Portal: More Than Just a Twist

Surprise, Surprise...

Why should you make your game surprising? As a whole, humans love surprises. We spot patterns quickly and get bored when things become predictable. And we are experts at predicting. Game developers (and other entertainment creators) have a hard time because if they start to lose customers if they serve the same dish twice.

Maybe it's why rogue-likes are so popular lately - unpredictable elements and possibly emergent gameplay. Sprinkle a bit of addictive player feedback loops and toss in a pinch of challenging gameplay. Stir three times and you've got yourself a game!

In other news, I am getting a bit hungry.

A Case Study on Portal

When people talk about surprises in video games, they often talk about about Portal. Now, if you haven't played it yet, stop reading and go play it.

Midway through Portal, there's a giant twist. And by most accounts, this is a pretty effective twist. Good game designers ask hard question, so this is the question of the day:

Why is the twist in Portal effective and how do we apply it to other games? 

This is a question I've pondered about for quite some time. I used to think that the twist in Portal was only based on narrative, but recently I've noticed that that was only a small part of it. There are plenty of games with twists in their story, but Portal somehow feels more special than that.



Let's take a look at the structure of puzzles in Portal.

Most puzzle games, from Angry Birds to World of Goo to Scribblenauts, have the same general structure.
They are a series of isolated puzzles that have about the same chunk size for each puzzle.

How most puzzle games are structured

However, Portal is structured like this:

How Portal is structured

Portal starts off in a rather traditional puzzle structure. It even has a "level number" for each puzzle. But after the midpoint the concept of isolated "test chambers" melt away. It's just a continuous long environment you travel through with implicit puzzles interlaced along the way. 

There are also a lot of differences to the twist besides puzzle structure. A big part of the surprise in Portal is setting up expectations and breaking them. This comes through in the tone, environment, and narration of the game. Most of these come across pretty clear: the first 20 levels are clean perfect testing chambers, and the rest of the game is played - the dingy and dirty spaces behind panel and testing facilities as well as the empty office spaces. 

Even the narration style is different. In the first 20 levels, the narration feels very hand-holdy. Something is said at the beginning of the puzzle, at the end of the puzzle, and maybe even while you ride an elevator. Later on, it feels that Glados is actively stalking you.

Crossing Genres

And this leads me to one hypothesis: 

In the player's mind, Portal changes from one genre to another

In other words, the game actually crosses genres. In the first half, it's just a puzzle game with a funny narrator. In the second half, it becomes an adventure game. The thoughts in the player's mind change from:

"Huh. How do I solve this puzzle?"

 into 

"HOW DO I GET OUT OF HERE. I HOPE GLADOS CAN'T SEE ME. WHERE DO I GO??"

Portal changed from a game being clearly rooted in one genre, and just about when you think it ends, changes into another game. And it doesn't cross genres half-heartedly. Unlike most other games, it doesn't dabble in another genre for a few brief moments before coming back to its original genre. Portal crosses that bridge doesn't look back.




And maybe that's the key to creating a twist or surprise on the scale of the one in Portal:

Make the first half of the game seem like one genre, 

and make the second half seem like another genre.

And when done correctly this could be very powerful. Think about a military shooter game that sudden becomes a stealth game after the first half of the game. Or better yet, a military game shooter that becomes an open world survival game. Ideally, games that cross genres would keep the same gameplay mechanic.

What if a stealth game like Thief suddenly became an assassination game based on revenge? One interesting thing is that to make these changes in gameplay genre will only make sense if you have a powerful change in narrative. This could be an interesting tool.

For example, consider going from "zombie survival horror" to "adventure". The twist might be getting bitten by a zombie and volunteering (or being forced) to leave the human compound try to do the most good possible before your time is up. The gameplay might change from "scavenging and running away from zombies" to "exploring the post-apocolyptic world looking for a cure or another human compound."





And...that's just a random thought I was having. Have a nice day.

Creativity Deadlock

After two weeks of pre-semester brainstorming and four weeks on discussion into the semester, we're having a bit of a problem: We have no idea what the game should look like.

At the moment, our project team is having trouble with artistic vision. It's one of those things that we didn't think would be a problem. Here is the basic premise: The art needs to be inspired by the narrative. The narrative needs to fit around the entire game. And we can't make the game without art. And this, ladies and gentlemen, is what we call a creativity deadlock.

The opposite of this

How do we break out of a creativity deadlock? The easiest way...is to just come up with everything at once! Just have everyone sit down and nail down the art, narrative, and entire game at the same time. But if you've done any team game development at all, you know that it usually doesn't work that way. Nothing comes together all at once. Even if you suddenly have a cohesive vision (which we struggled with from the beginning), that vision will indubitably change throughout the building process.

Another way to approach a creativity deadlock is to work from different angles. Experiment with art and narrative on their own and let them cross-pollinate each other. We also tried this approach for a few weeks, but it seemed that the pieces we came up with did not quite come as coherently together as we hoped. For example, our concept artist (who bases all his art  To be honest, I think this process could work if we had a lot of time to iterate, but we're feeling pressure to create things for GDC.

IGF Pavillion at GDC (photo credit to IndieGames)

Then are there any solid decisions for the game that won't change? Yes. One is the puzzles we have, and the other is having a jazzy soundtrack. But herein lies the problem.

The puzzles we have are based on a large variety of object, often not connected at all. Our game is supposed to give the feeling of unexpectedness and humor through the puzzles, and part of those feelings come through the context of the puzzles. However, at the moment, the context between the puzzles are not related, and this makes finding a common theme between the puzzles very difficult.

Also, "jazzy" turns out to be a very confusing term. Some team members immediately understand my interpretation of the word down to a T. Other members have different ideas about jazz or . However, this isn't really surprising - there's a huge variety of jazz.

Some concept art

Other things that we tried:

Making a ranked word association list. The idea is, as a group, create a list of words related to your game and rank them based on how important they are. This helped us inform each other what we were all thinking of and discuss which direction our game should head in. However, it still wasn't concrete enough to build things from.

Some other things I could have tried:

Instead of having one song or one picture to act as inspiration for the game vision, create a gigantic folder of stuff that give the atmosphere or feel of the game. Therefore, you only need a glance to get a comprehensive feel of the game. Include things like pictures, colors, and music. Of course, a danger with this approach at this point is that it might be too "blue-sky" and pull progress back again.

Word association graph

So what do we do?

Another possibility is that getting stuck all the time is part of the process. After all, we ARE asking a lot from our art: it has to be recognizable and stylish and unique that can be easily produced. Also, it can't be too similar to Portal, Scale, Antichamber, and Unfinished Swan. (In my opinion, Portal really nailed it in terms of design, theme, and narrative. Unfinished Swan was smart in picking a )

Maybe the key is to just try something - and not be afraid to fail and redo it until it feels right. Narbacular Drop took 1 year to produce and Portal required an additional 2 years and 8 months.The Unfinished Swan took about 4 years to make from prototype to full game...and let's not even talk about Fez.

I guess...we'll see what happens.