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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 creator

by 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!

adamrezich 3y ago
Narbacular Drop is the result of making a 3D game engine (the way everyone had to at DigiPen before they changed things such that now apparently nobody does this anymore, sadly), learning about portal rendering (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal_rendering https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal_rendering) in the process, and saying to oneself, "yo, what if portals weren't just used as a 3D rendering trick, but as a game mechanic, where the player is given the ability to place portals on arbitrary walls, and you can actually walk through them, thereby allowing the player character to traverse the environment in ways he could not in real life, thus allowing us game designers to create levels with geometry that would be impassable without the use of portals? that sounds like a decent puzzle game mechanic that nobody's tried before—let's make it and see what happens!" crucially, portal rendering (with regards to the player-placeable portals themselves) is actually entirely incidental to most if not all puzzle solutions, both in Portal, and, if I recall correctly, Narbacular Drop as well. if I recall correctly, Portal had a "portal render depth" setting that could be even set to zero for performance reasons on lower-end PCs. recursive portal rendering is just a neat visual effect that helps "sell" the mechanic, but it is not mechanically crucial to the functionality of the mechanic itself. yet, portal rendering (a 3D graphics engine implementation detail) inspired one of the most unique and great video game mechanics in the history of the medium! the idea of portals-as-traversal-mechanism only came about by means of creating a 3D engine from scratch—there's no reason such an idea would have occurred to them otherwise. there was no reason for them to paper-prototype the idea, because the idea itself was born from the implementation of a 3D engine. then, someone at Valve saw Narbacular Drop during a DigiPen Company Day, and said to themselves, "this is pretty cool, man, this wouldn't be that hard to implement in Source, and Source has better physics, and that could lead to a more robust design space, okay, let's offer these guys a job." and they were correct. Narbacular Drop became an excellent digital prototype for Portal, even though its physics engine was nowhere near as robust and capable as that of Source, such that it didn't, and couldn't, explore the full possibility space that was unlocked once the concept was literally ported over to that engine. sure, the student developers didn't consider it to be a prototype when they were making it, but that's just how many student games end up being—especially at DigiPen. this is exactly what I've been trying to say here: the best, most unique video game designs aren't arrived at by conceptualizing mechanics in the form of abstract ideas and only choosing to attempt to implement said mechanics if they pass some "paper prototype test"—rather, they're the result of people writing code, and seeing what happens, over and over, until a game design reveals itself. in order to design interesting, unique, and great video games, you have to write some code—it's unavoidable. but this makes sense, right? the act of using a medium's materials to create a work in said medium is instrumental to the creative process in many different media—why would it be different for video games? can you think of a single video game with a great, unique, and interesting design, whose design was paper-prototyped first, so as to confirm said design as valid and good, before a single line of code was written? not only is this as far as possible from the norm in the entire medium, but I cannot think of a single instance of this ever having happened, that I'm aware of at least. yet you claim this is the best way to go about designing video games?

by derefr 3y ago

adamrezich 3y ago

Narbacular Drop is the result of making a 3D game engine (the way everyone had to at DigiPen before they changed things such that now apparently nobody does this anymore, sadly), learning about portal rendering (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal_rendering https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal_rendering) in the process, and saying to oneself, "yo, what if portals weren't just used as a 3D rendering trick, but as a game mechanic, where the player is given the ability to place portals on arbitrary walls, and you can actually walk through them, thereby allowing the player character to traverse the environment in ways he could not in real life, thus allowing us game designers to create levels with geometry that would be impassable without the use of portals? that sounds like a decent puzzle game mechanic that nobody's tried before—let's make it and see what happens!" crucially, portal rendering (with regards to the player-placeable portals themselves) is actually entirely incidental to most if not all puzzle solutions, both in Portal, and, if I recall correctly, Narbacular Drop as well. if I recall correctly, Portal had a "portal render depth" setting that could be even set to zero for performance reasons on lower-end PCs. recursive portal rendering is just a neat visual effect that helps "sell" the mechanic, but it is not mechanically crucial to the functionality of the mechanic itself. yet, portal rendering (a 3D graphics engine implementation detail) inspired one of the most unique and great video game mechanics in the history of the medium! the idea of portals-as-traversal-mechanism only came about by means of creating a 3D engine from scratch—there's no reason such an idea would have occurred to them otherwise. there was no reason for them to paper-prototype the idea, because the idea itself was born from the implementation of a 3D engine. then, someone at Valve saw Narbacular Drop during a DigiPen Company Day, and said to themselves, "this is pretty cool, man, this wouldn't be that hard to implement in Source, and Source has better physics, and that could lead to a more robust design space, okay, let's offer these guys a job." and they were correct. Narbacular Drop became an excellent digital prototype for Portal, even though its physics engine was nowhere near as robust and capable as that of Source, such that it didn't, and couldn't, explore the full possibility space that was unlocked once the concept was literally ported over to that engine. sure, the student developers didn't consider it to be a prototype when they were making it, but that's just how many student games end up being—especially at DigiPen. this is exactly what I've been trying to say here: the best, most unique video game designs aren't arrived at by conceptualizing mechanics in the form of abstract ideas and only choosing to attempt to implement said mechanics if they pass some "paper prototype test"—rather, they're the result of people writing code, and seeing what happens, over and over, until a game design reveals itself. in order to design interesting, unique, and great video games, you have to write some code—it's unavoidable. but this makes sense, right? the act of using a medium's materials to create a work in said medium is instrumental to the creative process in many different media—why would it be different for video games? can you think of a single video game with a great, unique, and interesting design, whose design was paper-prototyped first, so as to confirm said design as valid and good, before a single line of code was written? not only is this as far as possible from the norm in the entire medium, but I cannot think of a single instance of this ever having happened, that I'm aware of at least. yet you claim this is the best way to go about designing video games?