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[Doncommie]

When playing Portal/TF2 I was really struck by the mastery Valve have over game design. For a start, how minamilist the whole thing is. Is there anything really complicated about the production of portal? It's got one very unique gameplay element and very little art assets but manages to still weave a whole game from it because they went well outside the box with their design. The quirks elevate it from a puzzle game to an experience that's more memorable than X blockbuster game. Hell they managed to make a goddamn block you use to hold buttons down one of the most memorable points of the game and no million dollars of art assets, next generation lighting or multiplayer mode was needed to do it.

Sure Valve has a full game engine and a talented team of artists, writers blah blah blah but everything that made Portal was design and writing, something you don't need a sack of cash to do yourself.

[Tr00jg]

I cant remember the game, but Valve hired the guys behind THAT game to develop their idea into Portal. So you should actually be thanking the indies. GO INDIE!

Does someone remember the name? It was something weird.

[Doncommie]

Narbacular Drop but it was much more of a proof of concept than a real game.

[th15]

The portal people won some game design competition that got them noticed by Valve didn't they? Anyone remember which competition it was?

Portal made me sick though, I couldn't stop playing it but when I finished it I had to go lie down for awhile. Honestly the portal gameplay was cool, but it's not really earth-shattering. I wouldn't have enjoyed the game very much at all if it didn't have more than that. The beauty in it is the visual style and GLaDOS. Portal is GLaDOS. GlaDOS is portal. The Cake is a lie!

Seriously, it's just one of those games that cannot exist without a key character. Compare it to Bioshock, a game with a supposedly compelling story; Would Bioshock have worked if Atlas was different? Would it have worked if Andrew Ryan was Atlas and Atlas was Ryan? Honestly, I didn't feel very compelled by the characters in Bioshock. The only character I really liked was one of the first splicers that you meet that is a woman with a baby pram. She keeps wailing abuse at her imaginary child and you see her shadow on the wall first; a maniac with blades for hands bent over an open baby pram. That, more than anything else, was the defining moment in Bioshock for me.

Anyways, my point is that Portal wouldn't have worked without GLaDOS (hell, I've got the credits song in mp3 and it's playing non-stop in my playlist), and I say that that is the mark of a truly fantastic game character.

So, there's no sense crying over every mistake, you just keep on trying till you run out of cake!

[Doncommie]

Yeah it's the writing and delivery that makes it. In a puzzle game! 

[Pacian]

After mucho edits: Here's the bit I should have come up with at the start:

Lombardi: They’re in their senior year at DigiPen, and part of their class project was to make a game. So they made Narbacular Drop, and we’ve hired a couple people out of DigiPen over the years. They’re right close to us over in Redmond so we’re friendly with those guys. They invited a couple of people over to see the senior class showcase, which is what the school does to market the students to people in the games industry. So they invite people over from MGS and Nintendo and whatnot – all of the usual suspects in the Seattle area.

Robin and a couple other people went over to visit the senior class showcase and just check out what was going on and they saw Narbacular Drop and thought “Wow, this is really cool.” So they invited the seven of them over to Valve to show it to more of us. We were all in the conference room and they started presenting it and about ten minutes in Gabe [Newell] just stopped the presentation and said, “You all should come work at Valve and build something like this on the Source engine.” And they all were just sitting there like, “Did he just say what I thought he said?” A year later we introduced Portal on the Source engine.

[moshboy]

2d flash (de-make?) version of Portal

[ChrisFranklin]

Clearly, one of the lessons in Portal is to have your legal department peruse Newgrounds for blatant IP infringement by shameless Flash hacks.

That said, I think the length and price point are really refreshing.  $20 for three hours of extremely polished play plus some bonus maps is a model I'd love to see more of.

[fish]

every 5 minutes while playing portal i would do something so clever that id sit there thinking: i am so smart. im so smart it hurts. i must be the only person in the world who thought of that. damn im smart.

every 5 minutes.

brilliant.

(the game, not me)

[lowpoly]

this was a triumph.
I'm making a note here
HUGE SUCCESS

[Movius]

Android hell is a real place.

The game is simple, funny, entertaining and features Mike Patton. Thus it is a great game.

[fish]

it features mike patton?!?!

[Movius]

as the anger sphere

[fish]

there's an anger sphere!?!?!

[Movius]

The various spheres attached to GLaDOS each have a different character to them. I would assume the angry one is the Anger sphere.

[gummikana]

What the fuck? Does Portal feature Mike Patton???

Seriously that's the last drop. If Portal features Mike Patton I'm fucking getting it and upgrading my PC to run it. No matter what the cost is.

[ravuya]

Where are we going?
Is that a gun?
Are those numbers?

[nayon]

Also listen to the developer's commentary for good advice on game design

[Derek]

What the fuck? Does Portal feature Mike Patton???

Yeah, it totally does!  Not extensively, but... it's pretty rad.  Also, I just finished it.  It's a great game.

I enjoyed Half-life 2, but it always felt like a series of puzzles strung along a linear path, with long loading screens every five minutes.  In Portal, it's meant to be a linear series of puzzles, and the load screens are really quick.  And it's hilarious.

[fish]

yo petri, patton is also voicing the main guy in the new next-gen bionic comando!
crazy!