Another highlight of the show for me. Both the speakers were funny and charming, much in the way Portal itself was...
Integrating Narrative and Design: A Portal Post-Mortem
Kim Swift & Erik Wolpaw, Valve
Warning, Spoilers!!!
Why should you care about Portal? Small team, no more than 10 people at once. Been a commercial and critical success for Valve. After all is said and done, no regrets. Unlike the guy with the portal tattoos…
By itself, story wouldn’t make much of a novel. Gameplay on its own would be dry. Tight integration of story and gameplay resonated. Team size imposed constraints on our design choices. Creatively sidestep constraints – Glados as disembodies voice might not have occurred to them if they had the resources to do otherwise.
Games tell two stories: story story, gameplay story. Lowering the delta between the two will make your story more satisfying. Games with a high story delta: Clive Barker’s Undying. Good shooter, talented writer who cares about story. Shooting lots of monsters but the game stops you to play one of these cutscenes where you calmly interrogate a member of the staff. At no point do you freak out and tell them about the monsters. The two stories make no sense when you smush them together. Good game being undermined by a disconnect between story story and gameplay story.
“story” story must never intrude on the gameplay story. Less is more. Ruthless about trimming the narrative fat. Lean storytelling machine.
Process:
Playtesting – really important! To both narrative and gameplay. Most important thing ever done on Portal. Watch people play your game. Find out what your players actually want, adjust gameplay to what players look like they need. Adjust story to enhance what players are already feeling. Playtest keeps you objective – expose what isn’t working. If a player can’t recall the story, it isn’t working. Fix was almost always to cut more exposition. Playtest early and often! First room iterated on from the very first week. Forcefield that playtesters just didn’t know what it was, traced the edge of the cage and got confused. Helped us refine our art direction – a lot cleaner and simpler.
Advice: writing a funny game? God help you. Tough guy dialog is endlessly macho. Funny dialog is funny once. Maybe. Trust your instincts, don’t despair. Playtest! Remember initial reactions. More playtesting = more hearing people react to your dialog for the very first time.
Embed exposition in the environment. Unless it is in emails or voice recorders. Reading email = not actually that fun. Be creative! Easy to say… Apply a rule set, and be ruthless about the rules. Choice between embed or cut, makes you really creative! In portal == wall scribbling behind the scenes. Put yourself in the position of your characters. “The Ratman”, a fellow escaped test subject. Originally wanted you to meet him but had two artists, so not feasible…
Evolve narrative out of gameplay. Write to enhance what playtesters are feeling. Keep the story “wet”. Don’t get too attached to anything. Could disappear at any time. Don’t get too attached, you might need to cut it and that is probably for the best!
Weighted Companion Cube. Box Marathon level – long level with the box, in the end put the box on a button. Take one: moving list obstacle over a good pit. Players would destroy the box and had to go back, frustrating and annoying. Back to the drawing board – remove the lifts and goo pits, added more where having the box was necessary to solve the puzzle. Cube as stairs, cube as weight. Take Two: Gameplay events so you can always see the button. Still needed something else. Erik to the rescue! Hint using the environment – lighting, geometry. When all else fails, great dialogue is an excellent hint. Was reading declassified govt manuals, isolation causes association with inanimate objects. Maybe if Glados needles you a little bit and it worked. Sometimes goofy ideas tend out to be really good ones. Incineration station = boss battle training. Perfect training location, more satisfying level ending. Players learn better when not stressed (no ticking clock). Forcing you to euthanize it was great! Revenge, incinerate Glados the way she makes you incinerate your best friend. Gameplay > story > gameplay.
Sometimes gameplay isn’t enough. Original ending of portal. What does a boss battle look like? Complex puzzle? Results: pain. Attempt one: James Bond lasers that followed the player around. Lasers = bad. Boring to dodge, difficult to aim. Hard to tell if you’re hit. Abandoned in favor of rockets. Attempt two: Portal Kombat. Lots of testers were hardcore shooter gamers. Didn’t work out very well. High intensity = bad. No one paid attention to Glados, and alienated players who like the slower-paced cerebral nature of Portal. Attempt three: chase sequence. Pacing was horrible, players didn’t see where she would go and then only slowly realize how to follow her. Chase = action packed, instead players were confused. Failed in many ways. Complex boss battle = nope. More complexity = slower pacing, not a good match for the climactic sequence. So what now? We’re screwed. Playtesting to the rescue! One thing worked well for players – the fire pit.
What made it climactic? Time pressure. Makes people think something is more complicated than it is. Good visual impact – pit of fire! High drama, for the first time Glados is openly trying to kill you and you first assert control over your environment to escape. Those things combined made an easy puzzle like a much more complicated puzzle. Holding on to this idea of a complex puzzle at the end, simply wasn’t true. Applied all of these things to the time pressure. Just had a countdown! Neurotoxin = green particles cheap! Drama meant we had to write six minutes of decent dialog, previous ones required infinity worth of dialog = sad. Easy puzzle important. Wanted people to see / hear the end! Wanted players to be genuinely happy and leave with a smile on their face.
What makes people happy? Catchy song… Ultimately a lot of this all came out of constraints. Couldn’t make a big FMV. Cost to happiness ratio of a great song was really high!
Embrace your constraints! Have faith in yourself and in the skills of your team. Playtest, playtest, playtest!
Q: Why are audio recordings / emails a bad choice? Just from playtesting? None of these are prescriptive. Just a personal choice they made. Don’t like to read in games that much. How often do you use a voice recorder to leave secret messages for your friends and family?
Q: Why does Glados have an incinterator in her room? Kind of fun… backstory that they weren’t sure if she was going to go out of control or not. So made this room so that they could incinerate her and get rid of her. Red phone in there, supposed to be his job to call somebody if the AI goes rogue… didn’t work too well.
Q: Playtesting critical, not outsourcing it. How do you go about getting new players through that process? Easy to go to the nearest Gamestop “we’ve got this game, wanna play it”? Friends and family, Gabe’s kids… lots of people working at Valve on their own other projects. Q: People come back for additional tests? Usually playtest only once but a few at Valve would repeat play.
Q: In the dev commentary, more portal games? How do you overcome the challenge of not having as many constraints? Dunno, just want to bask in the moment now without people bugging him about the next one!
Q: Portals shooting through portals? Not a tech restriction but design one – didn’t want to bypass training, shooting ourselves in the foot.
Q: Why change the look and color of Portals? Just iteration. We liked Orange better than Red…
Really like the way turrets screamed…
Q: Suggestions for students breaking in? Try and make a lot of games and fail. So many times failed at Digipen…one worked out but the others didn’t. Practice makes perfect. Shows commitment to the project. Make games!
Q: Fire pit –shock and confusion of getting past what you thought was the game’s end. Defying of game narrative intentional? Some intentionality there, one of the things that never changed in the story. Vault > Fire Pit > Glados was the most basic structure. Worked better than they thought.
Q: Why the humor? Something inherently funny about portals… In Erik’s comfort zone.
Q: Why kill off the Companion Cube? I think we explained that… thank the United States Secret Service.
Q: Lots of trial and error in the game, did that have to be smoothed over with management? Management at Valve is different than other companies, no producers really. People on the game make those decisions. Makes for a more satisfied group of people making games. Commitment to playtesting is the Valve philosophy.
Q: Dev background, how did you score your spot working with Valve? Students at Digipen, made Narbacular Drop, predecessor to Portal. Expo for graduating seniors, saw it and took them to Valve to show to Gabe. Asked them what they were doing after graduating… offered them a job on the spot. Erik did a lot of writing, was hired at Double Fine, freelanced, and then got email from Gabe one day.
Q: Why not submit to IGF? Narbacular Drop was in the student showcase.
Q: Where did the cake come from? Was something in there from the beginning… comedy tool to obsess over something unexpected. Just having fun.
Q: All characters (main character + glados) female? Working to define that, used to be a balding dude (citizen model from HL2). Gabe suggested making it a girl. Just sort of what if… Post feminist, didn’t occur to us not to make it a girl… For Glados we knew we needed a great actress / actor who was good and wouldn’t be offended when a lot of the stuff was just recording text-to-speech stuff.
Q: Is Chell a cyborg? No, another failure of writing. Got these crazy cyber future shoes…
Q: Portal is a short game with a lot of success, might make a movement back towards shorter games on the market? Common complaint is that people don’t finish games anymore, don’t have time…. Plus 40 hours a week playing WoW. Practical constraints but really wanted to make a game that everyone who plays it can finish it! Most games just peter out, never finish them.
Q: Dialog cut from the game, any of it fairly final? If so, going to release it? Not a lot of final stuff. Everything went through text to speech as temp audio, mostly got cut at that point. Other stuff wouldn’t want to give to anyone, or if it’s good keep it for later…
Q: Considerations for making it multiplayer or co-op? Thought about it… technically possible, just didn’t have the time to think through the gameplay. Tried it a little, was less fun than you think it is…
Q: Experience balancing keeping it wet and needing to get it done, or having momentum? Playtesting! You’ll know right away whether your idea is good or bad. If you can’t see how to fix it, cut it!
Q: Dev process as a style of painting, what would it be? Cubist…
Q: Chell and Gordon gonna hook up? Dunno…
Q: Can make exposition and narrative fun for playtesters? Less is more… just don’t like it that much in games. As concise as possible. Game writer, but games aren’t necessarily the best medium for stories. Like providing a film score. Films aren’t about music but they are a useful tool for enhancing, same for writing in games. Also a lot to be said for leaving mystery in games, people are smart, give them credit!
Q: Black Mesa references in Portal… when did you decide to be in the HL universe? Middle of development… when Erik joined just one of the constraints for the game because they weren’t sure of positioning and were reusing a lot of assets. Eased up at the end, didn’t need the G-Man to show up or anything…
Q: Best games teach us something, what do we have to learn from Portal? “The cake is a lie.” Explore the idea of manipulating space and thinking about 3d space in a different way, look at situations in a different way.
Q. Companion cube kind of silent, any dialog in the sequel? What is this “Sequel”…
Q: When did you figure out how to market and sell Portal? At first was supposed to be a 15 minute tech demo. Further on constraints changed… middle of development started talking about doing the Orange Box and seemed like a reasonable conclusion to package it with these other games that have a lot of clout. Honored to be packaged with TF2 and Ep2.
Q: Playtesting as method to test whether players got storyline. Compartmentalized testing, how did you get feedback if only playing 1-2 levels? Portal was short through most of its lifetime, never 8 hours… so if someone didn’t finish weren’t super worried.
Q: Storyline, less is more… applies to other genres? Don’t have a surefire solution for every game but in Erik’s opinion, in general, less is more.
Q: Portal and HL2 have very different tone and themes. If they tie together more, how will you resolve that? Honestly not a big problem, Aperture tone is mostly just from Glados. Experiencing the world through Glados’ eyes, so if Chell is in HL universe nothing is in contradiction there. Inside the Aperture Funhouse different tonal rules apply. Same physics and art style already apply.
Q: Chance of an artbook? Dunno… talking about doing an Orange Box artbook. Most of our concept was for the Glados battle. Compared to TF or HL not a lot of concepts there. Thumbnails of stuff… but not really great pictures.
Q: Why portals ovals? They look better than rectangles… Wanted to fit the bounds of where you’d actually pass through, so filled an oval through the rectangle of where it technically is.
Q; Game alludes to a backstory (test subject), how much actually written vs just use your imagination? A fair amount, 15-page document about Aperture science, some of which is hidden on the Aperture website. Sent it to Jonathan which helped for the song.
Q: Portal was a triumph of creativity, awards and acclaim and so different. How does that affect the community of games as a whole? Approach to making games as a creative medium? Too early to tell… I hope more people make games like this since we like them! Independent games are really getting awesome, higher profile and production quality. Maybe people take more risks on more oddball games…
Q: From a film background… as writers, what are your influences? Kim Swift: Miyamoto, Nintendo games… knew she wanted to be a game designer from an early age. Katamari Damacy. Wolpaw: Direct inspiration was a book, “Destination Void”, clones that go into space and tasked to build the AI, failsafe mechanisms to deal with AIs that go rogue. Doesn’t read a lot of science fiction now… Roger Scheckley, funny sci-fi.
Q: Portal design process was an animal, what would it be? Joke question…
Q: What the hell is on those slides!? Friendship…. And fire…. Just pictures we couldn’t fit into the talk in any meaningful ways.
Q: Dev team, female lead is unusual. How many girls on the Portal team? 2, Kim and one of the artists. Q: Does that help in the creativity process? Dunno… honestly, no matter what your gender you make a game you want to enjoy yourself. So maybe by extension but should be fun for everybody… Erik: makes the room smell better….
Duelin’ Firemen!!!!