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GDC's Design Challenge panel tackles sex in games
How does "My First Time" sound as this year's topic for GDC's time-honored Game Design Challenge panel? It may sound like something we cooked up ourselves, but it is, in fact, legit. This year's theme is all about the dilemma of designing games centered on "sex and autobiography." Obliviously, this won't be a discussion on how to peddle porno games; instead, it'll be about tackling the taboo and coming out with something both artistic and unique ... and probably about how to avoid a situation like this.Eric Zimmerman (chief design officer at Gamelab), Steve Meretzky (game design VP at YouPlus), Kim Swift (Valve level designer) and Sulka Haro (Sulake lead designer) will all be speakers at the panel on March 25. Those who are attending the industry-only event might want to stop by Room 135, North Hall at 2:30pm to see what's going down ... no innuendo intended there.[Via G4TV]
GDC08: Live from the Portal postmortem
3:36pm PT: After waiting in what can only be described as an epic line (by far the longest we've seen at GDC so far, and it's Friday afternoon!), we've found a respectable spot at the Portal postmortem, one of the most anticipated sessions of the entire week. Erik Wolpaw and Kim Swift are on stage, seemingly unaware of the sea of humans piling up outside the door.3:53pm PT: Ludwig posted a photo of the Portal postmortem line. Best part: you still can't see most of the line which wrapped around both ends of the frame. We're just happy to be in here. We're prickly with anticipation. It's like seeing the Beatles on Ed Sullivan ... just really nerdy ...
GDC08: The cake is a line
Oh, did you want to see Valve's Kim Swift and Erik Wolpaw deliver a Portal postmortem? We hope you like making your way through the digestive system of this rather large attendee snake. We'll keep you up to date -- just as soon as we figure out how to get down from this ladder.
GDC08: Portal designer Kim Swift mentions 'Portal 2'
We're not sure if Portal designer Kim Swift was speaking out of turn when she told X-Play, "I believe Doug Lombardi, who's our lead marketing director at Valve, has announced Portal 2." Was she referring to Lombardi's recent comment that "There'll be more Portal"? If so, we sorta thought his qualification of "the details of that ... we're still working out" sort of meant that "more Portal" didn't necessarily mean "Portal 2."Maybe that means "more levels" or "more musical hits by passive-aggressive AIs" ... or maybe, just maybe, it means "Portal 2." Lombardi told us, simply, "More Portal is coming. Nothing more to disclose right now." So, looks like we're back at cube one.[Thanks, Steve G.]
Portal a four-hour tour
Portal level designer, Kim Swift, told Eurogamer that her game will last only about four hours in its final version. The demo we saw at GDC looks fun, but only four hours?Portal will be bundled with at least Half-Life 2: Episode 2 and Team Fortress 2 (in the $40 Black version), which takes some of the sting. But ... four hours?We're all for short, sweet games. But our idea of a short game is about eight hours unless we're playing monthly episodes. When we hit the four-hour mark in a game, we're just getting started.[Via Xbox360fanboy]
Valve's Kim Swift talks about designing Portal
At the Experimental Game Design lecture (where, among others, we heard from Crush's Alex Butterfield), Valve's Kim Swift, one of the designers of Portal, talked about the challenges of creating a first-person mind-screw puzzler, which is packaged with the oft-delayed Half-Life: :Episode 2, Black, and Orange sets, and concluded with a video demonstration solving one of Portal's crazy door-opening puzzles."Doing something new can be a really big risk and adding something innovative to something already exists can often disrupt and create new games," she said. Swift told the crowd that she and the team approached Portal problems as small gamelets in isolated environments. To her, trying to innovate too much at one time can lead to failure. Jurassic Park: Tresspasser, she quipped, is an example of a title that "tries a lot, and fails at all." Swift's mantra is to try one thing and polish it to the best of your ability.Following her talk, Swift started a video of one level of portal to explain the depth of the puzzle. In Portal, you can make a blue and orange-rimmed portal that interact with one another. You can attach a portal to most surfaces, although reflective and glass surfaces will not take a portal, "just to make your life more difficult," Swift notes.
