En intressant intervju hos IGN bjuder på fler detaljer från #Portal, #Valves kommande portalskjutarspel som nyligen chockade spelvärlden med sin attraktiva trailer. Från Kim Swift, en av de studenter som låg bakom projektet Narbacular Drop (som köptes av Valve) kommer flertalet matnyttiga svar. Vi får bland annat veta att Portal kommer ta ungefär tre timmar att klara av och att spelet till en början enbart kommer vara spelbart för en spelare, men att Valve experimenterar med olika idéer för Portal i multiplayer.
Portal is a first-person, single-player game set in the Half Life universe. It is a stand-alone game that will provide an extra three hours of gameplay to the HL2: Episode 2 game package. The initial release is to be single-player only, but we have lots of ideas for multiplayer with Portal for future projects.
Storyn verkar uppbyggd kring företaget Aperture Science Laboratories, för vilka du som spelare agerar minst sagt välutrustad labbråtta.
Although Portal is a first-person game built using the Source engine, it's unlike Half-Life 2 in some very important ways. With Half-Life 2, Valve made an explicit decision to move towards a seamless world and away from discrete artificial gameplay arenas with level transitions, etc. In Portal, we chose to divide gameplay into a series of trials that you have to complete as a test subject in the Aperture Science Laboratories.
Vi får också veta hur det gick till när Valve rekryterade de talangfulla studenterna.
Along with the other members of the Portal team, we were students at DigiPen Institute of Technology located in Redmond, WA, next to the Nintendo of America campus. During our senior year, the seven of us created a game called Narbacular Drop, which was an early test of our ideas about portal-based gameplay. Every year, DigiPen puts on an expo for graduating seniors to show their game projects to prospective employers. A couple of Valve people attended, and they asked us to come to the Valve offices and show it to Gabe Newell. Gabe watched our demo and basically hired us on the spot. It was kind of shocking. We stood around in the parking lot afterwards gibbering to ourselves for about 20 minutes.
