3 ms·

> (And Portal is also a very good thing to spend some time physically prototyping, because it's a challenging thing to code on a computer — especially without a

> (And Portal is also a very good thing to spend some time physically prototyping, because it's a challenging thing to code on a computer — especially without any resources from someone who already figured out how to do it!) how so? implementing functional portals given that you have the Source engine to start from isn't difficult at all. sure, it took a little bit of work to make them look good, and to tidy up things like making physics props go through them properly, and making it so you can shoot portals onto certain walls but not others and have that all work properly. but just making static planes that teleport the player through them while conserving momentum so as to be able to prototype puzzle design isn't that difficult, and surely was much easier to do in the Source engine with the Hammer map editor than wasting time with LEGOs and pipe cleaners—especially when you hired the Narbacular Drop people to learn what they learned in implementing a less-complex version of the same idea. it's just hacking around the already existing physics engine in Source, to add physics and further dimensionality to the design idea that Narbacular Drop already proved—one which was also not predicated on paper/physical prototyping! I'm trying to figure out why you used Portal as a specific example, when you yourself admit that this is not at all how they designed Portal, given that the way they did design Portal—by building a prototype and playing around with level design in-engine—is clearly the far superior way to go about things. > Note, though, that nobody ever actually did this for Portal (at least, I don't think) because random people on the Internet had already been prototyping Portal in 2D by drawing portal-puzzles on paper or in MS Paint for years, before Narbacular Drop was developed. is this true? from my recollection, this all began in the wake of the release of the initial announcement trailer for the original Portal back in 2006.

meheleventyone 3y ago
Not to mention the ‘simple’ physical prototype suggested is actually extremely labor intensive and requires a bunch of hand waving.
- adamrezich 3y ago
  when I got to that part I had to ask myself long and hard if I was being elaborately trolled—I still don't know the answer
derefr 3y ago
I think you totally misunderstood what "game-mechanics design" is if you're thinking that Valve would be the one to do game-mechanical prototyping. The creators of Narbacular Drop — if their goal had been to make a AAA game ala Portal† — would be the people who should have sat down and worked things out with legos and pipecleaners. † (Which it wasn't — they built a game basically as a class project, a proof-of-concept; they didn't care about making a fun game per se; about discovering a novel challenge-space wide enough to build out a set of scenarios deep enough that they could keep a player's attention for a few hours and make it seem worth $60 or whatever. They built levels just to prove that the physics worked.) This is because, in order to actually implement Narbacular Drop, the creators had to sit down and write an entire custom game engine from scratch, to make their game possible. (A.k.a. the "Sketcher Engine." The Source engine wasn't public in 2005! And no existing publicly-available game engine in 2005 had support for sub-rendering of secondary view frustums onto textures to be included in a primary view frustum; nor for "proxy" physics objects representing an object being in multiple places at once [Chell standing half-way through a portal] where both have collision but only with things on the same "side of the portal" they're in, so that they don't collide with their own alternate self. Oh, and even if they did — DigiPen doesn't let people in their game-design program use external black-box game engines in class projects. You always have to implement the game engine yourself.) Insofar as Narbacular Drop is considered a separate game, though, Portal really doesn't have any novel game mechanics; it's entirely derivative (though it does combine the "3D traversal with portals" mechanics of Drop with more traditional 3D-puzzle-platformer and graphic-adventure game mechanics, to produce a novel — and very polished — game.) As such, Valve didn't need to do any mechanical prototyping. Narbacular Drop was the proof-of-concept of the mechanics. Portal was a simple port of those mechanics into Valve's engine. You don't re-do mechanical ideation just to steal another game's mechanics. You already played the original; you already know the mechanics are good. (I would note that Valve have never been one to innovate in game mechanics. Half-Life, for example, is an innovative game, but it's one built by taking a bunch of physics-toy interactions (e.g. exploding barrels) that were seen in older titles, and making a game entirely out of those interactions, where you're supposed to use them to kill enemies.) > is this true? from my recollection, this all began in the wake of the release of the initial announcement trailer for the original Portal back in 2006. The "Now You're Thinking With Portals" meme originated in 2007, yes. But people have been trolling each-other with images of impossible 2D top-down puzzles saying something like "find the exit" — where one common "solution" is to draw a wormhole that takes you right to the exit — for years before that. And then parodying those, by drawing complex 2D-side-on platform-puzzler levels, where the player-avatar's route takes them through walls and narrow gaps. This genre of meme-image doesn't really have a name of its own, which makes it hard to search. After portal, it evolved into the "Get The Cake" meme. But I can assure you that it existed before there was a cake involved!

meheleventyone 3y ago

Not to mention the ‘simple’ physical prototype suggested is actually extremely labor intensive and requires a bunch of hand waving.

adamrezich 3y ago
when I got to that part I had to ask myself long and hard if I was being elaborately trolled—I still don't know the answer

derefr 3y ago

I think you totally misunderstood what "game-mechanics design" is if you're thinking that Valve would be the one to do game-mechanical prototyping. The creators of Narbacular Drop — if their goal had been to make a AAA game ala Portal† — would be the people who should have sat down and worked things out with legos and pipecleaners. † (Which it wasn't — they built a game basically as a class project, a proof-of-concept; they didn't care about making a fun game per se; about discovering a novel challenge-space wide enough to build out a set of scenarios deep enough that they could keep a player's attention for a few hours and make it seem worth $60 or whatever. They built levels just to prove that the physics worked.) This is because, in order to actually implement Narbacular Drop, the creators had to sit down and write an entire custom game engine from scratch, to make their game possible. (A.k.a. the "Sketcher Engine." The Source engine wasn't public in 2005! And no existing publicly-available game engine in 2005 had support for sub-rendering of secondary view frustums onto textures to be included in a primary view frustum; nor for "proxy" physics objects representing an object being in multiple places at once [Chell standing half-way through a portal] where both have collision but only with things on the same "side of the portal" they're in, so that they don't collide with their own alternate self. Oh, and even if they did — DigiPen doesn't let people in their game-design program use external black-box game engines in class projects. You always have to implement the game engine yourself.) Insofar as Narbacular Drop is considered a separate game, though, Portal really doesn't have any novel game mechanics; it's entirely derivative (though it does combine the "3D traversal with portals" mechanics of Drop with more traditional 3D-puzzle-platformer and graphic-adventure game mechanics, to produce a novel — and very polished — game.) As such, Valve didn't need to do any mechanical prototyping. Narbacular Drop was the proof-of-concept of the mechanics. Portal was a simple port of those mechanics into Valve's engine. You don't re-do mechanical ideation just to steal another game's mechanics. You already played the original; you already know the mechanics are good. (I would note that Valve have never been one to innovate in game mechanics. Half-Life, for example, is an innovative game, but it's one built by taking a bunch of physics-toy interactions (e.g. exploding barrels) that were seen in older titles, and making a game entirely out of those interactions, where you're supposed to use them to kill enemies.) > is this true? from my recollection, this all began in the wake of the release of the initial announcement trailer for the original Portal back in 2006. The "Now You're Thinking With Portals" meme originated in 2007, yes. But people have been trolling each-other with images of impossible 2D top-down puzzles saying something like "find the exit" — where one common "solution" is to draw a wormhole that takes you right to the exit — for years before that. And then parodying those, by drawing complex 2D-side-on platform-puzzler levels, where the player-avatar's route takes them through walls and narrow gaps. This genre of meme-image doesn't really have a name of its own, which makes it hard to search. After portal, it evolved into the "Get The Cake" meme. But I can assure you that it existed before there was a cake involved!