Lessons for Developers

So what about those other risky conclusions I warned about at the start of this article? One of the tenuous assumptions one can make from Portal's success is that the best way to make it big in the game industry is to attend a game development school and create a school project that will instantly transport you (as if through a trans-dimensional portal?) to fame and success.

But consider how many things had to go right for the Narbacular Drop student project to get picked up by Valve. It had to be presented to someone with the clout to hire the team on the spot, at a point where the game was far enough along to show its promise, but before the team had graduated and moved on to possible separate destinies.

It certainly helped that the company was in the same town as the team already, and was already known for excellent first-person shooter games with unusual weapons.

And perhaps most unusual was the fact that Valve has not only committed to online distribution, but also was willing to place this small and atypically short game in their Orange Box, where it could benefit greatly from being packaged with other more proven AAA properties. This happy set of coincidences is not going to happen very often. I don't want to discourage school teams from dreaming big, but counting on success like this is about as reliable as playing the lottery.

Another happy accident was matching Erik Wolpaw with the Portal team. They didn't work with him specifically to add humor to the game -- at GDC 2008 Wolpaw said that the humor more or less crept in because that was what he was comfortable with.

It's fairly easy to imagine a Portal without humor, with just the standard resolute main character forging ahead silently and relentlessly, but the infusion of ironic humor makes Portal the opposite of relentless. Good humorous writing is very hard and there are very few practitioners with a track record out there -- it's great that in this case the resource was applied just right.

Writing is Not a Dessert Topping

And the final surprising irony of the production of Portal may be that after years of countless writers and designers clamoring to get the writing expertise into the game early to avoid the superficial and/or confusing kludge that so many game stories can become, Portal managed to add the writing relatively late in the process, after much of the gameplay was well along, and do incredibly well with it. I fear producers and publishers everywhere will say, "See, we can just add the writing in during the last few months! It'll be fine."

But looking more closely, I think that the circumstances of Portal once again show being in the right place at the right time. First, there is only really one substantial character in Portal, without a huge amount of dialog.

A typical action-adventure game character might have dozens of times as many total lines and will often interact with many other characters, and an RPG will typically have many times even that number of dialog lines -- you just can't cram that all in late in production and have it work well.

Also, the simplicity of Portal overall lent itself well to a sparse approach. But perhaps most fortuitously, the fairly sterile and sparse lab-rat's-eye-view of the world in Portal very much needed the lighter touch of the dialog to turn what would otherwise been a foreboding and cold experience into something joyful. I'd say it was like adding frosting to a cake -- but, of course, the cake is a lie.

The bottom line is that this is a game that should be enjoyed, and then carefully studied by any serious student of game design. But don't be too swift to generalize any lessons learned without considering the circumstances that made Portal so unique a production story.

Like many masterpieces, it may stand alone -- although I hope it inspires many others to create games that are equally as fresh, fun, and exciting. Or to paraphrase GLaDOS herself, look at me still talking when there's game design to do!