GDC 2008: Portal post-mortem

One of the interesting things to do with video-game development is to look back at those games that succeeded, deconstructing them in an attempt to figure out what the designers threw into the crucible that made the project a success.

We can do the same with failures, but that’s too depressing. Much more fun to focus on the positive.

It’s somehow fitting that my final GDC 2008 session was an opportunity to hear the creators of Portal, the best game of 2007, talk about what went into its creation.

As with so many of the seminars this year, the room was packed full, with interested attendees swirled around the outside of the room.

Portal was a sleeper hit. It leveraged the fact that it was packaged with the Xbox 360 Orange Box edition of Valve’s Half-Life 2: Episode 2 games to became a veritable pop culture phenomenon.

From the popularity of the companion cube to the mainstream airplay of the game’s closing theme song, “Still Alive” (written by musician Jonathan Coulton), by the end of 2007, Portal was everywhere you looked.

In the GDC session, level designer and team lead Kim Swift and writer Erik Wolpaw talked about how they were able to create a narrative in a game with only two characters and one-sided dialogue.

Portal was developed by a team of anywhere between five and ten people, and Swift and Wolpaw both agreed that the story from the game wouldn’t go very far on its own, nor would the gameplay be much when separated from the story. “It would be a race to see which would fail first on their own,” said Swift.

The thing that really seemed to drive Portal to be what it became, they both said, were the constraints. Restricted time, people, and resources forced them to come up with creative solutions to problems.

Wolpaw outlined the philosophy upon which Portal’s narrative was based. “Games tell two stories,” he said. The first is the story story that is told with cutscenes and dialogue, and the second is the gameplay story, which is the story told by what the player does.

Swift and Wolpaw also stressed the importance of playtesting to Portal’s final cut. Bringing in gamers to try the game and provide feedback was something they did early on, and Swift said it was invaluable to refining the game as it was developed..

When asked how they planned to overcome the challenge of not having the same constraints in developing Portal 2, assuming that a greater budget will be afforded to them, Wolpaw joked, “I’m content to bask in the moment without people bugging me about the next one.”

We do know, however, that there will be more Portal coming. Valve has promised. I can hardly wait.