The final session at the 2008 Game Developer’s Conference was also arguably the dopest.
It was a post-mortem on the last October’s break out hit, Portal. The talk was headed by lead designer Kim Swift and head writer Erik Wolpaw (who you may remember from his work on Psychonauts and the now defunct website OldManMurray.com, so you can guess, he’s a pretty funny guy). It was most popular session held, that’s for sure. There was a line that wrapped around the entire second floor of the west hall of people waiting to get in. It was surreal. I was surprised that I even managed to get a seat.
The main focus on their talk was how they managed to so successfully integrate the games narrative in to it’s gameplay. Erik gave some sound advice for anyone wanting to write a funny game.
“God help you.” See? Told you he was funny.
He stated that it’s easy to write macho dialog because it’s continues to be macho every time you hear it, however funny dialog is only funny maybe the first or second time. He also spoke about how keeping the narrative tight and simple was the ultimate goal for Portal. “We were gonna make it a lean, mean, storytelling machine even if it killed us.” Erik remarked, then lamented on all of the lines he had to cut, “And it did.”
Kim also touched on, may times throughout the talk that the most important tool they utilized during development were the play testers. She also specified that on-site playtesting was key, because so much is learned just by actually watching someone else play and how they react to the game.
It was a very amusing presentation, with tons of humorous slides to go along with it. I wish I could have gotten more pictures, but I was told that photography during the session was prohibited. However, the audio should be available for download soon and I would seriously recommend purchasing it when it does. It would be worth it for any Portal fan.
In fact, expect a story linking to where you can get it on here once it’s made available.
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