***** Sadly I can't take credit for noticing that. I played through portal with commentary enabled, and I just remembered that they mentioned early game testers got stuck because they didn't think the orange portal was an entrance too. I just wanted to point it out here, to spread the information.
The very first portal you ever go into in the game is an orange portal. As a matter of fact so is the second one. Maybe they changed that after the testers got stuck.
Archangel72985 I think the problem was after spending so much time acclimating them to the fact of "you control the blue portal" and since the prior chambers teaches you "shoot blue portal next to yourself to get to orange portal" teaches a directional blue->orange mindset while not necessarily reinforcing the orange->blue mindset. The entire portal experience up to that point is an "in" or "out" mindset (get out of the cage, go into the glass rooms, get out of the hole) rather than a bidirectional "through" mindset. And with a mono-directional mindset, cultural perceptions of colors has a fairly large influence. The blue (which in some cultures is functionally equivalent to green) portal is a "go" or "continue forward" sign while the orange/red portal is a "stop" or "wrong way" sign. That chamber also teaches you to look for spots to shoot outside of your immediate vicinity. Again, the few times you've had the portal under your control were shooting nearby walls to get TO a preset portal. Now you'll learn that if you already have a preset portal near you, you can use the other (controlled portal) to be the landing/exit/destination portal. It also shows you that there is no real range limitation to the portal gun and that it travels in a straight line instantaneously to your cursor over long distances rather than an arc affected by gravity or travel time that you might have to compensate for. This becomes relevant in later puzzles where you are taught the relevance of quick portal switching.
***** If you have the game, start it and play the beginning with developer commentary. When you get to that test chamber you will hear a developer explain that people thought that orange portal was exit only. As dragonbretheren said, the players wasn't in the right mind set to notice the color in the very first set of chambers.
Yemto I had the EXACT same thought process you did. I too played portal with the commentary, learned that piece of information, and was going to comment about it, until I saw your comment already existing.
My favorite part about Portal's level design is that while there is typically only a single way to do things, there are a couple of different ways to approach a problem. Not only that, but it really captures the "AHA!" moment when you figure out how to solve something like a tricky jump.
One of the early test chambers, shortly after you get access to both portals, was solved during game testing by a method the developers hadn't thought of, which bypassed almost the entire chamber's puzzles. Rather than change the level to make that method impossible (thereby forcing players to play the level as intended) they left it in as a sort of reward for creative thinking, so that everyone can use that trick if they work it out :)
Also, it feels really good when you complete a puzzle in a way you didn't think the developers though about (even tough they probably did) by exploiting some aspect of the game. These exploits makes you that you outsmarted the system, is just awesome. That's probably the main reason for Dark Souls sucess.
or when you ooops when you realize there was a pit you could place a portal instead of doing a highly complicated jump-and-place-the-portal-where-you-will-fall-thingy
Gareth Scott Do you mean the one where you're supposed to raise an "elevator" that takes you to an exit but instead you can just jump to the exit directly by jumping into a portal from a certain elevated surface?
One of the things I found most interesting was Portal's use of color. We're presented with a fairly minimalistic palette in the first set of test chambers. The background is black, white, and shades of gray, using light blue as an accent color for guide lines. This deliberate monochrome setting causes any color to pop out, so you can always quickly and easily see your portals in movement if you have line of sight. The fact that white walls are the ones that can hold a portal also immediately draws our eyes to brightness amid dark settings, something we need to learn and look for in later levels once things get gritty and messy, a contrast of light and shadow called chiaroscuro which Valve also used in Left 4 Dead. Encouraging players to move towards and use well lit or light colored areas allows them to highlight possible progress routes with simple lights or a change in texture without using signs and arrows. Orange and blue are complimentary colors, naturally linked chromatically in the human eye, and used here because they offset each other so well. Having established that blue and orange are encouraging and friendly, we're suddenly given red, a strong warning color, in the form of the buttons, the cameras, and the turrets' eyes, making us feel wary of them. What's red's complimentary color? Green. What's green in Portal? The toxic water in the chambers. We get a second set of complimentary colors that are also chromatically distinct from what we already have, but we learn to be careful of them because they're not blue and orange. We, as the player, are given control of the colors blue and orange. This must mean something else controls red and green, something that must be opposing us because the things that are red and green in this game are out to stop us either by using obstacles or by killing us. Who's ultimately controlling the buttons, the cameras, the turrets, and the poisonous water by controlling the test chambers? GLaDOS. We're already subliminally prepared to oppose her just by association and use of color, and they don't even tell us outright what to feel about which colors. They just let it happen as players run through the game and learn to play the game. That's pretty damned impressive with nothing more than gameplay and a color palette. Fun extra bit: when you place a cube on a button, you visually obscure most of the red with white and gray, part of the background palette. What happens to the control line and indicator panel afterwards? They go from light blue, a background palette color, to orange. Friendly, encouraging orange, a color that the player controls. You remove the threatening red palette and replace it with a color the game has encouraged us to associate with positive feelings. That's genius right there, artistically, symbolically, and design-wise.
As someone that studies Game Design in a house of traditional professions (mom's a doctor, sister's a vet, stepfather's an english teacher), I've been meaning to introduce them to games, mostly my mom. I've tried Telltale stuff, point and clicks, tried to have her backseat gaming... but I've never once thought about using portal. And I HAVE that game! Thanks for reminding me of its existence, guys. I'm gonna try to see if my mom gets into it later :D
Be careful with that one man, portal may be a great game, but I have found that it isn't good for introducing to people with. My dad found the entire way the game worked completely Gordian.
Adeptus Forge indeed, my parents both tried it (aged 60+) and while my dad got the hang of it (mostly), my mom kept stumbling over the controls. The whole mouse+WASD thing is not as intuitive as we may think. Add portals to that and older people who've never played anything with that control scheme are just getting information overload.
Adeptus Forge AdenineMonkey I will take baby steps. The reason I think this game will be good is because she loves puzzles. She loves anything that challenges her brain, that forces her to think outside the box. Moving around is not intuitive, sure, but it can be trained and practiced. However, we'll see what happens. I'm still waiting for the Wolf Among us to finish so we can play together (me behind the controls, her making the decisions), although I might have to cheat a little bit with the pause button =P
AdenineMonkey Both Portal games work seamlessly with the Xbox 360 Controller on the PC; I mention this because it seems to be a common theme that anything that isn't purely mouse controlled on PC tends to end up easily overwhelming those who don't play games often, where-as a Controller (despite what Nintendo says) is often very easily picked up on what does what in a well designed game. Portal in-fact the Controls are disgustingly simplistic and feel natural on the Controller; plus it's a fantastic case study for how fluid and precise controls can be even without Aim-Assist (something I've personally taken to turning off when I'm developers allow me to)
Leyvin360 I'm sorry, but you're still advocating a dual-analog control scheme for first person control. That may feel incredibly natural to us, but it's not as intuitive as you seem to think.
To anyone who wants to know more about Valve's approach to game design, I strongly suggest you listen to the Developer Commentary included in many of their games. Not only do they give you great insight into all sorts of facets of their design philosophy, but they do so within the game environment itself, allowing you to appreciate things they mention because they are right in front of you. Also, its worth noting they redid a few of the first test chambers for Portal 2, and the commentary there is particularly enlightening on the way those chambers have been improved.
One of the most mind blowing parts of the developer commentary (I believe it was in Portal 2) was that when building the levels they created room pieces and then connected them quickly using the portal mechanic. This allowed them to quickly iterate on their level design without rebuilding the room from the game engine each time. It's a fascinating thing to learn because essentially Portal was itself built with Portals.
When I watched the first episode of this series I thought "how long will it be until Portal gets an episode?" I played through portal with the developer commentary and gained so much appreciation for (good) game design as a result. It's amazing to realise the shear amount of thought that went into every design decision and just how many of those decisions the average player will never even realise was a decision. I also learned that we rarely look up. :)
It has a great balance of dark humor, challenging puzzles, and a mechanic that makes you think about problems different. It was an amazing game, and still is
+Nikolaj Lepka tecnically speaking portal stories mel and aperture tag are cannon, don't rage at me, i know they are mods, but i have a explanation, would you like to see it?
128Gigabytes have you ever seen the community test chambers? All of those are canon, they just happen in different universes, as the Cave Johnsons say, and the mods are nothing more than big community chambers, so the mods are canon, I should make a video explaining in more detail but im lazy
It's very worthwhile to go through portal's developer commentary, as well. They outline a lot of their design philosophy and the process they went through over the course of the game.
i tryed it out, but i was to difficult for me. And the first person perspective was very confusing for me, because I dont play FPS games. A third person back view would have been better for me
Duckboy Jacob maybe cuz most people seem to hate FPS's without much of a thought. There are some really good FPS games beyond CoD and people need to realize that.
5:34 This is such an underrated moment. It's so great for setting the atmosphere for when you start trying to break out of Aperture and rebel against GLaDOS as well as an excellent foreshadowing of shooting the moon in Portal 2. I immediately thought of this moment when I saw the moon in Portal 2. The sequel itself sets that moment up properly so you know you CAN shoot the moon and that you have to; that's not what I mean. From a story telling perspective, this first moment of putting a portal where it's not meant to be put as a decisive act against Aperture and for your own freedom perfectly sets up the moon moment. It's the most powerful thing you ever do with the portal gun and it is so something Aperture never wanted you to do with it, and to finally, after the entirety of two games, you make actual contact and interact with a piece of the natural world, so far removed from Aperture it's in fucking space. God damn is portal amazing.
*_finally, after the entirety of two games, you make actual contact and interact with a piece of the natural world, so far removed from Aperture it's in fucking space_* ahahaha that sentence - yesssss ♥
Well on the flip side, anyone who doesn't need the slow introduction to portals will quickly breeze through the levels until they hit a point they don't understand and die. The quick respawn allows the players to get back to the part they had trouble with and immediately get to solving that particular problem. So the gameplay can kind of fast forward for more adept players.
I fucking love EC and Design Club is probably my favorite new addition to the channel. But I'd love to see some dissections of "bad" game design. It's not enough to know what makes a game good, but what makes a game bad as well. There's just as much to learn there, if not more. Even if you all don't decide to take that turn with this show, keep up the good work!
I think Ride to Hell would be a good choice for this series. It's more appropriate than Sonic 06, because it's not so much bad because it's buggy or unfinished (Don't get me wrong. It *is* buggy and unfinished) but the terrible game design choices are its worst offender, not the lack of polish.
After playing both Portal games, I find it really hard going back to the first. The first few levels may be good at teaching someone the concept of portals for the first time, but for someone who already gets it it can be seriously tedious.
It's definitely one of those games that's infinitely easier the second time around. The first time I played Portal, it took me about 4 to 5 hours to beat it. My second playthrough took only 1 hour.
To stop it from being tedious I challenge myself to speedrun Portal 1. I can get consistent sub-40 minute runs and the tutorial sections can take less than a minute each if you're quick enough.
Ira Gamagoori If it's as if it isn't there then you can slip out of the bounds of the portal and splice yourself. Which is precisely the issue being discussed here.
DoomedLich GLADOS didn't create the gun, scientists did. Scientists who, presumably, do not want to be cut in half. They obviously but in a sci-fi safety mechanic. It was safe enough to be put into testing when GLADOS went hay-wire. I'm going to assume that they put anti-gravity forces on the edges, and initiate a propulsive force upon portal change. Oh, and I'm guessing they are using wormhole tech. Wormholes with infinite thinness.
Great video. The one thing I would add in the first few levels that you showed is another fundamental way of puzzle solving: you maintain velocity between portals. I think it is one of the more complicated ways of interacting with the portals and gets used a lot.
Portal is definitely a game that does a lot of things right in terms of gating and tutorializing concepts without being in the player's way. To those of you who have the game I would also recommend going through the game with the Developer commentary turned on and listening to them describe the thought processes behind making the game, it's all very fascinating.
Lot's of good commentary! I've always felt that portal has a near-flawless balance of challenge and carefully crafted hints. Panels that are at a 45 degree angle. Spaces on non-portal walls that allow portals. Vents through which you can shoot portals. And of course one of the few games that truly invites the players to stop doing what they're told in order to survive and progress. All of Valve's careful handiwork is very easy to undervalue because it's made to be so subtle and natural, but that's of course the very reason it's so fantastic and worth celebrating. I'll always have a space in my heart for games that can truly taught me to think in new and divergent ways (Crush on the PSP, the time puzzles in Ratchet and Clank: A Crack in Time, etc.) because they not only tell players just how clever and capable they truly are, but demonstrate it for them.
I really like the test chambers in Portal, because they're tutorials that exist within and ultimately further the narrative. A lot of games will take the player the aside to explain new mechanics and it often breaks my sense of engagement.
another game that does that is Psychonaut! It's definately woth to check out (it's jump and run though, not puzzle) plus it's hilarious, a bit older, but still a fun experience ^^
Don't hate on me but I think that the COD 2 Tutorial Stage was pretty good at not getting you out of the experience. You were a soldier and you needed some basic training before going out on the battlefield even if the text may look a bit too big.
Gabi Axinte I think the point as with Mario 1-1 and the Portal Test Chambers is that you get the player to learn organically rather than ham-fistedly telling them what to do and how to do it. They glazed a bit over it in the first button room in chamber 0, but the way the room is designed, the first thing the player sees walking through the entryway is a big red button. The box isn't there yet, nobody's telling you "push the big red button". You then see a closed door, which is presumably the only way to continue. There is also a stream of lights linking the closed door to the button. Still nobody's telling you anything, but you naturally think "let's go walk over to the button". You step on the button, which causes the lights to change and the door opens. Cool, now you know push button->open door. You start walking toward the now open door and it closes once you step off the button. You now realize that the button is weight-sensitive ala the boulder trap in Indiana Jones. At that same moment, a box is dropped in front of you and it falls down with a solid *clank* indicating weight and making sure that you notice it. The first (and only) instruction finally pops up telling you to "push e to pick up and object". Without being told, you understand that this is heavy, and may be heavy enough to hold the button down while you mosey through the door. Voila! You've been naturally introduced to doors, buttons, cubes, and lifting objects in a way that doesn't feel like a tutorial. Remember: you were only given one instruction, and it was only informing you of a single new control when you needed it (as opposed to Mario 1-1 where there are so few buttons that experimentation can be done quickly, a PC game, unfortunately has to tell you which of the many keyboard buttons actually do things, so this ONE brief, unobtrusive message is rather unavoidable). It doesn't feel like they're "teaching" you anything. Nobody told you what to do or how to do it. No long winded speech or wall of text. You've solved this puzzle of your own volition without anyone pulling you aside and going "I'm going to teach you the basics" or "this is just a warm up drill" or "in this room, you'll learn how to push buttons and open doors", breaking the flow of the game and the early immersion. It has become merely a part of moving on with the game, just as natural as walking around.
dragonbretheren Not many game do something like this, they flooded you with pointy arrow to objective and BIG TEXT slam into your eyes. The worst case is they lock you until you do something as the game said, then the game will applaud you for just simple task like hit the movement button. It is like they treat player like they are 8 years old.
I personally played this when I was like 10, with my only gaming knowledge being limited parts FPS and RTS. Puzzles in games were new too me, and portals seemed like too much, but this brilliant tutorial took me through the game and eased me into the amazing mechanics until I didn't know I was using them. I still remember my shock when I learned you could fall threw portals and keep your momentum, but by the end of the game I was flying about like a frickin' plane. The opening also stumped me fora few minutes as I tried to understand what was going on, but when I figured it out I began to realize what I had gotten myself into. This video showed me how I manged those levels when I had no experience of anything like that before. Thank you, and thanks Valve :D
I must have experienced this game in the best possible way. I got it free as part of the orange box and never touched it. I think I opened it months later and thought it was nothing more than a demo of what's possible. I thought it was neat but didn't play it again. It wasn't until years later that a friend challenged me to get to level 11. the level he was on. So I did. As the game went on I started seeing clues to a much more sinister story evolving. I was blown away. It wasn't just a demo. It was so much more.
I love the Design Club series so far, it's fun to watch as a player and probably good for designers. I've thought of doing something similar but I'm not sure how well I could do a series like it since I'm not exactly a game maker myself, though having more people do similar series would probably lead to more games being covered and seeing different stuff be explored. I look forward to the future episodes and glad to see one of my favorite games have an episode.
This game is great. Portal's Designer commentary section was basically what got me started in game design, and I remember being floored at just how much thought goes into things like the tiles on the floor, or where you start a level.
In the room that is discussed 4 minutes into the video, the commentary for Portal makes a point about how in play testing people were some times confused about if you could enter through blue portals, since you had only entered through orange ones before, and had very possibly never gone back through. That chamber forces you enter a blue portal, and in doing so, quickly teaches you that orange and blue portals are the same.
I'm digressing a bit here, but I personally find that the moment when you get the second portal gun to be genius, in terms of toning and mood. You solve the puzzle to get to the orange portal gun, then, when on that platform moving slowly towards the gun, the music intensifies. This does so much in building your anticipation of the power and freedom you are about to hold in your own hands. I find that valve does this a lot when the player is obtaining central item, for example how the music also intensifies immediately after you get the hazard suit in Half Life.
I will say Portal 2 is slightly better if only because there is no load/save thing that happens when you die, and Portal 2 doesn't actually allow for too much death. I kinda messed up by playing Portal 2 first.
For years I've known I want to become a Video Game Designer. Some of my favorite videos on RUclips are ones that analyse a game and take us into the mind of the developer. These range from Digressing & Side-questing, Really Freakin' Clever, and even Extra Credits! To see that this channel is starting a new series about Game Design is just plain awesome. Please continue to make these. I love what you have to say in these. It really makes you think about how much thought goes unnoticed in so many good games. Well, just wanted to say thank you, and to keep up the great content that only Extra Credits could possibly make.
It's an awesome game that not only utilizes a unique mechanic, but is master of subtle visual clues that aid in progression. Think about all the ways we're taught things like, if you see an extended platform, you should probably put a portal there. Even the portal-conductive concrete texture is suggestive standing out when placed against darker, non-conductive materials. That right there is a crucial piece of information that's never actually explained in dialog, but conveyed entirely through design.
Wow. And to imagine that Portal was created by a small team as an afterthought to throw in with the other games of the Orange Box to compensate for all the delays. Holy crap those people are geniuses. I'll say it once and I'll say it again, I love this series, its quickly becoming one of my more favorites here, but I really think it could do better by being longer. A perfect example why is shown right here at the end, where you only get through a couple of test chambers before you have to cut the video and run. This type of series really deserves to have a detailed look at its subject matter, and I don't think it will do you any good to run it the same way you run the other series on the channel.
you know I gave this game to my 3 year old niece and she quickly worked out the first couple of puzzles but grew board not long after, I gave this game to my 47 year old mother and she had trouble understanding the portals despite a history in science. I think the mentality of learning something new is regulated highly by age.
One thing I loved about Portal when I finished it was that I could enable commentator tracks to hear things like this from the level designers, how they did things, how people were having trouble and the redesigns, and so on.
Great video as always, EC! I think Design Club is my favourite series of yours, and as a lover of Portal myself, this was really interesting! I'd never really thought of the test chambers as one long tutorial, but I see what you mean now! :D
This was one astounding and impressive experience even before I was interested in game design. The game gave me puzzles which perfectly grew in difficulty with my understanding of the mechanics. Never before or after has a game managed to bring something new and challenging with every level, without demanding too much, which would result in me googling for the answer.
So until this was pointed out in this video I had *no idea* that there was a clock or doorframe visible at the beginning of the relaxation chamber. I am not visual at all, haha. And I know plenty of people who would never notice the key bindings at the beginning - people who rarely see the control instructions in GTA, which has to be the worst source of frustration for them in those games. I keep an eye out for popups and I miss those half the time. I've always thought that Portal's loooong tutorial would never have worked if it wasn't specifically a series of laboratory tests, or something similar. It's world-building, it's showing us mechanics...and if we didn't have the huge safe space, we'd get frustrated, and if it wasn't for GladOS showing us how messed-up this situation really is, the huge safe space would have gotten boring. That being said - the Portal series is a masterpiece. And the way that they figured out how to make that tutorial work was brilliant.
I see the Extra Credits team are getting the same graphical glitches I do on newer computers. The missing frosted window effect and portal wibbly-wobbliness has been driving me nuts lately. For those that liked this video, it's worth playing through the Commentary mode on Portal since it covers similar things to this video for all the test chambers. Actually... play the commentary mode on every Valve game you own, they're all super interesting insights into game design and managing your audience's experiences. They even gave me food for thought with tailoring my audience's experience in how I design my own stuff, and I make comics and art rather than games (and to give kudos to Extra Credits generally, a lot of their episodes have had the same effect on me).
Another very clever thing about the last test chamber you've talked about is how they have both versions of entering and exiting a portal: entering a blue portal that you placed yourself and exiting an orange one / entering an orange portal that is part of the level and exiting one that you placed yourself. I think that was actually part of the dev commentary, but I've heard that the reason for that is because many players apparently thought that the blue portal was only for entering and the orange one only for exiting.
For more info, go through the game with the commentary on. It's really interesting to hear the designers talk about these levels and what challenges they had to solve.
what she says: i'm fine what she means: so the first part of Portal is just a bunch of tutorials for all the mechanics you're going to need to beat the last level of the game, but they're called Test Chambers? like Aperture Science is testing players for their ability to destroy GLADoS? and then you kill GLADoS? but isn't GLADoS administering these tests? so GLADoS is responsible for teaching you how to kill her? and is that just-?
This is cool! I like this series a lot. I'm just curious, are you ever going to do videos longer than just ten minutes? I really like videos like this and I would be amazed to watch you pick apart every single bit of a game like Portal or really anything. Great video!
I got sick a certain weekend and with nothing else to do I played portal and portal 2 back to back all the way through. I do not recommend it, I was literally thinking with portals, as in I'd catch myself thinking "if I place a portal here and there I can reach the kitchen faster"
playing through the game with "Developer Commentary" on was one of the most valuable learning experiences I've ever had with a video game, and would HIGHLY recommend that anybody who has portal and hasn't done so yet, do.
Portal is probably my pick for the best game ever. It's just perfect. As stated in this fantastic video, the mechanics are perfect. The learning curve is consistent, not really putting the player in any real danger, and letting them have space to figure out how to progress through the game. While some may argue that the last sections of Portal don't really utilize this, by then the player will have all the knowledge they need. The atmosphere is also brilliant. The solid and pure parts of the test chambers don't give the player almost nothing to get distracted, and the ambient music accompanying with the levels also deliver the feeling that you are in a testing facility. There may be some parts that may leave you just pondering and pondering the puzzles, but those are few and far away. GlaDOS is the one of my favorite antagonists in video games. Playing the game through a second time made me realize how subtle she was in delivering some negative and hateful comments towards me. Plus Ellen McClain is a really great voice actor. While the game was really short, since you can beat it in about 2 or 3 hours, the game still let the player feel satisfied with the experience, and asking for more. Even though this game has gotten the praise it deserves and even more, i still can't stop loving it! It's a game i can just launch on Steam and play through in a single run over and over and over and over again, but i still feel this warmth feeling inside me whenever i play it. It's that great.
I completely agree with everything you said here (even though it sounds like you took heavy inspiration from the Dev Commentary). Portal is one of the few games I have fully completed multiple times. I love it, just the first level is very annoying if you're replaying it. I kind of wish there was a way to skip the timer without loading into the next segment. When I was trying to get a friend to get into Portal, she gave up on Chamber 3. I was heartbroken that she gave up so easily.
Speedrunners hate it too. However, most of them just use a save that skips to the end. Now to properly answer your comment, TECHNICALLY you can skip it by pushing yourself out of bounds with the radio and save glitching (saving and loading messes up the game). This is an INCREDIBLY hard trick. Here is footage of it: clips.twitch.tv/BoringObliviousScorpionPogChamp
When making my own puzzle game, Portal was the absolute first example that I went to to learn how to teach the player through gameplay. I'm not sure there's a better example out there, the entire learning progression is very clever, and also nicely reinforces previous lessons in the interconnecting space between puzzles... to say nothing of the excellent pacing!
I remember when I got the blue portal gun, I thought " This is freaking awesome!!". I had no idea a few test chambers later I would get the orange portal too. I couldn't believe how good of a game it was, plus the voice acting and pacing was superb.
Ah, there are so many games that do too much handholding. Ever since I've watched this episode and other things on good introduction of concepts, I see all these other games that flash walls of text saying "DO THIS TO DO THIS AND THIS AND THAT AND BAM!" and I always think how they could have done it better.
If you plan on continuing making videos like this about portal you should consider taking the audio commentary into consideration. There's an extra version in which speech bubbles appear throughout the game. Clicking on them will play respective audio files which are, by the way, also in the game's folder. These commentary contain information about why certain choices were made. For example the first scene was made so when the first portal appears Chell could see herself because testers would think that the portals would lead to other universes.
I will also note that Room 03 (5:17) has a great "ah-ha!" moment in that when you use the Blue Portal to both enter the middle of the room, then using it to get near the exit, pointing out that the portals work both ways. Again, done without a single line of dialogue.
The art also helps, having signs that guide you but are designed in such a way that look like part of the environment rather than being directional arrows.
I honestly and truly believe that Portal is THE GAME that should be shown as an example in every single game design school and course. It's level design, pacing, way of teaching players is so top notch, so stellar that ever game designer should learn from it as much as possible. It shows that you can make a tutorial that will teach a player in such a way that he won't even recognize that he's being taught. You can incorporate it into the story and gameplay seamlessly, make it feel natural and in place. Design wise this game is absolutely and definitely the best game ever created, and one of the most important too. There's just so much about Portal, that I could probably go on for hours about how brilliant of a gem it is amongst other games..
Textures are often the big bottleneck for loading of scenes in games, so while it's loading the whole level, it's likely spending most of that time loading textures.
Really? I thought mapping the polygons was a big deal as well, then the lightning, other effects etc. Well, I actually don't know. It's just odd with a game like portal because almost all the levels have the same textures. Maybe it's the mapping of all those textures on top of the polygons that takes the time? ..am just speculating.
Polygons are pretty cheap to load. Lighting is either done at runtime (dynamic lighting) and therefore doesn't need loading at all, or is baked into a texture (lightmapped static lighting), and therefore consists of part of the texture load time. I suspect that Portal uses lightmapped static lighting for the most part, as there's no real reason not to when the lights don't move. Mapping the textures to the polygons is done at creation time, so doesn't cost time during loading to do. It's actually pretty expensive to load textures, as there's a lot of data to stream into memory and decode for rendering. Portal does share a lot of textures between levels, and that's why its loading times are often very short, but not all levels use all textures, and you can be sure they unload them for levels that don't use them, which means they have to re-load them later when a level needs them again.
Alright. Thanks for the information. So it pretty much comes down to all the pixels of all the textures, as they are all information. But can't I see all the textures pretty fast in the whole portal game just by opening its level editor. Not sure about portal, but I can do it with half-life, and I've even added a ton of more textures into that. If it is the same for portal, then what is it that makes it take longer in the game?
It's not so much it's taking longer, it's just how it has to manage it. A load in an editor will take the same time to actually load the textures, but it also has to process rendering and gameplay while you're doing it, which takes a lot of resources. In an editor, it can just freeze everything until it's ready, but without a loading screen, the game has to do things in the background, while a lot of resources are being taken by other things. Kind of like trying to put on a shirt while walking - it's a lot harder and takes longer if you're doing something else at the same time, but it's a popular method for games because it allows it to be seamless, so the game doesn't have to drop to an ugly "LOADING" screen all the time.
Another great episode that breaks apart the excellent learning mechanics of a well-designed game. Coincidentally, I just started playing portal again a few days ago, so I could actually reconstruct most of what you said quite well (and remember what came after the point where you stopped). *SPOILERS* Interestingly enough, you could argue that the actual tutorial (or at least the practice) ends no earlier than with the escape from your planned incineration in Test Chamber 19.
Personally I'd recommend anyone who's into game design to play through Portal with the developer's commentary turned on. It was really interesting hearing about the reasoning behind the designs for the room, and the changes they made when they saw how playtesters reacted to them.
I can not understate the importance of introducing the portals to the player with the side on view like they did at 2:20. When I first played the game, I had to stand there staring through the portals for a good five minutes while I tried to wrap my head around the idea that, "Okay, I am both over there and over here at the same time. No wait, over there IS over here. I am looking at myself standing in a room while I am standing in that very room." And from there they *slowly* introduce the concept of portals to you. First you get automated portals, then you get control over only one portal, before they finally give you two. If they had of just thrown the double portal gun at you right at the start and just said, "Go nuts" it would have been very easy to get overwhelmed.
Seeing this video makes me realize, I don't think I ever played the first portal... only the 2nd game, which I jumped right into and quite enjoyed. I may have to go back and play part 1 now...
Since I unfortunately heard a friend telling me about the game at first, and then watched a full playthrough, I already knew and understood the mechanics before even playing it. I've just noticed, for the first time in years, that as soon as the first portal was open, I was never perceiving myself as in the cell, but as in the room outside the cell. As soon as the first portal was open, I saw myself outside the room, never even noticing I was still in the room. I actually find it somewhat concerning. I was so captivated by the sight of Chell's side view, I lost my spacial orientation.
Ok Secret reveal time: I never played any of the portal series. The reason? I was so mad that EVERYONE had revealed the ending. I decided there was no value in playing the game because I had already seen the ending. I was mad at everyone. As well as the internet. This happened because I came from a time when endings to games were jealously guarded. So much so that even Nintendo Fun Club, later Nintendo Power would shy away from the ending even on complete walkthroughs. I couldn't really *not* see the ending, it was everywhere. Watching this made me wish I had played the game. Lots of good game design elements to be learned. Hopefully the EC staff will read this. Thanks for changing my mind on a game, and keep the design club videos coming!
Design Club - Katamari Damacy I'd be really interested to see how the devs introduced such a bizarre game mechanic, and to discover the method behind the madness of the seemingly randomly placed items.
It's probably easy for gamers to underestimate the value of that "first teaching moment", but I have to admit when I tried teaching a non-gamer how to play Portal 2, they didn't end up going through that same learning experience, and actually had a lot of confusion understanding how portals worked in the world; first assuming that if you placed one on a block, you could travel through that block, like a hole - or that placing one allowed you to travel on to another arbitrary room, or another world. I'm now wondering what might have happened differently if I had started them off with that one moment Dan claims is so pivotal.
Well, funny enough, I think it was only Portal 2 that was given to schools for learning (and this person was school-related, though not a child). Part of that is because Portal 1 is rated T, and has visible blood when turrets shoot you. Portal 2 is E10+.
A suggestion for a future video or video series: Open world vs story. This is one of the key balance issues in games. Some of the best stories are done through interactivity, but sometimes you want the player to do something in a certain way because you want them to experience something in a certain way in order to tell your story. However, some people thing this is wrong, and that more interactivity is always better. So, which is better? Less interactivity for a better story or a worse story for more interactivity?
If I may add to the conversation about the last chamber discussed in the video, there was another purpose to the way the puzzle was set up; the designers wanted to teach the player that the colour of the portals did NOT determine if it was an entrance or an exit. They wanted to teach them that either colour could be used for either purpose.
So, in short, to compare Portal and Portal 2: Portal is more game mechanics, and the story only really start after all 19 chambers after all the backstories GlaDOS said. That game has the gem and fascinated a lot of people. Portal 2 has both old and new stuff, but the story in that game is much deeper and forces you to adapt to unstable and unconventional environments much more than the first (outside of test chambers, altered test chambers, the journey through the former Aperture Science, etc.), which in turn makes it more interesting as a good sequel. It's recommended to be able to play first before stepping in.
I think it is even more interesting to listen to the commentary of Portal 2 where they explain how they refined the tutorial by elimiating the waiting time (wandering portals/rotating portal gun) so new players could breeze through the chambers while new players learned the same thing the old chambers taught.
The test chamber at 5:16 is also meant to teach the player that the orange portal isn't exit only.
***** Sadly I can't take credit for noticing that. I played through portal with commentary enabled, and I just remembered that they mentioned early game testers got stuck because they didn't think the orange portal was an entrance too.
I just wanted to point it out here, to spread the information.
The very first portal you ever go into in the game is an orange portal. As a matter of fact so is the second one. Maybe they changed that after the testers got stuck.
Archangel72985 I think the problem was after spending so much time acclimating them to the fact of "you control the blue portal" and since the prior chambers teaches you "shoot blue portal next to yourself to get to orange portal" teaches a directional blue->orange mindset while not necessarily reinforcing the orange->blue mindset. The entire portal experience up to that point is an "in" or "out" mindset (get out of the cage, go into the glass rooms, get out of the hole) rather than a bidirectional "through" mindset. And with a mono-directional mindset, cultural perceptions of colors has a fairly large influence. The blue (which in some cultures is functionally equivalent to green) portal is a "go" or "continue forward" sign while the orange/red portal is a "stop" or "wrong way" sign.
That chamber also teaches you to look for spots to shoot outside of your immediate vicinity. Again, the few times you've had the portal under your control were shooting nearby walls to get TO a preset portal. Now you'll learn that if you already have a preset portal near you, you can use the other (controlled portal) to be the landing/exit/destination portal. It also shows you that there is no real range limitation to the portal gun and that it travels in a straight line instantaneously to your cursor over long distances rather than an arc affected by gravity or travel time that you might have to compensate for. This becomes relevant in later puzzles where you are taught the relevance of quick portal switching.
***** If you have the game, start it and play the beginning with developer commentary. When you get to that test chamber you will hear a developer explain that people thought that orange portal was exit only. As dragonbretheren said, the players wasn't in the right mind set to notice the color in the very first set of chambers.
Yemto I had the EXACT same thought process you did. I too played portal with the commentary, learned that piece of information, and was going to comment about it, until I saw your comment already existing.
"Touching the floor will result in an unsatisfactory mark on your final score.....
followed by death."
O_o
"good luck."
My favorite part about Portal's level design is that while there is typically only a single way to do things, there are a couple of different ways to approach a problem. Not only that, but it really captures the "AHA!" moment when you figure out how to solve something like a tricky jump.
One of the early test chambers, shortly after you get access to both portals, was solved during game testing by a method the developers hadn't thought of, which bypassed almost the entire chamber's puzzles. Rather than change the level to make that method impossible (thereby forcing players to play the level as intended) they left it in as a sort of reward for creative thinking, so that everyone can use that trick if they work it out :)
It is weird seeing you comment on these videos when I had to watch one of your advertisements to see it in the first place.
Also, it feels really good when you complete a puzzle in a way you didn't think the developers though about (even tough they probably did) by exploiting some aspect of the game. These exploits makes you that you outsmarted the system, is just awesome. That's probably the main reason for Dark Souls sucess.
or when you ooops when you realize there was a pit you could place a portal instead of doing a highly complicated jump-and-place-the-portal-where-you-will-fall-thingy
Gareth Scott Do you mean the one where you're supposed to raise an "elevator" that takes you to an exit but instead you can just jump to the exit directly by jumping into a portal from a certain elevated surface?
the companion cube was destroyed to teach you about the boss battle :D
+jupoawp And the fact that VENGEANCE IS SWEET!
*sniffle* he was too young.
+Locutus Borg You get him back at the end of Portal 2! (a bit worse for wear)
Also the bit where you have to use the rockets to break the glass
Me and a friend even named it...
@@DarthRadical when i played portal 2 and saw the companion cube get thrown out at the end i was like "well atleast im not lonely anymore"
One of the things I found most interesting was Portal's use of color. We're presented with a fairly minimalistic palette in the first set of test chambers. The background is black, white, and shades of gray, using light blue as an accent color for guide lines. This deliberate monochrome setting causes any color to pop out, so you can always quickly and easily see your portals in movement if you have line of sight. The fact that white walls are the ones that can hold a portal also immediately draws our eyes to brightness amid dark settings, something we need to learn and look for in later levels once things get gritty and messy, a contrast of light and shadow called chiaroscuro which Valve also used in Left 4 Dead. Encouraging players to move towards and use well lit or light colored areas allows them to highlight possible progress routes with simple lights or a change in texture without using signs and arrows.
Orange and blue are complimentary colors, naturally linked chromatically in the human eye, and used here because they offset each other so well. Having established that blue and orange are encouraging and friendly, we're suddenly given red, a strong warning color, in the form of the buttons, the cameras, and the turrets' eyes, making us feel wary of them. What's red's complimentary color? Green. What's green in Portal? The toxic water in the chambers. We get a second set of complimentary colors that are also chromatically distinct from what we already have, but we learn to be careful of them because they're not blue and orange. We, as the player, are given control of the colors blue and orange. This must mean something else controls red and green, something that must be opposing us because the things that are red and green in this game are out to stop us either by using obstacles or by killing us. Who's ultimately controlling the buttons, the cameras, the turrets, and the poisonous water by controlling the test chambers?
GLaDOS.
We're already subliminally prepared to oppose her just by association and use of color, and they don't even tell us outright what to feel about which colors. They just let it happen as players run through the game and learn to play the game. That's pretty damned impressive with nothing more than gameplay and a color palette.
Fun extra bit: when you place a cube on a button, you visually obscure most of the red with white and gray, part of the background palette. What happens to the control line and indicator panel afterwards? They go from light blue, a background palette color, to orange. Friendly, encouraging orange, a color that the player controls. You remove the threatening red palette and replace it with a color the game has encouraged us to associate with positive feelings.
That's genius right there, artistically, symbolically, and design-wise.
My brain is now spaghetti.
As someone that studies Game Design in a house of traditional professions (mom's a doctor, sister's a vet, stepfather's an english teacher), I've been meaning to introduce them to games, mostly my mom. I've tried Telltale stuff, point and clicks, tried to have her backseat gaming... but I've never once thought about using portal. And I HAVE that game!
Thanks for reminding me of its existence, guys. I'm gonna try to see if my mom gets into it later :D
Be careful with that one man, portal may be a great game, but I have found that it isn't good for introducing to people with. My dad found the entire way the game worked completely Gordian.
Adeptus Forge indeed, my parents both tried it (aged 60+) and while my dad got the hang of it (mostly), my mom kept stumbling over the controls. The whole mouse+WASD thing is not as intuitive as we may think. Add portals to that and older people who've never played anything with that control scheme are just getting information overload.
Adeptus Forge AdenineMonkey I will take baby steps. The reason I think this game will be good is because she loves puzzles. She loves anything that challenges her brain, that forces her to think outside the box. Moving around is not intuitive, sure, but it can be trained and practiced. However, we'll see what happens. I'm still waiting for the Wolf Among us to finish so we can play together (me behind the controls, her making the decisions), although I might have to cheat a little bit with the pause button =P
AdenineMonkey Both Portal games work seamlessly with the Xbox 360 Controller on the PC; I mention this because it seems to be a common theme that anything that isn't purely mouse controlled on PC tends to end up easily overwhelming those who don't play games often, where-as a Controller (despite what Nintendo says) is often very easily picked up on what does what in a well designed game.
Portal in-fact the Controls are disgustingly simplistic and feel natural on the Controller; plus it's a fantastic case study for how fluid and precise controls can be even without Aim-Assist (something I've personally taken to turning off when I'm developers allow me to)
Leyvin360 I'm sorry, but you're still advocating a dual-analog control scheme for first person control. That may feel incredibly natural to us, but it's not as intuitive as you seem to think.
To anyone who wants to know more about Valve's approach to game design, I strongly suggest you listen to the Developer Commentary included in many of their games. Not only do they give you great insight into all sorts of facets of their design philosophy, but they do so within the game environment itself, allowing you to appreciate things they mention because they are right in front of you. Also, its worth noting they redid a few of the first test chambers for Portal 2, and the commentary there is particularly enlightening on the way those chambers have been improved.
I agree. This video didn't add anything really. Everything is already said in the Developer Commentary.
One of the most mind blowing parts of the developer commentary (I believe it was in Portal 2) was that when building the levels they created room pieces and then connected them quickly using the portal mechanic. This allowed them to quickly iterate on their level design without rebuilding the room from the game engine each time. It's a fascinating thing to learn because essentially Portal was itself built with Portals.
When I watched the first episode of this series I thought "how long will it be until Portal gets an episode?" I played through portal with the developer commentary and gained so much appreciation for (good) game design as a result. It's amazing to realise the shear amount of thought that went into every design decision and just how many of those decisions the average player will never even realise was a decision.
I also learned that we rarely look up. :)
"One of the best games..." - absolutely true, it's my all-time favorite.
It has a great balance of dark humor, challenging puzzles, and a mechanic that makes you think about problems different. It was an amazing game, and still is
Its the closest to perfekt we will ever get!
This series is by far my favorite on this channel. And this particular video makes me want to play Portal 2 again.
I wish this series would return
+Nikolaj Lepka tecnically speaking portal stories mel and aperture tag are cannon, don't rage at me, i know they are mods, but i have a explanation, would you like to see it?
LAPISwolf Flufftail
I'm talking about Design Club. Not Portal
Nikolaj Lepka oh ok
+LAPISwolf Flufftail (fourteen) I would like to see your explanation.
128Gigabytes have you ever seen the community test chambers? All of those are canon, they just happen in different universes, as the Cave Johnsons say, and the mods are nothing more than big community chambers, so the mods are canon, I should make a video explaining in more detail but im lazy
It's very worthwhile to go through portal's developer commentary, as well. They outline a lot of their design philosophy and the process they went through over the course of the game.
Never played portal... but I can see why people consider it one of the best games out there...
i tryed it out, but i was to difficult for me.
And the first person perspective was very confusing for me, because I dont play FPS games. A third person back view would have been better for me
Duckboy Jacob maybe cuz most people seem to hate FPS's without much of a thought. There are some really good FPS games beyond CoD and people need to realize that.
The Harsh Way That's true, but I can understand what Wario means. I don't like the first person view either. It's just a preference thing.
Understandable, I just can't get in to them. I love platformers. Maybe I should try Mirrors Edge.
David Wiita Have you played The Last of Us yet....? I think you may want to retract that statement
5:34 This is such an underrated moment. It's so great for setting the atmosphere for when you start trying to break out of Aperture and rebel against GLaDOS as well as an excellent foreshadowing of shooting the moon in Portal 2. I immediately thought of this moment when I saw the moon in Portal 2. The sequel itself sets that moment up properly so you know you CAN shoot the moon and that you have to; that's not what I mean. From a story telling perspective, this first moment of putting a portal where it's not meant to be put as a decisive act against Aperture and for your own freedom perfectly sets up the moon moment. It's the most powerful thing you ever do with the portal gun and it is so something Aperture never wanted you to do with it, and to finally, after the entirety of two games, you make actual contact and interact with a piece of the natural world, so far removed from Aperture it's in fucking space. God damn is portal amazing.
wtf are you on about? it's portal. not portal 2
*_finally, after the entirety of two games, you make actual contact and interact with a piece of the natural world, so far removed from Aperture it's in fucking space_*
ahahaha that sentence - yesssss ♥
As far as episodes go, I'd say this was a triumph
Agreed, it's hard to overstate my satisfaction.
MichelFialloPerez Aperture Science: "We do what we must, because we can!"
@@LeSpai1337 For the good of all of us
except the ones who are dead
But there's no sense crying
Over every mistake
Well on the flip side, anyone who doesn't need the slow introduction to portals will quickly breeze through the levels until they hit a point they don't understand and die. The quick respawn allows the players to get back to the part they had trouble with and immediately get to solving that particular problem. So the gameplay can kind of fast forward for more adept players.
Level 19 taught me not to trust omniscient robots.
I fucking love EC and Design Club is probably my favorite new addition to the channel. But I'd love to see some dissections of "bad" game design. It's not enough to know what makes a game good, but what makes a game bad as well. There's just as much to learn there, if not more. Even if you all don't decide to take that turn with this show, keep up the good work!
I think Ride to Hell would be a good choice for this series. It's more appropriate than Sonic 06, because it's not so much bad because it's buggy or unfinished (Don't get me wrong. It *is* buggy and unfinished) but the terrible game design choices are its worst offender, not the lack of polish.
Ride to Hell is an excellent choice, but I'm sure there's many many more titles to chose from.
After playing both Portal games, I find it really hard going back to the first. The first few levels may be good at teaching someone the concept of portals for the first time, but for someone who already gets it it can be seriously tedious.
It is a puzzle game after all, so yeah, solving the same puzzles can get old when you don't have much room for creating new routes.
It's definitely one of those games that's infinitely easier the second time around. The first time I played Portal, it took me about 4 to 5 hours to beat it. My second playthrough took only 1 hour.
That's why you play community maps ^_^
To stop it from being tedious I challenge myself to speedrun Portal 1. I can get consistent sub-40 minute runs and the tutorial sections can take less than a minute each if you're quick enough.
The two main features of the game are the puzzles and the story. When you already know about both of these, there's not much left to offer.
I've always wondered why skimming the edge of the portal wouldn't cut you in half.
Great episode, btw.
Because the designers didn't want players to be afraid of the portals. It's in the developer commentary.
well, no one said portals were sharp.
what if that means its so thin it isnt there?
Ira Gamagoori
If it's as if it isn't there then you can slip out of the bounds of the portal and splice yourself. Which is precisely the issue being discussed here.
DoomedLich GLADOS didn't create the gun, scientists did. Scientists who, presumably, do not want to be cut in half. They obviously but in a sci-fi safety mechanic. It was safe enough to be put into testing when GLADOS went hay-wire. I'm going to assume that they put anti-gravity forces on the edges, and initiate a propulsive force upon portal change. Oh, and I'm guessing they are using wormhole tech. Wormholes with infinite thinness.
Most people thought when they saw the first portal: "Oh my god, it's a portal." Looks through portal. "Oh my god, I'm a woman. MIND BLOWN."
lol
what portal taught me?
"speedy thing goes in, speedy thing comes out"
:P
Great video. The one thing I would add in the first few levels that you showed is another fundamental way of puzzle solving: you maintain velocity between portals. I think it is one of the more complicated ways of interacting with the portals and gets used a lot.
Portal is definitely a game that does a lot of things right in terms of gating and tutorializing concepts without being in the player's way. To those of you who have the game I would also recommend going through the game with the Developer commentary turned on and listening to them describe the thought processes behind making the game, it's all very fascinating.
Everyone- play the games again with developer commentary on.
It really lets you get inside their heads about game design.
This is my favourite of your shows and each episode so far has only whet my appetite for more.
Excellent job as usual, guys. Bravo.
Lot's of good commentary! I've always felt that portal has a near-flawless balance of challenge and carefully crafted hints. Panels that are at a 45 degree angle. Spaces on non-portal walls that allow portals. Vents through which you can shoot portals. And of course one of the few games that truly invites the players to stop doing what they're told in order to survive and progress.
All of Valve's careful handiwork is very easy to undervalue because it's made to be so subtle and natural, but that's of course the very reason it's so fantastic and worth celebrating. I'll always have a space in my heart for games that can truly taught me to think in new and divergent ways (Crush on the PSP, the time puzzles in Ratchet and Clank: A Crack in Time, etc.) because they not only tell players just how clever and capable they truly are, but demonstrate it for them.
I really like the test chambers in Portal, because they're tutorials that exist within and ultimately further the narrative. A lot of games will take the player the aside to explain new mechanics and it often breaks my sense of engagement.
another game that does that is Psychonaut! It's definately woth to check out (it's jump and run though, not puzzle)
plus it's hilarious, a bit older, but still a fun experience ^^
89taklung ^ ^ This game has a really good tutorial like stage.
Don't hate on me but I think that the COD 2 Tutorial Stage was pretty good at not getting you out of the experience. You were a soldier and you needed some basic training before going out on the battlefield even if the text may look a bit too big.
Gabi Axinte I think the point as with Mario 1-1 and the Portal Test Chambers is that you get the player to learn organically rather than ham-fistedly telling them what to do and how to do it. They glazed a bit over it in the first button room in chamber 0, but the way the room is designed, the first thing the player sees walking through the entryway is a big red button. The box isn't there yet, nobody's telling you "push the big red button". You then see a closed door, which is presumably the only way to continue. There is also a stream of lights linking the closed door to the button. Still nobody's telling you anything, but you naturally think "let's go walk over to the button". You step on the button, which causes the lights to change and the door opens. Cool, now you know push button->open door. You start walking toward the now open door and it closes once you step off the button. You now realize that the button is weight-sensitive ala the boulder trap in Indiana Jones. At that same moment, a box is dropped in front of you and it falls down with a solid *clank* indicating weight and making sure that you notice it. The first (and only) instruction finally pops up telling you to "push e to pick up and object". Without being told, you understand that this is heavy, and may be heavy enough to hold the button down while you mosey through the door.
Voila! You've been naturally introduced to doors, buttons, cubes, and lifting objects in a way that doesn't feel like a tutorial. Remember: you were only given one instruction, and it was only informing you of a single new control when you needed it (as opposed to Mario 1-1 where there are so few buttons that experimentation can be done quickly, a PC game, unfortunately has to tell you which of the many keyboard buttons actually do things, so this ONE brief, unobtrusive message is rather unavoidable). It doesn't feel like they're "teaching" you anything. Nobody told you what to do or how to do it. No long winded speech or wall of text. You've solved this puzzle of your own volition without anyone pulling you aside and going "I'm going to teach you the basics" or "this is just a warm up drill" or "in this room, you'll learn how to push buttons and open doors", breaking the flow of the game and the early immersion. It has become merely a part of moving on with the game, just as natural as walking around.
dragonbretheren Not many game do something like this, they flooded you with pointy arrow to objective and BIG TEXT slam into your eyes. The worst case is they lock you until you do something as the game said, then the game will applaud you for just simple task like hit the movement button. It is like they treat player like they are 8 years old.
I personally played this when I was like 10, with my only gaming knowledge being limited parts FPS and RTS. Puzzles in games were new too me, and portals seemed like too much, but this brilliant tutorial took me through the game and eased me into the amazing mechanics until I didn't know I was using them. I still remember my shock when I learned you could fall threw portals and keep your momentum, but by the end of the game I was flying about like a frickin' plane. The opening also stumped me fora few minutes as I tried to understand what was going on, but when I figured it out I began to realize what I had gotten myself into. This video showed me how I manged those levels when I had no experience of anything like that before. Thank you, and thanks Valve :D
This game was a triumph, I'm making a note here: HUGE SUCCESS!
Its hard to understate my satisfaction.
Aperture Science
:
We do what we must because we can
For the good of all of us...
I must have experienced this game in the best possible way. I got it free as part of the orange box and never touched it. I think I opened it months later and thought it was nothing more than a demo of what's possible. I thought it was neat but didn't play it again. It wasn't until years later that a friend challenged me to get to level 11. the level he was on. So I did.
As the game went on I started seeing clues to a much more sinister story evolving. I was blown away. It wasn't just a demo. It was so much more.
This series is very good. Please make more of it.
Give us more episodes! The design club is awesome!
Design Club is my favorite show on this channel!!! So helpful!
I love the Design Club series so far, it's fun to watch as a player and probably good for designers. I've thought of doing something similar but I'm not sure how well I could do a series like it since I'm not exactly a game maker myself, though having more people do similar series would probably lead to more games being covered and seeing different stuff be explored. I look forward to the future episodes and glad to see one of my favorite games have an episode.
This game is great. Portal's Designer commentary section was basically what got me started in game design, and I remember being floored at just how much thought goes into things like the tiles on the floor, or where you start a level.
In the room that is discussed 4 minutes into the video, the commentary for Portal makes a point about how in play testing people were some times confused about if you could enter through blue portals, since you had only entered through orange ones before, and had very possibly never gone back through. That chamber forces you enter a blue portal, and in doing so, quickly teaches you that orange and blue portals are the same.
What a blast from the past. This just rando popped in my feed and of course I still loved it. Good memories of this game, it was worth every penny.
I'm digressing a bit here, but I personally find that the moment when you get the second portal gun to be genius, in terms of toning and mood. You solve the puzzle to get to the orange portal gun, then, when on that platform moving slowly towards the gun, the music intensifies. This does so much in building your anticipation of the power and freedom you are about to hold in your own hands. I find that valve does this a lot when the player is obtaining central item, for example how the music also intensifies immediately after you get the hazard suit in Half Life.
I will say Portal 2 is slightly better if only because there is no load/save thing that happens when you die, and Portal 2 doesn't actually allow for too much death. I kinda messed up by playing Portal 2 first.
For years I've known I want to become a Video Game Designer. Some of my favorite videos on RUclips are ones that analyse a game and take us into the mind of the developer. These range from Digressing & Side-questing, Really Freakin' Clever, and even Extra Credits! To see that this channel is starting a new series about Game Design is just plain awesome. Please continue to make these. I love what you have to say in these. It really makes you think about how much thought goes unnoticed in so many good games. Well, just wanted to say thank you, and to keep up the great content that only Extra Credits could possibly make.
It's an awesome game that not only utilizes a unique mechanic, but is master of subtle visual clues that aid in progression. Think about all the ways we're taught things like, if you see an extended platform, you should probably put a portal there. Even the portal-conductive concrete texture is suggestive standing out when placed against darker, non-conductive materials. That right there is a crucial piece of information that's never actually explained in dialog, but conveyed entirely through design.
I absolutely love this series. It is probably my favorite series on all of RUclips. Looking forward to the next episode. :D
Thank you so much... This is now my favorite show on this Chanel.
Wow. And to imagine that Portal was created by a small team as an afterthought to throw in with the other games of the Orange Box to compensate for all the delays. Holy crap those people are geniuses.
I'll say it once and I'll say it again, I love this series, its quickly becoming one of my more favorites here, but I really think it could do better by being longer. A perfect example why is shown right here at the end, where you only get through a couple of test chambers before you have to cut the video and run. This type of series really deserves to have a detailed look at its subject matter, and I don't think it will do you any good to run it the same way you run the other series on the channel.
you know I gave this game to my 3 year old niece and she quickly worked out the first couple of puzzles but grew board not long after, I gave this game to my 47 year old mother and she had trouble understanding the portals despite a history in science.
I think the mentality of learning something new is regulated highly by age.
I love the way the conservation of momentum (a.k.a fling physics) mechanics are introduced. That was an impressive feat.
One thing I loved about Portal when I finished it was that I could enable commentator tracks to hear things like this from the level designers, how they did things, how people were having trouble and the redesigns, and so on.
Portal is absolutely brilliant. Great topic for an episode, would love to see more about the franchise eventually!
Great video as always, EC! I think Design Club is my favourite series of yours, and as a lover of Portal myself, this was really interesting! I'd never really thought of the test chambers as one long tutorial, but I see what you mean now! :D
Go beat the game and then play the game with Developer Commentary which explains a lot.
This was one astounding and impressive experience even before I was interested in game design.
The game gave me puzzles which perfectly grew in difficulty with my understanding of the mechanics. Never before or after has a game managed to bring something new and challenging with every level, without demanding too much, which would result in me googling for the answer.
So until this was pointed out in this video I had *no idea* that there was a clock or doorframe visible at the beginning of the relaxation chamber. I am not visual at all, haha.
And I know plenty of people who would never notice the key bindings at the beginning - people who rarely see the control instructions in GTA, which has to be the worst source of frustration for them in those games. I keep an eye out for popups and I miss those half the time.
I've always thought that Portal's loooong tutorial would never have worked if it wasn't specifically a series of laboratory tests, or something similar. It's world-building, it's showing us mechanics...and if we didn't have the huge safe space, we'd get frustrated, and if it wasn't for GladOS showing us how messed-up this situation really is, the huge safe space would have gotten boring.
That being said - the Portal series is a masterpiece. And the way that they figured out how to make that tutorial work was brilliant.
I LOVE this design club series
I love this series, partially because you've talked about some of my favourite games.
I see the Extra Credits team are getting the same graphical glitches I do on newer computers. The missing frosted window effect and portal wibbly-wobbliness has been driving me nuts lately.
For those that liked this video, it's worth playing through the Commentary mode on Portal since it covers similar things to this video for all the test chambers. Actually... play the commentary mode on every Valve game you own, they're all super interesting insights into game design and managing your audience's experiences. They even gave me food for thought with tailoring my audience's experience in how I design my own stuff, and I make comics and art rather than games (and to give kudos to Extra Credits generally, a lot of their episodes have had the same effect on me).
Another very clever thing about the last test chamber you've talked about is how they have both versions of entering and exiting a portal: entering a blue portal that you placed yourself and exiting an orange one / entering an orange portal that is part of the level and exiting one that you placed yourself.
I think that was actually part of the dev commentary, but I've heard that the reason for that is because many players apparently thought that the blue portal was only for entering and the orange one only for exiting.
For more info, go through the game with the commentary on. It's really interesting to hear the designers talk about these levels and what challenges they had to solve.
what she says: i'm fine
what she means: so the first part of Portal is just a bunch of tutorials for all the mechanics you're going to need to beat the last level of the game, but they're called Test Chambers? like Aperture Science is testing players for their ability to destroy GLADoS? and then you kill GLADoS? but isn't GLADoS administering these tests? so GLADoS is responsible for teaching you how to kill her? and is that just-?
This is cool! I like this series a lot. I'm just curious, are you ever going to do videos longer than just ten minutes? I really like videos like this and I would be amazed to watch you pick apart every single bit of a game like Portal or really anything. Great video!
This show is my new favorite! I wish it were twice as long and twice as frequent!
I got sick a certain weekend and with nothing else to do I played portal and portal 2 back to back all the way through. I do not recommend it, I was literally thinking with portals, as in I'd catch myself thinking "if I place a portal here and there I can reach the kitchen faster"
playing through the game with "Developer Commentary" on was one of the most valuable learning experiences I've ever had with a video game, and would HIGHLY recommend that anybody who has portal and hasn't done so yet, do.
Portal is probably my pick for the best game ever. It's just perfect. As stated in this fantastic video, the mechanics are perfect. The learning curve is consistent, not really putting the player in any real danger, and letting them have space to figure out how to progress through the game. While some may argue that the last sections of Portal don't really utilize this, by then the player will have all the knowledge they need. The atmosphere is also brilliant. The solid and pure parts of the test chambers don't give the player almost nothing to get distracted, and the ambient music accompanying with the levels also deliver the feeling that you are in a testing facility. There may be some parts that may leave you just pondering and pondering the puzzles, but those are few and far away. GlaDOS is the one of my favorite antagonists in video games. Playing the game through a second time made me realize how subtle she was in delivering some negative and hateful comments towards me. Plus Ellen McClain is a really great voice actor. While the game was really short, since you can beat it in about 2 or 3 hours, the game still let the player feel satisfied with the experience, and asking for more. Even though this game has gotten the praise it deserves and even more, i still can't stop loving it! It's a game i can just launch on Steam and play through in a single run over and over and over and over again, but i still feel this warmth feeling inside me whenever i play it. It's that great.
I completely agree with everything you said here (even though it sounds like you took heavy inspiration from the Dev Commentary). Portal is one of the few games I have fully completed multiple times. I love it, just the first level is very annoying if you're replaying it. I kind of wish there was a way to skip the timer without loading into the next segment.
When I was trying to get a friend to get into Portal, she gave up on Chamber 3. I was heartbroken that she gave up so easily.
Get used to it.
I hate it too
***** #iJust(gotrekt)stine
Speedrunners hate it too. However, most of them just use a save that skips to the end. Now to properly answer your comment, TECHNICALLY you can skip it by pushing yourself out of bounds with the radio and save glitching (saving and loading messes up the game). This is an INCREDIBLY hard trick. Here is footage of it: clips.twitch.tv/BoringObliviousScorpionPogChamp
When making my own puzzle game, Portal was the absolute first example that I went to to learn how to teach the player through gameplay. I'm not sure there's a better example out there, the entire learning progression is very clever, and also nicely reinforces previous lessons in the interconnecting space between puzzles... to say nothing of the excellent pacing!
I remember when I got the blue portal gun, I thought " This is freaking awesome!!". I had no idea a few test chambers later I would get the orange portal too. I couldn't believe how good of a game it was, plus the voice acting and pacing was superb.
Ah, there are so many games that do too much handholding. Ever since I've watched this episode and other things on good introduction of concepts, I see all these other games that flash walls of text saying "DO THIS TO DO THIS AND THIS AND THAT AND BAM!" and I always think how they could have done it better.
I love the way the test chamber puzzles sometimes have quicker routes if you have some skills and go for time.
If you plan on continuing making videos like this about portal you should consider taking the audio commentary into consideration.
There's an extra version in which speech bubbles appear throughout the game. Clicking on them will play respective audio files which are, by the way, also in the game's folder. These commentary contain information about why certain choices were made. For example the first scene was made so when the first portal appears Chell could see herself because testers would think that the portals would lead to other universes.
I will also note that Room 03 (5:17) has a great "ah-ha!" moment in that when you use the Blue Portal to both enter the middle of the room, then using it to get near the exit, pointing out that the portals work both ways. Again, done without a single line of dialogue.
The art also helps, having signs that guide you but are designed in such a way that look like part of the environment rather than being directional arrows.
I honestly and truly believe that Portal is THE GAME that should be shown as an example in every single game design school and course. It's level design, pacing, way of teaching players is so top notch, so stellar that ever game designer should learn from it as much as possible. It shows that you can make a tutorial that will teach a player in such a way that he won't even recognize that he's being taught. You can incorporate it into the story and gameplay seamlessly, make it feel natural and in place. Design wise this game is absolutely and definitely the best game ever created, and one of the most important too.
There's just so much about Portal, that I could probably go on for hours about how brilliant of a gem it is amongst other games..
Man, I loved this game. I came a bit late but it ended up being the first game I played start to finish in a long time.
Load its textures :I ... it loads the whole level.
Textures are often the big bottleneck for loading of scenes in games, so while it's loading the whole level, it's likely spending most of that time loading textures.
Really? I thought mapping the polygons was a big deal as well, then the lightning, other effects etc. Well, I actually don't know. It's just odd with a game like portal because almost all the levels have the same textures. Maybe it's the mapping of all those textures on top of the polygons that takes the time? ..am just speculating.
Polygons are pretty cheap to load. Lighting is either done at runtime (dynamic lighting) and therefore doesn't need loading at all, or is baked into a texture (lightmapped static lighting), and therefore consists of part of the texture load time. I suspect that Portal uses lightmapped static lighting for the most part, as there's no real reason not to when the lights don't move. Mapping the textures to the polygons is done at creation time, so doesn't cost time during loading to do. It's actually pretty expensive to load textures, as there's a lot of data to stream into memory and decode for rendering. Portal does share a lot of textures between levels, and that's why its loading times are often very short, but not all levels use all textures, and you can be sure they unload them for levels that don't use them, which means they have to re-load them later when a level needs them again.
Alright. Thanks for the information. So it pretty much comes down to all the pixels of all the textures, as they are all information. But can't I see all the textures pretty fast in the whole portal game just by opening its level editor. Not sure about portal, but I can do it with half-life, and I've even added a ton of more textures into that. If it is the same for portal, then what is it that makes it take longer in the game?
It's not so much it's taking longer, it's just how it has to manage it. A load in an editor will take the same time to actually load the textures, but it also has to process rendering and gameplay while you're doing it, which takes a lot of resources. In an editor, it can just freeze everything until it's ready, but without a loading screen, the game has to do things in the background, while a lot of resources are being taken by other things. Kind of like trying to put on a shirt while walking - it's a lot harder and takes longer if you're doing something else at the same time, but it's a popular method for games because it allows it to be seamless, so the game doesn't have to drop to an ugly "LOADING" screen all the time.
I LOVE DESIGN CLUB!! that the kind of material i wanna see in this channel
Another great episode that breaks apart the excellent learning mechanics of a well-designed game.
Coincidentally, I just started playing portal again a few days ago, so I could actually reconstruct most of what you said quite well (and remember what came after the point where you stopped).
*SPOILERS*
Interestingly enough, you could argue that the actual tutorial (or at least the practice) ends no earlier than with the escape from your planned incineration in Test Chamber 19.
Personally I'd recommend anyone who's into game design to play through Portal with the developer's commentary turned on. It was really interesting hearing about the reasoning behind the designs for the room, and the changes they made when they saw how playtesters reacted to them.
AAAAGH JUST GOT PORTAL THE DAY BEFORE YESTERDAY AND I'M OBSESSED WITH IT
+Jonathan Pierzchala The cake is a lie...
(NO IT'S NOT!)
Portal also does a good job at demonstrating that you keep your momentum as you fly trough portals. A mechanic heavily used afterwords.
I can not understate the importance of introducing the portals to the player with the side on view like they did at 2:20.
When I first played the game, I had to stand there staring through the portals for a good five minutes while I tried to wrap my head around the idea that, "Okay, I am both over there and over here at the same time. No wait, over there IS over here. I am looking at myself standing in a room while I am standing in that very room."
And from there they *slowly* introduce the concept of portals to you. First you get automated portals, then you get control over only one portal, before they finally give you two.
If they had of just thrown the double portal gun at you right at the start and just said, "Go nuts" it would have been very easy to get overwhelmed.
Seeing this video makes me realize, I don't think I ever played the first portal... only the 2nd game, which I jumped right into and quite enjoyed. I may have to go back and play part 1 now...
When i see my silf in portal , why i feel so scared
OMG I forgot how much I loved this game. Really good observations about it's level design.
Since I unfortunately heard a friend telling me about the game at first, and then watched a full playthrough, I already knew and understood the mechanics before even playing it.
I've just noticed, for the first time in years, that as soon as the first portal was open, I was never perceiving myself as in the cell, but as in the room outside the cell. As soon as the first portal was open, I saw myself outside the room, never even noticing I was still in the room.
I actually find it somewhat concerning. I was so captivated by the sight of Chell's side view, I lost my spacial orientation.
Hey I'm loving this show, I really hope that you can make more! I'm wanting to go to game design and stuff like this helps out a lot
I love this series so much
Play portal with commentary - a lot of this is also covered there and there is a lot of very nice nuggets of information!
Ok Secret reveal time: I never played any of the portal series. The reason? I was so mad that EVERYONE had revealed the ending. I decided there was no value in playing the game because I had already seen the ending. I was mad at everyone. As well as the internet. This happened because I came from a time when endings to games were jealously guarded. So much so that even Nintendo Fun Club, later Nintendo Power would shy away from the ending even on complete walkthroughs. I couldn't really *not* see the ending, it was everywhere.
Watching this made me wish I had played the game. Lots of good game design elements to be learned. Hopefully the EC staff will read this. Thanks for changing my mind on a game, and keep the design club videos coming!
Sometimes the most rewarding part of a game is the journey.
Portal is about the experience, not the ending.
Actually, spoiling the ending makes you enjoy the work more. By knowing the ending, you focus on how you get there.
TL;DR, play the damn game, son.
***** I know, right!? My best friend told me the ending, and it sounded so fun that I had to play just to see it!
portal is such a great game. a great blend of puzzle and first person action.
I'm really liking this new series you guys are doing, and I would love it if Halo was covered at some point (namely the first one)
Design Club - Katamari Damacy
I'd be really interested to see how the devs introduced such a bizarre game mechanic, and to discover the method behind the madness of the seemingly randomly placed items.
It's probably easy for gamers to underestimate the value of that "first teaching moment", but I have to admit when I tried teaching a non-gamer how to play Portal 2, they didn't end up going through that same learning experience, and actually had a lot of confusion understanding how portals worked in the world; first assuming that if you placed one on a block, you could travel through that block, like a hole - or that placing one allowed you to travel on to another arbitrary room, or another world.
I'm now wondering what might have happened differently if I had started them off with that one moment Dan claims is so pivotal.
Well, funny enough, I think it was only Portal 2 that was given to schools for learning (and this person was school-related, though not a child). Part of that is because Portal 1 is rated T, and has visible blood when turrets shoot you. Portal 2 is E10+.
A suggestion for a future video or video series: Open world vs story. This is one of the key balance issues in games. Some of the best stories are done through interactivity, but sometimes you want the player to do something in a certain way because you want them to experience something in a certain way in order to tell your story. However, some people thing this is wrong, and that more interactivity is always better. So, which is better? Less interactivity for a better story or a worse story for more interactivity?
If I may add to the conversation about the last chamber discussed in the video, there was another purpose to the way the puzzle was set up; the designers wanted to teach the player that the colour of the portals did NOT determine if it was an entrance or an exit. They wanted to teach them that either colour could be used for either purpose.
You could make thirty episodes with Portal alone.
Hey, EC, you guys should do a level design about Antichamber!
Btw, this and the normal episodes are my favorite, please do keep them coming :)
Oh and a thing, I would love if you talked about Team Fortress 2's class balance between eachother!
fantastic series...can't wait for more
So, in short, to compare Portal and Portal 2:
Portal is more game mechanics, and the story only really start after all 19 chambers after all the backstories GlaDOS said. That game has the gem and fascinated a lot of people.
Portal 2 has both old and new stuff, but the story in that game is much deeper and forces you to adapt to unstable and unconventional environments much more than the first (outside of test chambers, altered test chambers, the journey through the former Aperture Science, etc.), which in turn makes it more interesting as a good sequel. It's recommended to be able to play first before stepping in.
This should be longer... Portal is such a perfectly designed masterpiece that it deserved a more thorough analysis.
I think it is even more interesting to listen to the commentary of Portal 2 where they explain how they refined the tutorial by elimiating the waiting time (wandering portals/rotating portal gun) so new players could breeze through the chambers while new players learned the same thing the old chambers taught.