Portal 2: Creating a Sequel to a Game That Doesn't Need One

[Music] uh I'm Eric WPA and I'm a writer at Val I'm CHF ALC also a writer valve and today we are going to talk about making Portal 2 um and because we're going to talk about making Portal 2 I just want to be clear that there's going to be a lot of spoilers in the talk uh so if you want to storm out now now would be a good time uh Talk's going to be about 30 35 minutes long and we want to leave some time at the end uh for Q&A so here we go Blues Brothers 2000 Ghostbusters 2 and my favorite Titanic too these all raise a question why even make a sequel yeah sequels uh get a bad rap uh which comes mostly from movies we think where sequels rarely work in the first place and are almost never better than the original uh game sequels though have a long tradition uh of actually improving on the original

uh the reason why I think is just cuz games in general get better with iteration uh you know most of the first in a series of games tends to not actually capture the vision of the developers so the good news here is that making a sequel to a game is actually should be a lot easier than making the sequel to a movie unfortunately we still had a problem this is a sequel to portal a critics and players pretty much thought the game was the perfect length and most people thought the story was self-contained and they were just about set aside with the experience you know at the end we blow up aperture and we even kill GLaDOS kind of um so that leaves us with the problem we made a game with really no thought of making a sequel or extending the story on how we would go make about a sequel go about making a sequel and actually uh Jay Pinkerton who's one of the other writers helped us uh make this slideshow and he put these in this morning these quotes so I'm actually just seeing it for the first time could portal 2's writers possibly top what many consider to be one of the finest examples of modern game writing in a word no so they kind

of gave it to us and then took it away there real quick uh so why make portal 2 well at valve uh we really just get to work on what we're interested in and the bottom line was portal one was made by a small team of students that we picked up from digipen who had made a uh small demo game called narbacular drop and so that left like 150 people at Val who actually didn't get to work on Portal but who loved portal and so after we released The Orange Box uh there were just a bunch of people who wanted to work on a portal game and honest to God it was uh as simple as that so then the question is where do we start um at valve we don't create giant design documents um what happened is after The Orange Box we took about four months where the entire company broke into small little groups of about three to four people and we did design experiments um and this is you can design you can kind ofce whatever

interested you whatever kind of crazy gameplay idea you wanted to explore and a few of those experiments seem like they might be a good fit for portal right and that's where we started uh with a few simple ideas and some goals and constraints at this stage of a project of valve we tend to start with a smaller team in the case of Portal 2 there was about 15 of us uh so that we can kind of poke holes in the concept before we get a big 60 or 70 person shipping team on it uh so that's what a group of us did and after looking at the results of everybody's design experiments and thinking lot about what a squel to portal might look like we ended up making a few key initial choices so the first thing was we decided to keep aperture uh Aperture Science seemed like it was the foundation kind of on which portal was built uh from writing perspective we thought there was sort of unlimited potential there to explore this mad Fun House of science so having decided to keep aperture here's what we cut from

the original version of Portal 2 so we cut Chell she got out good luck to her who needs her right who needs her cut GLaDOS uh she kind of died at the end and she had a nice little story arc is time for a new villain and we cut portals uh sure the name is in the title and but we figur we would worry about that later yeah who needs them we have a sexy new mechanic super confident in that uh so the new mechanic was something that came out of the design experiments and it was called f-stop and this is uh from our fstop Portal 2 our first mockup of it this is kind of the the room where you were introduced to fstop uh I'm not actually going to go into the details of the mechanic because hopefully someday uh we'll use it again so in this version uh we had a new antagonist and that was Cave Johnson who actually ended up showing up in Portal 2 uh for part of the experience but in uh fop Portal 2 he was the whole show he was the main character and these are some Concepts from when we were

originally casting for him uh originally he was going to be this Southern billionaire and he eventually uh kind of trans moried into the midwestern millionaire that appears in in Portal 2 um GLaDOS was not going to appear uh except in this little Cameo uh where we had this thing called the gyroscopic liability absolver and disc operating system and uh referred to as Betty and she would kind of roll out after Cave Johnson would describe a test and quickly rattle off some legal e stuff that would uh absolve aperture of any responsibility for the danger you were about to be in it was like in Those ads for uh uh medicine where they show puppies while they're talking about the rectal bleeding it's going to cause so this was also going to be a new era of apture that you hadn't seen before it was all going to take place in the 1980s about 20 years before the events of Portal 1 and uh it was all going to be about this robot upright Rising you can kind of see these

mannequins in the lower uh right hand corner having a smoke break and uh I don't I found this picture I don't know what it is there's a giant chicken running through some offices I'm not sure what that was all about but anyway so it was going to take place in the80s and you were going to get to see a whole new part of aperture before it had actually been destroyed so this is the very original the opening sequence of that game or of the uh fop portal this is where you're waking up in in that version of the relaxation Vault if it plays there we go he

[Music] so that was showing some of the uh transforming environments that we were going to go for uh in that iteration so after about three months of working on this the team felt pretty good uh people seem to like the in individual component ideas but when we had something meaty enough to play test the constant feedback we got was that it was a lot of things but it wasn't portal two so lesson one you don't need to burn everything to the ground um so some some things we added back in we added back inck

GLaDOS and portals so in terms of the portals uh at the end of development of Portal 1 we had had uh a few mechanics that we've been working on but because of the size of the team we just didn't really have time to polish them enough to ship uh some things like the light Bridge that's shown here and the Excursion funnels and so we went back to these and actually started trying to design puzzles with them and figure out what worked about them and so we also went back to GLaDOS you know in the last 10 minutes of portal um she's an interesting character to explore she's broadened herself at that point she has more emotions for lack of a better term she's become more human and I think if most people look back at portal one that's the GLaDOS that you remember they don't remember the early robotic GLaDOS you know as writers we' lived with her for years and so you know whatever we thought of her um it was a skewed perspective most Gamers had only lived with her for a few hours and they they wanted they ready for more of her so Chelle bringing her back was kind of

the least intuitive piece to us uh she's mute she doesn't really have a character she's just kind of this physical presence that you occasionally see glimpsed uh through portals and honestly like Chad said before we kind of felt as writers that she'd had her day you know she fought GLaDOS she escaped and we' just let her be uh and we put her uh we started this iteration of portal with you waking up in the relaxation Vault and you were standing in front of a mirror so that you could see that you weren't Chell you were this other character we called Mel who had blonde hair and a different color jump suit and it was pretty obviously not Chell and to a person play testers didn't care at that point ma did not matter at all to them that they weren't CH until the point where she wakes up GLaDOS and GLaDOS does not recognize her and what we realized is that Portal 1 was this sort of intimate story about the relationship you had with GLaDOS and

when GLaDOS wakes up and doesn't recognize that you're the person that did the these things to her in Portal it's actually a blow to the player I mean this was a place where to a person the play testers were like you know why why doesn't GLaDOS know know who I am so chel went back in and then at this point we also added something new and that would be the paint mechanic um we had hired the guys who made tag the power of paint back in the Left 4 Dead 1 days and they actually helped us ship Left 4 Dead 1 and two and then they were somewhat independently work working on uh using paint with portals and they showed what they were working on to the Portal 2 team and we brought them on board so there you had it we had our new Mechanics for the game yep so we had added a whole bunch of stuff in uh although still cut was uh the cake and nope nobody missed it um so this is where we were at this point after the f- stop uh was abandoned uh Portal 2 would have portals GLaDOS and take place in the aperture that players were familiar with from portal one so here is the very first opening of that iteration

of portal to activated activated hello you have been detained in the relaxation Vault for nine 0 0 0 4 0 Sentry mode activated Target acquired

[Music] [Music] hey what's going on over there I don't see nothing why am I not surprised crial do you smell something burning [Music] so we wanted to make a game for both new and returning players uh we didn't want to force new players to play portal one in order to understand what was going on uh unfortunately portal one was about 80% training Arc uh so the challenge we

faced when we switched back to portals was how to compress that and represent it in a way that new players would be up to speed on Portals but that returning players would still have something interesting going on so the good thing is uh we had some fresh eyes looking at portal 1's puzzles and we came up with some clever ways to kind of streamline and combine training for instance uh in its original form this puzzle what we call uh portal carousel required players to wait for the portal to move around the room on its own schedule and you could see often players wouldn't look at where the where the portal was coming up um it just really hard for them to learn and slow to solve that puzzle and then the new version of this puzzle um of the same map allowed the players to control the pace by opening up the portal with a button uh this not only made the puzzle faster to solve but by letting players control the appearance of the puzzle uh they actually helped understand the uh new mechanic it seems pretty obvious but it's really big difference between the

two so another thing we did uh was improve the game by actually removing uh one of the features of Portal 1 which was the the dreaded plasma ball I don't know if you remember it but uh we replaced it with lasers uh the plasma ball had had several drawbacks uh primarily that there was a long wait after failure before the plasma ball would come back and also the way it would kind of sneak up behind you and just vaporize you out of nowhere and players often no idea why they why they just died um but lasers uh had all the puzzle solving properties of energy balls while also providing instantaneous feedback loop for the player uh because the laser entering one portal and coming out of the other was sort of a permanent fixture until you moov the portal we noticed that it really really helped new players sort of understand what portals were doing uh the lasers also let us do do uh a few things the plasma balls didn't for

instance this is the original version of the part of the game where you destroy the neurotoxin facility so that long awkward part I just showed you was uh an accurate Recreation of what players did when they went in that room there's this kind of fundamental axiomatic physical principle of Gamers that they will never look up at the ceiling they only look straight ahead uh which I guess we should have known but um so here is the actual solution [Music]

so it was kind of cool but we were really having a hard time getting people to look up at one point we even considered just putting uh a sign there that just said look up which seemed like it was going to ruin the puzzle and just seemed kind of cheap and we had a rule against doing that uh having said that we put a lot of time into making the implosion in that room look really cool and when we discovered people were turning away not looking at it uh we actually did just put a sign in that says in case of implosion look directly in imp implosion so uh I guess the design rule there is don't be a tight ass about your own rules uh just abandon them all right so while we tightened up the uh portal one training Arc uh we still needed something more to entertain returning players and some of what we did was merely cosmetic uh for instance here's the portal one elevators uh and then we can take a look at the portal two elevators and we'll see that somehow destroying Aperture Science gave us all new elevators with video screens around them that showed us cool transition movies I mean there is

no logical reason we have new elevators but players never questioned it never minded it and so our thought always was you know you don't need to be a slave to the original if you're improving it players won't care and so then we also set the game in from some unknown but long amount of time after portal one so that this way the returning players that see familiar spaces in an entering altered space um or in state you know it also let them see their actions in portal one they're the ones who blew up the base they're the ones who caused all this plant overgrow grow and destruction and they got to witness it and the altered environments wasn't quite enough to rehabilitate the old space so we introduced a new character wheatle he gave players an interesting companion which was the final thing we needed to make the feeling uh the training feel fresh luckily uh Wheatley solved a few other problems for us you know portal one's story kind of sneaks up on you uh players aren't sure if it's funny at first uh in fact uh players don't even know there's a story until about two-thirds of the way through it's a really good trick but you can't do it twice so for Portal 2 we need to do something

new and wheatle really quickly helps establish the tone right off you know it's a comedy he comes in you're laughing it's okay to laugh the rest of the game it's okay for you to laugh um and you know wheatle also gives players a burst of exposition and the cool thing here is uh new players uh they get told what happened and returning players reminded of who they are where they are and what's happening and for new players he also restates the entire plot of portal one and provides a brief glimpse into GLaDOS and that way you also get to know that she's a big deal um and then finally when you have this likable companion uh he ALS actually lets us demonstrate something else to new players and that's that GLaDOS is a threat by having her immediately kill them and that's not a spoiler uh because he's not actually dead and that is the spoiler so there was a lot of positive things with wheatle but he did cause some uh problems the first problem was that we burned a lot of calories making sure you couldn't leave him behind

uh when we first put him in the game you spent a lot of time actually carrying him around and we let you drop him basically at any point and the main reason we let you drop him because was because we were thinking well if you can carry him obviously you ought to be able to drop him it was just this kind of axiomatic assumption that we made that we never really thought to challenge uh the other reason you could carum dates back uh to an early prototype sphere that was this uh paranoid spere that it carved out a section of old aperture as his own little fum and it set up all these defenses uh to protect it unfortunately all the defenses were pointed in One Direction and Chell could just drop in through a crack in the wall about 2 feet behind him and pluck him off his pedestal uh and here is an actual video of that original [Music] sphere this I think I just in it P P pom yeah well I guess you won't be doing

that will you not in here you won't not on my watch you can s down on that oh yes oh yes indeed I can assure you of that I'd love to see someone get here I'd dearly love to see that I am absolutely just tearing on the precipice here lady on me down or I will go man and people will get hurt me you monster you're kidding me P me down cuz I down very much that you are prepared for the terrible consequences of me going meno which I swear to God is this close to occurring run so that last part at the end where you beat him against the wall and then throw them down the stairs uh caused us probably about a year of pain and suffering because we liked it so much that we wanted to make sure that you

could do it uh with wheatle unfortunately being able to drop Wheatley meant that we had to gate the player so that he couldn't just drop wheatle and then wander off into the rest of the game and those Gates took the form of these doors that wheatle would have to hack and they were at regularly scheduled intervals so you could only get about 20 ft ahead of wheatle um implementation wise it was a huge pain in the ass uh and as the game progressed the time that you spent with we off his rail was narrowed down to more or less what it is in the shipping game which is after he jumps off his management Rail and you don't catch him all the way up until the point where you put him in the elevator that leads up to GLaDOS it's it's probably about 5 minutes in the shipping game uh but having said that this staircase in the GLaDOS uh wakeup room is actually only there because we wanted you to be able to throw wheatle down it uh so at some point Fair late in development we finally admitted how many

problems dropping wheatly was causing us and we just decided during that part he was going to stick to your hands like glue we put it in and we assumed because we'd build it so much up in our heads that play testers were just going to revolt and they were going to be trying to throw him down and just be angry and not a single play tester even cared that you couldn't drop him none of them even tried uh it was just another example of us having these kind of fundamental assumptions that we didn't think to question uh the fact that you can't drop wheat wheatle if you don't know you can drop wheatle nobody misses it so our second problem with wheatle rose out of uh temp audio so this is Steven Merchant who uh voiced Wheatley and his sessions happened uh and his vo came online like in the last year year and a half of development um before that wheatley's voice was provided by one of our animators uh Richard Lord uh this is and this is the picture that Richard gave us

when we asked him so uh actually gave us another picture of him on the toilet so you're getting the better one um Richard is uh a super super duper smart guy he designs and animates all the icon uh iconographic animations that uh you see in the elevators and that were in some of our advertising he's also got this kind of nice voice uh that people like to listen to and you heard his voice in the clip of the paranoid spere so people liked his voice enough that when our first merchant session got delayed a month right before E3 where we uh debuted portal we decided what the hell we'll just play the Richard audio um and people liked it and people liked it so much that when we finally got world-class comedic actor Steven Merchant in there there was this small but very vocal section of our fan base that was just livid wanted uh Richard back and at the end of the day this is kind of a microcosm of the whole problem

with sqls you know with nothing to compare it to the first version of anything can pretty much stand alone uh but once you put uh a replacement in there there's going to be somebody who prefers it it's kind of the law of sequals you just can't win no matter what you do well you can win but it's sort of like a a you can't have a Flawless Victory so so our last problem was caused by week weekly dying um so originally uh GLaDOS crushed we right after she wakes up and that was it you didn't see Wheatley anymore uh you know he was just dead and gone and we thought that kind of finality let everyone understand just how evil GLaDOS was um this was back when GLaDOS was still going to be the main antagonist and but the problem is after wheatle dies you're going to meet six other sphere personalities with each with their own personality and uh as an example this is one of the ones this is some concept art for the uh somebody we called the Morgan Freeman sphere so he'd been sitting on that little pedestal for a few centuries and he was just incredibly incredibly

wise but only about the 20x20 space that he was trapped in uh so as soon as you dragged him 22 ft out of the room his mind was blown and he was pretty much useless although uh as the game progressed he eventually got uh his feet under him and and started delivering some Homespun wisdom that all related back to this little 20 X20 space that he'd been living in so back to wheatly dying um it certainly worked in the term of making people understand how evil GLaDOS was they got that but people missed Wheatley and with GLaDOS now in the mix and none of the other spheres really having enough time to bond with the player um we're missing something because even in a talky game like portal you're still more or less writing in the margins and so then our simple answer was Let's us kill Wheatley and then bring him back um you know we still get all the dramatic benefits of gr GLaDOS crushing them uh plus we don't have to throw away all the precious time we'd spend building this relationship between the player and wheatly even better this led to a bunch of uh insight and that ought to make that we ought to make wheatly the antagonist um because again

before he was just dead and he wasn't going to be the antagonist and now he's going to be the evil villain for the last half of the game and a lot of good things flowed from that one assumption it's another example where we try to solve a problem without questioning the core assumption and that was not to kill we not you know to kill Wheatley then what do we do in this case let's just kill him and bring him back and then it's fine everything works in retrospect okay and so now we've got a pretty good handle on the single player game this is rough but generally working in terms of plot and structure and most importantly for what we test is pacing and comprehension every play test we we bring people in we talk about the pacing comprehension we make sure we have that nailed that's working that's flowing and the co-op mechanic was working great on its own uh just the puzzles alone were totally fun so we figured the co-op story was going to be a breeze smart thing in our part we thought would save it to the very end of development uh problem is we discovered there's a huge difference between telling the Portal 2 story versus the single player story yeah since we figured people would play

the single player first we set the co-op story after the events a single player game and in this uh original Co-op iteration we actually thought we had a pretty good story going so with chel gon GLaDOS is just prepared to test for eternity with the two Co-op Bots uh that we introduced in single player uh unfortunately though she quickly discovers that none of the tests she's doing is providing any data because without any human Observer tests are always in this sort of schroer cat state of quantum uncertainty uh like in this picture is the cat hanging in there or is he not hanging in there who knows until somebody looks at it um so what she does is she start sending the Bots into the bots of aperture to collect human artifacts in the hope that they will help the Bots become more human so she can break through this kind of quantum problem she has so we actually mocked this whole part of for play testing all the way

through the retrieval of the first artifact which was this um Garfield light cartoon called dorfel that uh one some long dead aperture employee had tacked up on a bulletin board uh deep in the balls of aperture uh the Bots find it they bring it back to GLaDOS and none of the three of them can figure out what's funny about this doorf felt so GLaDOS actually rewrites it to make it funnier uh so the first three panel dorfel is sitting next to an empty panel Ofna and then his owner comes and he's really angry that dorfel ate the lasagna uh and then the owner says that he's activated the neurotoxin emitters at which point uh dorfel feels regret but only briefly so and uh just want to mention that uh Anthony Clark who goes under the name of nedroid originally Drew this for Jam and I like in a day when we were trying to

put this together so thank you so we had our comic and we were pretty happy with this direction uh but we discovered uh as we play tested is there's some fundamental differences between the way the story was going to work for the single player versus the co-op in single player you have a captive audience they will watch intently they're fully in the moment and they generally pay attention to the crafted experience Co-op players on the other hand will interrupt your best material to ask each other what they had for dinner so this means we had to simplify and change how we told the story and so what we do is we actually repeat the main story points in many times in short little bits that way if you miss one you're going get it the next time and this is also different though from how we handled it in left the Left for Dead series because we do co-op there and we tell story there but there we know you're going to play the maps multiple times each playthrough you can pick up another little bit of the story for the co-op in Portal 2 we actually wanted you to get everything in the first St first past so that was a difference there and you know the mystery GLaDOS presents is simple and if you're paying attention it's pretty obvious but it's Co-op so

it's the fun of going through with your partner you're making up your own stories you're going along towards the next human genocide um but you know there's also one other major difference between single player and Co-op players that was not obvious to we became started play testing and that's during play during testing of both parts of our game uh we actually have people sit in a room they're separated and they have we have a camera on the game that they're playing but we also have cameras looking at their faces so we can see their reactions so this is a photo I grabbed off that system of a player at actually playing the single player part of Portal 1 and this is what they look like during the entire part he's probably watching the funniest section of portal one or Portal 2 right now um you can see he's uh completely stoic and unsmiling uh there's no hint that he's enjoying it all at all but when you debrief them afterwards they're like that was great it was super funny but again in the moment they're just staring at the screen solving puzzles looking incredibly angry so there's a strange thing that happens in Co-op we have people in separate rooms again they can't see each

other we sometimes test them with no microphones so they couldn't talk to each other there's no way they can communicate with each other and yet they laughed they smiled they joked right they were having they had all these regular things you have when you're next to someone right all these regular social norms They Carried through into the game even though they didn't have the communication and the other person couldn't see their face you know smiling or laughing so this is an important takeaway from anyone anyone out there writing a game if you're going to do a comedy game make a co-op cuz otherwise you're going to have years of misery and self-doubt as you watch play test it's awful it's the the darkest thing you can possibly do uh so just real quick we also tried a um competitive multiplayer mode uh which we put together over the space of a month or two and it was kind of a mix between the old Amiga game speedball and portal except with none of the good parts of either of those two things uh it was super chaotic difficult to tell what was going going on and no fun uh so the only

real good news about this part was that we cut it pretty quickly and were able to use those resources to develop Co-op a little bit more all right so in this point in development um we've got this Co Co-op story set we're on our way with that um we have most of the single player story set we just have one major problem we have no ending to the single player story and we had the same struggle when we're making portal one the ending didn't come to really really late and that turned out to be one of the highlights of the game so we had that going for us but still at this point we had no ending we did have some things that we knew though we knew you were going to have to confront Wheatley we knew you were going to have to remove him from the GLaDOS chassis we knew he was going to have to get some sort of comeuppence for causing you all that trouble uh and something we knew from portal one was that this final puzzle shouldn't be particularly difficult this should not be the most difficult puzzle in the game because long thoughtful puzzle solving is completely not climax so with that knowledge we were able to

at least start designing the final battle and start iterating on that and that was coming together great what was missing was any sort of Story part to that which was bad for Jay and Chad and I and this is a uh early version of the solution we initially came up with and you'll you may it's a slightly different version of the end chamber you'll recognize some things but uh I'll just play it through core are you ready to start the procedure corrupted core are you ready to start the procedure stale May detected transfer procedure cannot continue unless a stalemate associate is present and can press the stalemate resolution button press button to replace core

stalemate button has been destroyed transfer procedure cannot [Music] continue unless a stalemate associate can say the word yes stalemate associate do you wish to start the [Music] transfer yes stalemate resolved core transfer initiated so confused so we're all our play testers that was chel speaking right uh the confusion reaction was pretty much always often players not really understand who was talking and they're super underwhelmed and that's the end of the game um you know this is a classic idea of like just you have this great idea you're pitching it it sounds awesome oh my God ch's finally going to speak where going to come out one one word she's going to one word and it's going to be the one that ends the game and you actually tested boy suck yeah it sucks boy that was bad

uh so this is where we were uh there's a release date bearing down on us and uh we have no ending uh so going back a little bit uh at one point earlier in production we'd had this idea that uh scattered throughout the game there would be these fake endings uh when this rose out of when we were watching portal one play test there's a part about 2/3 through the game where you ride uh an elevator into a fire pit and you're supposed to escape the fire pit and that's when you go behind the scenes but a small percentage of play testers were just fine with riding the the elevator into the fire pit like that was a good ending for them it was it was dark but they they liked it like it just ended with them dying so we thought well we'll service those people and we had these scattered throughout the game Parts where Chell would die and that would be the end and we'd play a song and if you wanted to you could just quit there uh so we had one that was like 2 minutes into the game and if you died there

there was just a song that I think just Jay and I sang it was I mean we had done anything yet that was just about reviewing those first two minutes kind of wistfully what had happened um and then later in the game there was a part where there's a crack in the ceiling and you could see the moon and you could put a portal on the moon and if you put one on the wall it would suck you out onto the moon and you would asfixiate while listening to a sad song about the Moon um and that one actually worked for the people that found it which was a small percentage of our play testers they really liked it uh we eventually cut the alternate endings partly because of how much work it was going to be for how little payoff and partly because other than those two we had kind of overestimated how many great fake endings we were going to be able to come up with um so anyway there we were not long to go until we're really going to have to finish this game and ship and as Jay CH and I in one of these sort of flop sweat soaked ending

meetings trying to figure out desperately what's going to happen and somebody made the connection that if we resurrected this Moon thing it solved all our problems you know wheatle would get sucked out of the chassi he'd get a comeuppance that was that was kind of deserved but it wasn't really that bad he's still out there in space uh and it was this perfect mix of being totally awesome and completely stupid um so that's what we did and in retrospect there's another example that we kept finding of an obvious solution that was just sort of sitting there all along uh in fact it was probably one of the biggest lessons we learned is try to give yourself enough time for the obvious to become obvious because at a certain point most of the answers to what you need to do are already are buried in in what you've already done so oh so that was the uh last major puzzle piece we finished the game we released it uh and then as far as how it turned out this year there was pretty

clear winner of the most Game of the Year Awards and that was Skyrim but um still uh you know pretty clearly we were number two no shame in being number two at all so yeah that's where we ended that's where we end it we're going to do some Q&A [Applause] so I don't know how Q&A works yeah so oh no no questions we can leave I could ask a question oh damn so my question is uh thanks for portal Portal 2 and Oldman muray now uh could you say a little a bit about the role of uh the writer at valve of writers in general yeah yeah so I mean part part of it is um we use the title writer because uh we need to have a title on our business cards that's what people ask but everyone valve has a lot of different roles and so it really

depends on what's going on I mean as writers obviously we're writing the story we're writing reloading and all the things that need to be in the game um but it's a really collaborative effort at valve so um you know everybody weighs in on the writing and we weigh in on everything else yeah we try and uh spread ourselves out in terms of uh you know like Chad and I wire and Jay as well now wire the dialogue into the game we don't just kind of throw it over the wall and hope that the game turns out okay uh which is especially important for a game supposed to be funny because the time you know tenth of a second here and there just ruins ruins the gag that all right uh kind of following up on that a lot of what made the first portal special was how well your voice actress understood the material and there's a real sense of a relationship there uh you also uh took huge strides in Portal 2 by working with JK Simmons and Steven merch can you talk some about the casting process and the recording process of

working with them sure uh is that Tom chick yes it is hey Tom uh so uh originally we were uh we had cast uh an actor named Richard aoid who is from The IT Crowd and G mangi um yeah and uh we were actually having some trouble getting our schedules right uh which is when we eventually uh switched to stepen Merchant and uh we honestly Jay and I did not think he would do it because we assumed he was just so so wealthy from owning half the office or however much he owns but we sent him a packet of materials and uh he said okay and we had actually been writing with sort of Steven Merchant's voice in our head more so even than Richard ao's uh so it it ended up being being a good uh good fit and with JK Simmons uh I think we just always sort of pictured his voice whenever we heard

uh Cave Johnson when we were writing lines and uh again we asked him it's amazing when you just you call up an actor's agent they're they're more or less willing to do it and it tends not to be it's less expensive than you think I mean I don't know if it's that way with every actor but with character actors they want to work this is an easy gig for an actor they don't have to get dressed up they don't have to go in makeup they show up for 4 hours and do their work Stephen Merchant actually we did four and a half sessions with including the first one where we had to go to London the rest of them we did ISDN from from Seattle but so we have about 16 and a half hours of Stephen Merchant uh doing stuff and uh JK Simmons basically he read the stuff and nailed it the first time uh uh stepen Merchant we kind of let him just with 16 hours we let him just sort of mess around with with the lines and he did a lot of a lot of improvisation uh you know some of which we used or some of which we would edit together to make a coherent thought uh after the

fact yeah there I me there's definitely something nice about having actors that you know their voice that you could write to it directly instead of a lot of times we'll cast people and you find out they can't say anyone they can only say anybody or there's every actor has some weird hangup you can listen up of their body of work that you can kind of understand what they can do W name it we had an actor uh where this is not the world's greatest line and we stole it from Aliens but clear wanted him to say stay frosty like stay frosty Stay Frosty and for some reason he thought he was telling a dog to say could not read it's like stay frosty stay frosty they we're like no no it's like stay frosty he's like oh I get it I get it I get it stay frosty so it's probably just as well that we didn't ship uh a line from Aliens but yeah but the other great thing about stepen Merchant is he speaks so fast and for a character that's delivering a lot of exposition that's amazingly awesome he speaks fast and clearly and he he really threw himself into it like I don't think he plays a lot of games and I don't know that he's

played Portal 2 but he cared a lot about what was happening it was terrifying because we didn't have an audition like we were just giving him some money to do it and we're flying to London Jay and I after making this big decision and if he had sucked or not cared cuz he was going to you know build a new deck on his house we were super screwed uh but he from you know minute two of the session he was asking questions he was he he just he really knocked it out of the park and then also uh Ellen mlan who does GLaDOS we her we just record with every every couple of weeks whatever we need you know she she has a handle on on that character and that's all I have to say about that you guys have to fight it out who goes I don't know how this works um this is a question about your anecdote of the uh the testers the single player testers being very frosty and the multiplayer testers being very animated do you know if the um the multiplayer play testers were actually enjoying the experience more or they just emoting about it more um at the end of at the end of the play test when we would have them talk about highs and lows and that

kind of thing they seemed equal um it seemed exactly on power equal um we we' started separating um them from like so way back when I think of for started EV valve we would actually sit in the room with the play testers but then they would perform um because they had an audience and so that's why we would move them to the isolated booths and the feedback would have been the same for either you know the the single player or the co-op they're both you know both having a good time yeah they're just way more demonstrative Co-op uh when you approach writing a game that will change uh through iterative uh design um where do you uh go for like a overall theme uh how does that change uh when you're changing the game so widely with play test in ter uh by by theme what are you uh overall theme of The Narrative oh well I think we you know if we think of the theme as being uh so for instance in Portal uh the

theme is basically I'm going to have this relationship with glattus I mean that's the most important thing to us so we wanted to make that Central and we wanted these other characters to somehow what whichever whatever we added or whatever events had happened it needed to kind of deepen your relationship to GLaDOS so that that was there from the beginning and carried through the whole time we always held on to that uh this isn't really theme it's more of a writing rule we had was that with a silent protagonist uh there's this danger that you get into a position where you have a bunch of characters talking about something and you're just sort of observing it and you're standing around just with nothing to do so one of the rules we had in the writer's room was that the characters needed to always be talking either to you or directly about you just so you would always feel even though you couldn't participate in the conversation that you were the center of attention does that generally answer your question

he said that so I really enjoyed exploring the uh the drawings on the walls and I was just wondering if you could talk about um kind of when in the process you guys started thinking about what those would entail and um how deep you went with those with the I guess the physics and the astronomy that you guys included in those um and just generally talk about those I I really found them interesting well that was kind of as we're expanding the ratman's role yeah this is kind of goes back to the thing we were talking about with the elevators where the elevators got way better looking between the games uh the guy the rapman got way better at Art between the two games uh just cuz we we dedicated an artist yeah we had an artist who who could do it um and that that's the main reason of that and some stuff is backs solving so in other words that was kind of cheap to bring online at the end so when we decided late that you were going to go to the Moon well it was pretty easy to go back and have the ratman drawn all sorts of pictures of the Moon all over and makes us look super smart when yeah and and oddly enough the uh the national

song that plays in his den was originally the moon sad song yeah it was going to they were going to was going to do the sad song you know you you had a good time but you died on the moon sort of thing okay yeah hi um I was just wondering um when I was when I was playing I noticed there were a lot of uh references to uh greatek mythology um in the story uh more so with like Prometheus um I was just wondering um what the reason was for putting those in the story J Tiner in red some Greek mythology I think uh that's really honestly about the it was weird we made the connection one day that uh I don't know if this was uh unconscious or what that basically what GL what happens to GLaDOS is almost exactly what happened to Prometheus and uh so we just added it to the Oracle turret I think some of the other Illusions may be uh accidental that's one of the things we discovered is that

when you have a game with enough content there's just going to be some crazy coincidences that make you look again super smart uh that you may not have planned for like uh Carolyn apparently means free man is that right Jay uh but Carolyn also just happens to be the name of Jay's mom which is why we actually picked that so uh still worked out thanks do you ever struggle between bouncing the comedy and the drama of the piece like where you had a joke you really liked but you had to cut it because it was ruining a story beat I mean yeah it's you know there's a lot of stuff we cut there's a whole set of tracks we cut because of gameplay that we had good beats in funny stuff and there's uh we definitely went back and forth on uh for instance the part where GLaDOS uh is deposed and wheatly takes over we originally had some more jokes in there and we took some of them out and we still have an ongoing argument

where I still feel like when he's going in and he's like this is going to hurt isn't it I wish he was just more scared there like there there are times when we're like let's just not go for the joke here yeah because I mean a lot of times if you go for the joke there kind of um you're you're purposely undercutting the main focus of the the that bit of story so it's a toso it is something we struggle with hi so you did sort of start the talk out with this but I wanted uh wanted you guys to go in a little more about sort of managing I guess fan expectations so I know I was talking to some of your colleagues around like the ep2 time and they were really nervous about how the hunter was in the teaser trailer but there wasn't really gameplay around it and I'm wondering just about like you know if there any promises you may regret or just like things that you uh revealed about the game before it was done or before it was tested that you know just kind of put you in a tough position what was the thing you said they cut no not that they cut but like when when the hunter in in episode two oh in episode two was in the teaser uh I we did show we showed uh well the vents the suction vents that just never turned

into they I don't know if you remember it it was we presented it as a puzzle mechanic and you could break a tube or something and suction would come out and you could redirect the suction through portals um it was super cool but we just never really found a great puzzle use for it ex for the end yeah the mitigating factor is uh we did use it in the end when you get sucked onto the moon but we didn't really make it into a but I mean a puzzle that that happens with all the games we've ever shown at any event I mean there's still people that are swearing that Left 4 Dead one the beta that we showed at this event was the greatest version of that game ever um but the truth always is uh there's always a little bit of smoke and mirrors going on there and really the best version is the version we shipped there's not some point we go this is a really cool thing let's get rid of it no it's like there's a bunch of problems it's not really working as well as you think it is and so what we end up shipping is going to be the thing that you know we made the best choices on yeah I mean people ask us sometimes or well not so much anymore but uh some of the promotional videos we originally did

for Portal 2 showed some test chambers that didn't really make it into the final game but a lot of those weren't even decent puzzles they were just something there to show off a mechanic uh uh people still some people still think that they're going to be great puzzles and want to know why we cut them the good news is we're going to release a puzzle Creator pretty soon so they can try and recreate them themselves and find out how bad they were thanks uh yes I was just wondering what decisions led to the potato both from uh this purpose it served narratively but also just why a potato uh so Jay and I would take these long walks trying to figure out what we were going to do with the story and we knew GLaDOS was going to get deposed and she was going to have to come with you and um we were trying to figure out what was the most humiliating thing that could happen to her and we figured turning her into a potato battery was pretty bad and then I think Jay said potatoes and then it was kind of a sealed deal cuz we had a name for it and it just seemed super sad that she would be in this shriveled

crappy little potato um and you could put it on the gun andt mic yeah we we originally also had this idea there's another reason it was a potato was the bird was going to play a bigger role so cuz we needed to we knew we were going to need to explain later on why she wouldn't just tell you how to solve the puzzles that wheatle had set up for you uh and so our thought was the bird every couple of Chambers was going to come in and attack the potato and eat part of it and she was going to keep getting stupider and stupider as you went along uh there was a couple problems with that in that we didn't want her to get stupider that was funnier when we said it than when we actually tried to write it and then it also turns out that it's actually a big honking deal to get a bird to fly in and uh attack your view model and so people were like are you sure this is this going to be a lot of work and that but it was good because it actually just drove us to the much simpler solution which is they've got this hardwire thing that if they try and uh tell you the answer to the puzzle they have this physical like uh pain

reaction to it which was just a way easier solution and the bird was in there plenty still thanks did all those hours spent watching testers test ever make you feel like GLaDOS yeah it is a but also it gets you nauseous it's it's tough Portal's a tough one to watch motion sickness but it is it is kind of just a a giant uh uh uh analogy for for actual how we make the games is is what what GLaDOS does so yeah so your experience in game design sort of informed the the concept of the story like the this huge test little bit some of it I mean I know that when Wheatley makes his first test chamber uh I think it was Phil Co maybe made that and he just used like the standard thing that everybody does when they first make a level which is to just make this big box with the word test on it or or their name or something so yeah in some ways that you know Wheatley was this kind of

neoy uh level designer thank you how do you guys generate your scripts do you each take a a mission or do you bounce them back and forth do you lock yourself in a room and say no one's getting out here till we have the level it depends it depends where we are in the process what we're working on how far away we are from a recording session if it's like 3 weeks I'm not doing anything if it's a 3 days yeah we're sweating it uh and we tend to sit in a room more so now we've been getting more in this sort of writer's room kind of thing where we'll bring our ideas we'll try and hash them out all together and then maybe separate and uh uh just sort of uh smooth everything out especially when you're doing the jokes if the jokes aren't making anyone in the room laugh they're they're not going to work yeah right good first test you get kind of Punchy and then they seem like they're working and then they don't but uh but that that's B it's a lot of it is a group right um where we sit down and

we map out what needs to get written you know where dialogue needs to be and then we just try and as a group go through it uh so uh as play as I was playing Portal 2 I felt it was a really clear example of this kind of hero's journey kind of story with three acts and especially the the player descending in this in this sort of uh underworld in the second act so can you say something about how intentional this was well we certainly wanted our hero to go on a journey and we definitely there's a there's a structure of Storytelling right I mean 3A is pretty standard we didn't really reinvent anything there and it seemed to fit pretty well yeah part of the thing with going into the underground was portal one starts with you waking up and feeling very alone uh and Portal 2 didn't start that way because for various reasons but we still want to have an area where you did feel like you were now loone in a place you didn't understand uh which is why when you get dropped down that pit we give

you a while to just sort of take it in you know after having basically been accompanied by someone the entire time uh but yeah I don't know that there was any conscious Heroes Journey sort of thing going on thanks what do the lights mean can we keep we have two more questions right we can do those is that all right yeah uh yeah valve has a pretty air by the way oh thank you I appreciate that it's just a street fighter sh um Vala's got a pretty uh awesome reputation for releasing free content and so I'm just wondering have you ever considered releasing Michael's version of wheatle like his entire assuming he did he didn't do the he not oh no we didn't get like none of the stuff after wheatle takes over except for maybe a couple times when we didn't have Merchant stuff we'd bring Richard back in but yeah we it would be a huge huge undertaking got it I assumed you already had the audio track no and the other problem is it would need to match the timing uh of the merchant lines or else

it would be like 10 times more okay all right yeah so that's not yeah let's not go there all right all right thank you but thank you um so the two big like memes that came out of the first portal were the cake and the Companion Cube uh and I want to commend you guys for not going back to that well in the second game but was it ever like really tempting to just go for that layup and bring those back or were there people inv valve who are like we got to have the Companion Cube people loved it like well the Companion Cube is back so yeah I don't know if you're setting me up to uh H sorry no the cube is there uh not we don't focus on it a lot we kind of we we felt like that we could bring back in a sort of I know for lack of a better word tasteful funny way um the cake I think we make one reference to but no nobody was was really like pushing us to do it we just knew I mean we were pretty confident that we could just come up with a story that didn't rely on that and uh you know we figured people had lived with the

cake jokes enough that they probably yeah I mean that is the thing though right like so we were talking about internally we Liv with uh GLaDOS this whole time and so for us not that we're sick of her but we' live with her a lot we're thinking maybe we should try something new but everybody lived with the cake as a lie jokes right I think we all had our share of those yeah Ian it was great back yeah but so no nobody pressured us and honestly I've never had anybody come up and say you know I wish wish there was more cake in the game yeah okay do you have anything left for a third one maybe no so I mean honestly um it's like it's like with when we also do like why it take so so so long for DLC we don't worry or think about that like holding something back because you think you're in to run out of ideas don't ever do that just go just put it all in you know what you're going to have those horrendous days of like the ending where you're like just staring at each other thinking there's no way you're going to come up with anything and you do yeah

there there's some way to solve it so don't hold back yeah and also we one of our goals was to not have like a cliffhanger ending we wanted you know we felt like Portal had this nice satisfying ending and we wanted Portal 2 to feel the same way like at the end there maybe there were some some unresolved questions but it felt like everybody had their end yep so I think that's it is that it so thanks guys yeah thank you so much