way too much stuff going on and we had play testers who come in who were sort of hardcore counter-strike or shooter fans and they were able to bring a little bit of enjoyment out of it but the vast majority of our play testers who had sort of gotten used to the slower paced cerebral nature of portal were just frustrated and confused and dissatisfied which was absolutely not the way we kind of wanted to send them out of the door so the final attempt was to have a chase sequence and that's guys there is the kidney she cubed so here's kind of what that looks like this is actually a continuation of

the previous section where you know Gladys would rise up to top of the ceiling well after you hit her with the second rocket she's rise up even more and would zoom down this hallway and you would actually have to follow her and by you know flinging a couple times and you know getting up into this hallway and honestly the pacing was just horrible because you know players wouldn't necessarily see where she would go and so they didn't know where they were going so they would wander around for a while and they eventually realize oh I don't think I've been there before and you know kind of get up there but you know if it's a chase sequence it's supposed to be action-packed you're supposed to be going going going and you know instead players you're just wandering around confused and then once you actually got up into this hallway we wanted to make it seem like oh Gladys and sprung some sort of trap and and to kill you so we had all these Pistons kind of like break out of the walls and you know try and crush you or you know block you from getting further and we

also you know had these turrets and stuff popped down from the ceiling and if you actually played the game you can see that these hallways are kind of similar to what we ship W and we took a lot of stuff out because yeah this I'm gonna bother reading down this failed in every way it's possible or a level like that to fail if you had bad pacing players didn't really know what was going on was Gladys making the Pistons come out at you and every solution we came up with to try and fix those were either too expensive for us to do or just made the gameplay even worse so complex boss battle didn't work and the thing that we actually learned from all this was that the more complex that we made our puzzles the slower the pacing actually got because players would have to stop and think about what they were going to do next and you know if you watch an action movie and and you know you get to the climactic sequence there's something happening all the time and in our game when we wanted it to be climactic because we made everything you know more complex it did

the opposite thing than what we expected so it's it's funny to us now but we were desperately screwed at this point because the episode 2 was winding up and TF after 10 years was going to be dis Alison and you know the episode 2 guys are running around they're like our final battle is going to be a hundred Striders and you're gonna be driving the car running into little mini Strider what are you guys so but again once again old friend playtesting helped us there was a point and we I don't know why we didn't realize it earlier on but there was one piece of feedback that we were getting that there was a point in the game that playtesters felt excuse me who was both climactic and satisfying and it's the fire pit it happened about 2/3 of the way through the game of a testing proper the regular testing along

a tick adrenaline is almost over and GLaDOS is kind of talking you out you're riding this this platform into a fire pit and and you eventually you escape out of here but play testers were just consistently telling us not only was this dramatic and exciting they they kept telling us that it was actually like it was a really tough puzzle that I felt super satisfied to to solve which absolutely made no sense to us right [Music] is going to be this picture when it comes right down to it at that point the

game that's about the easiest puzzle in Portal you place a portal on the wall next to fire pit and then you place one in the safe area and you just hop through it mmm that's it so we then had to sit down and reflect like what in the world made this so climactic and one of the things that we learned was that well it had time pressure you know there was only a limited amount of time while you're on that platform before you're going to get burned alive to place your portals and escape and you know as I think I've said before you know time pressure makes people think something that is a lot more complicated than it actually is another thing was it had a really high visual impact I mean you can't really go wrong with a platform heading straight to a giant pit of fire for visual impact and you know it's something that our players had never seen before in the game and so something also a dramatic high point because for the first time GLaDOS is pretty openly trying to kill you and also for the first time you're

able to assert a little bit of control over your environment and escape from her and like Kim was saying that tie all of those three things combined made it so that an easy puzzle was sort of feeling like a much more complicated puzzle which allowed us with led us to the realization that we've been holding on to this idea that we needed a complex puzzle at the end and it simply just wasn't true so here's what we actually shipped in the game is boss battle you can see GLaDOS there with her little personality spheres and the next order was a patch where a rocket launcher would pop up and you'd have to reorient the Rockets and hit GLaDOS take one of those spheres and then put it in the incinerator by you know getting to the activation switch with your portals and then getting back to the incinerator and tossing it in the end so taking the four lessons we learned this is how we applied them to the final GLaDOS battle first of all was time pressure we were ourselves under some

time pressure so instead of getting fancy we actually just had a timer counting down to something that would kill you and we decided that that thing would kill you would be some neurotoxin because it was also really cheap just to make a green particle system so you know visual impact well on one side of the screen you know on the far side over there you can see a piece of concept art that an artist at valve Jason Bradshaw did for us thanks Jason and on the other side there you can see what we actually shipped so everything in this room visually is pointing at GLaDOS you know got the geometry of the stairs leading up to her got all the lights pointing at her you know after all this time of hearing GLaDOS heckle you and fur ass you you know we wanted to make this room have some serious impact and you know I think it did its job pretty well and you know it's it's not like any other room in the game and so I think it really gave players a sense of satisfaction and

then in terms of a high dramatic moment putting some time pressure to the puzzle made it so that I only had to write like six minutes of decent dialogue which is in stark contrast to all our previous attempts which required me to write infinity in it which makes eric's a bad time for me writing infinity minutes of dialogue and finally the easy puzzle you know when Allison done portal is a puzzle game but all the things that we learned led us back towards you know we need to simplify this puzzle so adding time pressure and then you know having it be a very dramatic room and have a lot of really interesting points made by GLaDOS scaling back the puzzle allowed players to really absorb this moment and have a good time and you know honestly at least for me there's nothing more frustrating than getting to the finale of a game and

not being able to beat that stupid boss battle and see the ending of the game which in our case we really wanted people to see or rather hear so we wanted to leave players you know with a real sense of satisfaction and you know scratch that we wanted players to feel genuinely happy and leave the game with a smile on their face so yeah we sat down we kind of made a list of what makes people happy and then we kind of made a list of what we could put in a game and then put it into Excel and pivot table and head to song kind of floated to the top and this is Jonathan Coulton who we got to write our catchy song who's wearing his best hat by the way and so you know when I am done a lot of this actually came out of our constraints you know we had a small team we had a limited amount of time and you know frankly we just couldn't make a giant F and the epic finale of doom and

you know the cost to happiness ratio of putting a song over some scrolling text was really high so the morale of the whole thing for us was just try to fully embrace your constraints is fuel for creativity honestly without the constraints that we had I truly believed portal would not be as good a game as it turned out to be and in addition to that you know have faith in yourself have faith in your writing and and in the skills of your team because you know they're your best resources you know and once again play test play test play test and when you're done with that play test some more because honestly you will get the most valuable information for your game out of watching your play tests and it'll make for a better player experience in the end

so we had only two kind of kept our top short because you know we kind of assumed people had questions because we keep getting asked questions and so you know we wanted to just kind of make a point and then leave the floor open to you guys to ask us whatever you want so questions you I kept on pointed back okay and they're all bad games oh yeah I

have no idea not of these were are actually prescriptive you know go for it if you want it was just a personal choice we made I think it because we're not just personally I don't like I don't I mean for me I don't like to read that much I don't like to read in games I mean I like to read books but when I'm in a game I just wanted to kind of happen and not have to read that much and Eric you know we're talking about this before and Eric made a really good point which was you know how often do you use a voice recorder to leave secret messages for your friends and family yeah something these futuristic games there's always like over in the future and everybody we messaged on PDAs I can go by PDA for eight dollars at Best Buy now and nobody's using it to deliver messages to me ever so yeah we just so that's our own personal hang-up with those two things but I think they're fine and games okay saying like oh yeah what Mike this

is important if I stand here anyway looks like a good place to stand yeah it isn't great place in yeah and I want to ask this question because I thought it was exactly type of thing that I think of Eric normally really against why does Gladys have an incinerator in her room funny story so the question was why does Gladys have an incinerator sitting in her room and the the history actually kind of fun like we were talking sort of like a back story and there one it's like so they created this giant AI and they weren't really sure at Aperture Science if she was going to go out of control so they made this room so that way you know if she did completely lose her mind they could you know incinerator and get rid of her right there's a red phone in there that he's supposed to be there was a guy who that was his job to sit there and call somebody if it looked like the a I was going rogue and then they

and the thing it sadly it didn't work no we buy after science they're sort of half geniuses half half morons Thanks so you mentioned playtesting as a really critical step but also not outsourcing it to another group how do you go about selecting and acquiring a steady supply of new players throughout your process how did you guys poke about doing that so the question was how did we go about getting new playtesters all the time to play test our game do you know how easy it is to go walk out to the nearest gamestop and say hey we've got this game do you want to come play it and of course and also we had you know friends and family come in and play test gabe's kids actually play tested for us just in valves there's a lot of people working at valve who were kind of heads down on their own project so we had a lot of people who could just come in you know from other parts of the company as well

and did you ever have people come back for like additional tests or was sort of you test once and that's that's all the useful information so the question was do we have people come back and play tests again usually we would have people play test once but we had a few play testers mainly valve who seemed to really like portal and were stubborn so you know they wouldn't really get frustrated easily so when we would have a puzzle that we wanted to try out that was really really rough and we just wanted to see if the concept was good we would usually grab one of those guys and have them sit down and chug through it thank you hi in the developer commentary you said to you there will be more portal games and obviously you know your first couple sides show you know you have your having a lot of success and when that happens you get a lot of resources you will be a little tiny team so what kind of are you

you know afraid or how will you overcome the challenge of not having as many constraints and next o so how will we make a next portal if there is one how can we keep some of our client design philosophies if we have a lot more resources and it's a good question I don't know I'm scared to tell you the truth to this bask in the moment now about people bugging me about the next funny enjoy no but seriously I don't know yeah I don't know a little bit of a personal flashback for me but um as I remember toward the end of narbacular drop there is a puzzle where you're required to to

aim through one of the doorways and put you know a portal on the wall on the other side in essence to to shoot through which was very elegant as a way of pushing that the mechanics of the game to its women I suppose and I noticed of course that in in Portal you chose well for one reason or not or that they're not to allow the player to fire the the portal gun through one portal and I was I can think of a couple of reasons why you might have done that but I was just wondering if it was a I guess for technical purposes or as part of a larger idea so the question was did we so in our back Euler drop we we gave players the ability of being able to shoot one portal through another portal and we decided to you know not do that for portal because not because it was you know technically empathic knowledge

II was impossible but more for a design purpose like you know we wanted players to learn something in particular in a certain level and so giving the players suddenly the ability to bypass all the training that we had tried so hard to construct and you know just seemed like shooting ourselves in the foot essentially in the first trailer for a portal the portals seemed to have sort of an almost liquid quality to them now there are more like holes in the wall also they were a blue and a red portal and now it's a blue and orange one what triggered this change so the question was why did we change the look and color of our portals yeah well honestly we went through just a bunch of iterations and as far as blue

and orange goes you know we like orange better than red I mean it really boiled down to that like we liked the color choice better in the end and you know we left it sort of up to our artists like you know what do you want the portals to look like so yeah so I think what you're referring to as far as the liquid quality of of how the portals were looking was that was an opening shader for it and we just decided to change it like it honestly just sort of we decided one day I just wanted to leave a comment I just want to thank you guys for the end of the torrid level the most satisfying thing that I felt in that game was was picking up that last torrid and walking into the elevator to the through the field and watching it just turned into a ball of ash thank you guys for that yeah no problem

yeah we also really like the way they scream too so I have a question I'm student and you guys started out as an indie developer so I'm just wondering if you have any suggestions for students and whatnot who are hoping to get into the game industry and break in like you guys did so the question is do we have any advice for student developers on how to break into the industry make games make as many as you can and fail because honestly failing you'll learn a lot of stuff like I can't tell you how many times we've failed on our game designs working at DigiPen like yeah one of them worked out but you know we had three others that were not the best games ever and and honestly practice makes perfect right so the more things you have on your resume and your portfolio to show to game developers that look I did all these projects I worked on them from start to finish you know it obviously shows that

I have commitment to to the project right so make games like whether it be a mod or you know a student project just just make as many as you possibly can and have fun with them thank you yeah so when I spoke to people that also played portal about the firepit puzzle one of the things that we talked about a lot was the fact that we felt like we had broken the game somehow by escaping like this final ending and that there was this moment of sort of shock and confusion about what to do next when you suddenly had had gotten past what you imagined was the games and and that was a very powerful moment and the way that it defied conventional game narratives so I'm wondering if that that defying of conventional game narrative was something that was intentional in the design of the level or whether that was just something that was an accidental occurrence from what you set up honestly but I was one of the very first thing the collection oh sorry I forgot the question No was it intentional the sort of way

that you feel maybe like you've broken the game after the fire pit and I guess there was someone intention ality there because that's one thing that virtually never changed the beats as far as you start in the relaxation ball at some point during the game although it maybe was earlier in the game at one point you escape the fire pit and then you would eventually meet GLaDOS was in there before anything I mean the the test levels with no dialogue basically had that structure just cuz we had this intuitive feeling that it would work and it just ended up working better than we thought so we can take some credit for it but not not total credit it just worked really well thank you Thanks so when I first heard about portal I went and played in her back Tyler dropped really thoroughly and when I played portal I know there were a lot of similarities the one big difference was that portal had all this humour a profound amount of humor and I was

wondering what the decision was and how you decided to throw in the comedy so the question is why did we decide to throw in comedy for portal because narbacular drop really wasn't that funny and you know there's something inherently funny about portals like you know especially you know you put one like both of them on the floor and you drop a box and you see you like popping out back and forth like there's something kind of funny and visceral about it and well honestly Eric's really damn funny yeah well I mean given a choice oh that was kind of in my comfort zone like if my task at now was to write stuff for portal if nobody was going to object I would just make it funny because it I mean that would that would you thank you something I was more likely to succeed at because he liked this pairing hi I have no problems harvesting Adam from little sisters I'm not kicking innocent bystanders to blood growth and

lots of games but why why why why did you have me kill off the companion so why did we kill off the companion cube well I think we explained that in the speech anyway you can thank the United States Secret Service I have two questions in the second ones quick the first one is it sounds like there's a lot of trial and error and rework that went into portal um did you have to do anything to smooth that over with management set their expectations or anything like that so the question is there's a lot of trial and error with with the game obviously and did we have to you know convince our management that was perhaps a good idea and honestly the way management works at valve is a lot different than it does about other game companies we don't really have producers there um you know we have team leads but basically you know maybe do like

administrivia stuff every once in a while and do some PR but you know honestly the people working in the game get to make the decisions about the game and have direct impact on what they're working on and you know we found that it just makes for a much more you know satisfied group of people making games also like the play testing the commitment to play testing wasn't our insight that's that's the valve philosophy and that's how they make games if we hadn't done that then we would have been okay fantastic second question is GLaDOS still alive and when will we see her again GLaDOS so the question is is GLaDOS still alive and when will we see her again well did you not listen to the last you're writing if you don't know

as far as when you'll see her again and who knows all right hi I had a question about your development background and how you guys scored yourself like an awesome scene by working with valve so what were you still making a questionnaire well no guy okay call yourself like a position to work with valve so the question was how did we end up like hooking up with valve to make portal so as far as like the team goes with the exception of Erik we were all students at DigiPen Institute of Technology and we created a game called narbacular drop which was our student project for our senior year and it was you know the predecessor the predecessor to portal you know you had two portals in the wall and there was an environmental puzzle game and every year different has an expo for graduating seniors and valve came by took a look at at our project and thought it was interesting enough to drag us over to valve and have us present the game to gabe newell and

after about 15 minutes through our presentation Gabe's you know told us to be quiet and then asked us what we were planning on doing after we graduated we were like well hopefully you know paying alone getting a job eating food and and you know he offered us a job on the spot essentially to come in and create portal using a Source engine and you know that's how we ended up there and Eric's got a different story yeah I worked I'd been just doing a lot of writing and then I went and I worked at Double Fine for a couple of years and then I left Double Fine and I was just back to freelance writing and for me it was just I got a mail one day from Gabe Newell and said you want to come or get Val I have another quick question yeah probably why didn't you guys submit this to IGF it seems like a perfect candidate so

that was it the reason because you guys got you know picked up by valve or so NAR back so here the question was why didn't we submit the game to IGF so narbacular drop actually was in the IGF student showcase three years ago the Japan submits the games that they find to be interesting to student showcase and the IDF we didn't make the the for indie professional like guess section but we made it to the scene showcase thank you how to be the element of cake coming to fruition so how the question is how did the element of cake come to fruition I kind of started off as like an inside joke I'm really an infant just was one of those things I think originally when we sat down that you guys were showing me the game there was something about cake in there and it just seemed like it's a comedy to will obsess over one thing that maybe you wouldn't expect to obsess over and and

we just they really didn't have any deeper meaning than that yeah we were just kind of having fun we were working very hard and having you keep turn around these are guys it goes our conference is turning ugly again two quick questions first was there any reasoning behind making like all the characters and the references and grottoes quotes in such female so the question is why did we decide to make our characters female GLaDOS and you know the main character so as far as the main character goes gave actually made a suggestion one day we were at the time looking to find what we wanted you know to be the main character protagonists of portal and you can see like some of her you know earlier shots of the game there's like a

balding dude as the main character and that was just hand part like it was it was something that we you know used the citizen model from half-life 2 and just kind of fix them up a little bit and put him in just for our testing purposes but anyways Gabe you know came up to us while we were looking to figure out what we wanted our main character to be and said well why don't you make it a girl and we're like all right sure I mean it really didn't stretch beyond that and you sort of oh what if okay what like post-feminist it didn't work and not in the girl no big deal and as far as GLaDOS while there's the awesome colliders Punja kind of made it seem like we had it had to be female but really we knew an actress in casting is is hard because we knew this person was gonna have to carry the game so we needed an actress or actor actor or actress who a was good and B wouldn't be offended when you know the first third of our recording sessions were just us playing her text-to-speech and

saying say this exactly like that back to us because act actors hate that sort of thing but she was super nice about it and so that that kind of inform that okay and the other one is just to officially shut my friend up is chella cyborg no another failure of writing Chell is not a cyborg there's no she's not a cyborg Shepard those ridiculous future shoes hey this might have already been dressed at some point but I got in late so I have to ask anyways um obviously portal is a very short game that met a lot of very popular success do you think this might start making a movement back towards the idea of shorter games being on the market I mean right now the huge pressure is you know everybody wants 20 plus 30 plus 40 plus our games because everyone won't get wants to get as much out of the game as they possibly can for

you know what they're paying out of their wallet yeah I mean sorry uh do you think portal would influence more developers to make shorter games because of the according the questioner people want longer and longer games although I'm not a hundred percent sure about that you know everybody had battled all all the people I know who played games who were adults now the common complaint is they never finish a game you know nobody ever finishes a game that I know who is in fourteen they just they don't have time and also in forty hours a week to play World of Warcraft to what's in your gaming time but uh so you know there were some practical constraints and how long we are going to make it but you know if we could have done anything I really wanted to make a game that P buddy who played it would be able to finish you know you'd be able to it's weird to be playing these games or trying to tell a story in a game work almost everybody it just sort of Peters out you know you just stop playing at

some point and never finish it alright thank you very much hello two-part question the first part is you mentioned that a lot of dialogue had been cut from the game I was wondering if any of it had gotten recorded and or put through the process of being somewhat final for GLaDOS and if so is there any chance you could release it on one of your websites because as a member of the portal mapping community we would give our eyeteeth to have extra GLaDOS dialogue so the question was how much of final dialogue cut and could we release it so a lot he wasn't a lot of final dialogue virtually everything went through the text-to-speech as temp audio and a lot of it got cut at that point and some of the stuff that got cut I you know a lot of it I'm just not super proud of so I wouldn't want to give it to anybody and somebody is good and if it is good I'm

gonna use it somewhere else to be mean yeah not to be mean but probably the chances are somewhat slim I had to try thank you my question is were there any considerations for making a multiplayer or cooperative experience so the question was were there any considerations for making portal a co-op or a multiplayer game yeah we thought about it actually the I don't know if we ship this or not but we played around for a little while actually having like multiple sets of portals and it is technically possible we just you know didn't really have the time to think through like what would the gameplay be that that was fun you know sort of immediate conclusion that that we actually kind of tried a little bit was oh my gosh portals and death match and it's less fun than you think it is honestly it's actually kind of frustrating hi you had a lot of really

good advice about keeping it wet keeping the project wet not getting too attached to ideas and being willing to cut things or make changes later I'm just wondering how what your experience was for balancing that with the need to get a project done and the kind of tendency of a project to kind of gain momentum the further it goes along and be harder to make changes later than earlier so the question was how do we temper a game you know the longer you work on it the harder it is to you know sort of cut things and and is that kind of what you were saying yeah okay had you said it better than I do and and playtesting you will know right away if your idea is good or bad you know if if you wash your players and they're just totally frustrated of your mind and you can't really you know necessarily like pinpoint the ways to fix it then cut it

because so you know one of the things that we do making our levels at least is we try and get them up and running once we come up with an idea okay we want you know such and such objectives as we try and get it up and running within like two to five days like really go fast and then we start running play test through it and if we play test it like maybe you know three or four times and we find that it's just really not working out then it's going to the cutting floor or going back again to design phase and you know really mangling it to work so we never really got to a point where you know it was really really difficult to cut something because you know we were always play testing and getting reinforcement for whether or not our ideas were good or bad directly from you know people we consider our customers thank you yep if your development team were your development process were a style of painting what would it be

so if our development process were a style of painting what would it be maybe maybe a I don't know yeah cute looks I have to getting some cubist painting so um ciao obviously has a very good set of DNA and you mentioned that it was Gabe's idea to make her female and gordon freeman has good DNA is there any question is our challenge we're gonna hook up essentially I don't know I mean you guys you know have access to Garry's Mod right you can

yeah I was wondering you you kept on talking about how you cut up a lot of things in the narrative and like cut off a lot of exposition and stuff like that they just really streamline the process and I was just wondering do you think that it's possible I mean do you think that there's a way to make exposition and narrative like interesting and fun for the playtesters it's so the question is is do I think there's a way to I think you're saying is there a way to include a lot more exposition and still make it entertaining I mean for me personally I somebody I'm sure there's somebody who's a genius who could do it but I personally don't I mean I I like it when there is less you know my own personal taste is less so for me probably probably not and you believe that it's possible games aren't good at telling like long expository stories

then ah yeah I guess I'm not good at it but I'm also not good at sitting through it I mean I just don't like it that much in games and I when I play a game I like it to be as concise as possible because honestly the game writer but I'm not even 100% convinced that games are the best medium for like telling epic wrong stories I kind of think of what I do is more of like providing a film score you know movies aren't about music but the music is definitely an important part that enhances the experience of watching the movie so the writing is something that enhances the experience of why you're there which is playing the game and honestly for me there's something to be said for leaving things to people's imagination you don't you don't have to have someone sitting there next to you dictating to you exactly what's going on at all times like you know people are smart give me credit you know and I know for me personally it's kind of fun just sort of imagining up you know what I think some of the storyline is playing through portals one of the

biggest surprises that I had was finding references to Black Mesa inside of it and then references to aperture and the borealis inside the half-life 2 episode to around what point development did you make the decision to drop portals into the half-life universe so the question is what when did we decide the you know sort of cross reference in between the two games of episode 2 and portal like you know maybe in middle of development or so we well middle adult development for you but I think when I came on it was I was in the earlier meetings that was just one of the constraints on the game initially because I think they weren't sure exactly where they were in a position and also because we are still using a lot of CAP like art so it sort of made sense to tie them together as portal kind of got its own identity we worried less and less about it like you know we're not going to have to have the g-man up here or something we can kind of make it a little bit more subtle and

not have to dwell on it too much two questions I have a friend who says that the best games teaches something what do we have to go to the portal so the question is what do we have to learn because the best games [Music] I mean we we definitely wanted to explore the idea of manipulating space and thinking about you know a 3d space in a different way and so you know throughout portal work we're kind of teaching you to look at a situation in a way that you haven't before so I don't know if that County answered your question no do also I noticed that the compare cube was kind of silent there's a a does

it have any dialogue in the sequel so the question is a roller companion cube have dialogue in the sequel to portal hi I don't know about this sequel this might be a little bit proprietary but I'm curious how did you guys end or valve figure out or when did you figure out it was evolutionary process how you're going to sell the game so the question is when did we figure out when we were gonna how we were gonna you know market and sell portal so when we initially started portal it was supposed to be like just a seriously short game like maybe like I don't know 15 minutes just like a quick temper tech demo and then like the further we got you know on the game our constraints would you know change and I guess about the middle of portals development you know we started talking about you know doing the orange box and it would just sort of seemed

like a really reasonable conclusion that it should be packaged with other games that you know have a lot of clout and are awesome games and you know from our standpoint like that's that's great you know we're we were seriously honored to be packaged with you know tf2 and an episode 2 because we think they're truly awesome games you said that you used the play testing as kind of a method by which you test whether or not the players got the storyline and I wondered as the game length grew how when you compartmentalize the testing because grabbing people for 8 hour or 10 hour play sessions and always possible did you get them to give you that feedback even if they're only playing maybe one or two levels well a lot of oh sorry how did we get people to experience the entire story if they didn't play test the whole game luckily because portal was a pretty short game throughout most of its value no point

was it so long that it would take people eight hours to get through it what was I gonna say so if somebody didn't finish the game we weren't super worried about asking and we did occasionally have play testers didn't make it through but most of them we sat and watched them for the entire time and they made it through I know that this questions have been beaten to death of it but it was about story line you saying less is more would you say that that that policy applies to like other genres besides just portal or you know this is just like mostly for that type of I mean there's definitely oh is lessons lessons more in terms of story apply to other genres and again I don't know I don't have a surefire solution for every genre I mean in terms of my enjoyment of a game less is more so but again if you're making a giant RPG you probably need to say who beget

whom and where the hammer came from so portal and half-life 2 have a very different tone in terms of the writing and that sort of themes the thematic elements if you ever do try and tie the universes together and do something with the cross-referencing you've done you have any ideas for how you might resolve that well so how do we resolve the differences in tone between half-life universe and the sort of aperture universe and actually it was something I thought about and I honestly don't think it's that big a problem because the aperture universe is the tone that you're seeing is mostly GLaDOS right you're seeing things even though you're playing a character you're actually kind of experiencing the world through Gladys's eyes and so if Chell is out in the half-light the universe no action that you took as a player is really in direct contradiction to anything that

would happen in the half-life universe inside the sort of Aperture Science funhouse there's a different set of maybe tonal rules fit this physics wise they're the same places and in even art style wise so I'm I'm not super duper worried about it is there any chance of an art book is there any chance of an art book is there any chance of an art book they're talking about I think of me more of an orange box sort of thing most of our concepts aren't honestly was Jason brash old designing the the GLaDOS battle which is some awesome awesome artwork which you can there there's actually a print I think that you can buy of it look at on the website yeah but a lot of the other stuff there I mean compared to TF or half-life the there isn't a lot of really awesome concept art I mean we've got a lot of

thumbnails and stuff but like there aren't a whole lot of like really you know great you know pictures that we have you rational did maybe like maybe six or so but essentially we've just got a lot of thumbnails of you know the turrets and and the gun and and a bunch of other stuff also why are the portals avoided so the question is why are the portals ovals well I almost look better than rectangles you know we wanted we wanted something to kind of fit the bounds of where the actual like you know where you can pass through the portal to be and so we kind of just build an oval you know through the rectangle where the portal you know technically is the game alludes to a lot of backstory that isn't really fully explained like the fact that you're a test subject for no explained reason how much of that backstory is

actually written and referenced through and how much of that that you just sort of like say or well let the player kind of use his imagination so the question is how much backstory is there that isn't in the game and there's there's a fair amount there's a lot there's a lot of I don't know there's probably a 15 page document about Aperture Science there's actually a little bit of it is on the Aperture Science website kind of hidden in there somewhere and I had written up a bunch of stuff in the beginning just to kind of help me and actually at that point I thought maybe I'd get more in there but uh and and I sent it to Jonathan - that kind of helped him get into those sort of mindset of the whole thing but yeah there is a bunch hi I think I speak for a lot of people on this that portal really was a huge triumph because it was so creative and one yeah so many awards

and it's got so much acclaim and it's so different I was wondering if you could speak a little bit on how you think that's affecting the community of games as a whole so the question so it's like how portal impacts the community of games yes and the approach to to making games as a creative medium yeah I mean it's a kind of too early to tell I hope it I mean because we made portal we made a game sort of light so if more people make games like portal I would probably I will probably like them so that but I mean you just look at it this year it seems like the independent games are getting really good awesome awesome yeah they're they're higher production quality and also higher profile so maybe it'll mean people take risks on you know with more oddball games

good evening so I had a question about in terms of like my background is Perlman in that sort of media so my question to you as writers and developers of this game is what are your influences what do you look like what did you think of as inspiration for portal or inspiration to get into the game industry and you know how did that influence how you attack this game this project so the question was do we have any influences that kind of inspired us to make portal organically gaming gaming industry so for me personally like every other person on the planet you know Miyamoto is definitely an inspiration you know I grew up with Nintendo games and and I was kind of raised on him so you know from an early age like you know I wanted to be a game designer and you know as far as just kind of interesting games that actually

get published you know Katamari Damacy was a really great one you have inspiration oh well direct inspiration for portal was there's a book by who's the doom guy Frank Herbert called destination void that was it's about people that clones that go into space and there tasked with building an AI and there's always like this failsafe mechanism because the a I've always go crazy and kill everyone and they the crew doesn't really know that that's what happened and then they blow up the ship and it just fails and fails and fails because the the AI goes rogue and they blow up the ship there's like one mole guy in there who knows that he's supposed to blow up the ship so that was an inspiration for that the game industry I just okay no Isaac Asimov or anything like that or that you know I'm not honestly not when I was a kid I read a lot of science fiction but I don't read a lot of science fiction now and so but I mean I

know I has mom I'm sure indirectly Robert Shaklee is uh we actually named a character in Episode two Shaklee after Robert sheckly just because he writes kind of funny science fiction it's a great kid I loved his stuff thank you thanks oh you know just because we have to catch a plane at some point so these if we can just do these three and then and there's nobody else for that that's easy I have a question specifically for Eric if the portal design process was an animal what would it be we used to sit right next to me at double fine so that was her joke question I'm not going to answer okay so my question it pertains to the current slides actually waiting for someone to actually ask us what in the world do we put on the slide what's the significance of the Tash ops and if you were each one

of the characters in each of the picture which would you be trying to pictures we just had we didn't quite fit into the top in any meaningful way and they were pretty funny one of those is by the crying guys is my Steam Community ID - and that's really ran more high so I was actually wondering about the development team because you're female and that's kind of unusual um how many girls are on the team so the question was how many girls were on the portal team there were two myself and one of the artists realm Lovejoy right on um do you think that that helps in the creativity process and making like a unique game having that different perspective so the question was you know

does having females on a game team you know make for a better game giving you a unique perspective and I don't know no I mean honestly I think you know whenever you're you're on a game team team you know no matter what your gender you want to make a game that you would enjoy to play yourself like that's the dream right so I mean I guess that that could you know by extension mean that we made a game that perhaps you know girls could like too but you know honestly it's I hope that it's fun for everybody personally having girls on the team makes the room smell better thank you [Music]