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Hey, looks good  I don't read that many blogs, but the Portal 2 article got my attention Will bookmark.
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The only one I read was the Portal one so I'll address that one here -- from personal experience I felt pretty much exactly the opposite way about Portal 1 and 2.
Portal 1 I remember playing through the test chambers and feeling like the entire thing was one large tutorial trying to teach me how to use the portal gun, and that "escaping" the area was still just part of the "tutorial" experience -- ok, I've learned all the tricks, I'm going to go through and escape this lab...holy shit, Glados is just the first boss? This game's going to be epic! ....wait...it's over already? What the hell, I just played a big tutorial and it's over? I wanted to escape the lab, get out into the world, and start portalling my way through a bunch of puzzles. I actually felt cheated, even though I enjoyed the experience.
Portal 2, on the other hand, I think was paced *really* well -- yes, there were plenty of test chambers where you got new toys and were introduced to the different colored goos, but the pacing felt a lot better -- there was enough stuff *between* the test chambers where you had to explore around and experiment that you actually in the moment felt like you were playing a game rather than just trying to expose the next chamber solution.
However, barring that -- the content itself was really well written and enjoyable, so good job on that.
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It's a really subjective thing, unfortunately for us designers. That means that there's always going to be people who see the man behind the curtain more clearly in some situations than others. I'm sure a lot of people found portal 1 more restrictive and felt more limited- I can totally understand that myself, actually. Yet, from objective analysis, Portal 1's structure gives less tells than Portal 2.
For what it's worth, I found that the 'outside the chamber' experiences in portal 2 were the biggest issue- too clearly structured and linear to maintain the illusion of agency. I'd love one day to do a detailed let's play of the game and talk throughout about what I'm seeing and thinking to really test the hypothesis I developed in real time, but I don't see that happening in the immediate future.
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That might just be the difference between a designer's perspective and a player's perspective talking there. There's a certain amount of suspension of disbelief that happens when you're playing through a game, especially when you're playing a puzzle game with full awareness that there is a set solution that exists, as in the case of the portal games. At a certain point, your brain goes, "I'm in a test chamber, I'm learning these tricks. Ok, now I'm out of the test chamber, hey, I just learned about this, let me see if I can be clever." *solves* "And I was!"
It would be awesome if a similar game to portal could be played sandbox style, which I'm getting from the article is what you want -- I'm here, I need to get over there, this is a huge room full of toys and objects to play with, let's see which few I feel like using to get over there. The problem with that approach in a puzzle game is you run the risk of ending up with something like Scribblenauts, which starts out as being fun because you can literally do anything, but then eventually you figure out that there's no real challenge to it, because, again, you can literally do anything. It becomes a toy rather than a game.
Puzzles have to be structured to be challenging. I thought they were fairly well-handled in the between-sequences of Portal 2, given the limitations of the scope, knowing that everything you need to solve a puzzle will be within that room/section. What I wouldn't mind is if it almost became an Adventure game in scope -- something in the realm of Amnesia, where you can find things in rooms that are multiple-screens apart, or on the other side of a mansion. With portals you could come up with really clever puzzles, where you need to leave a portal up clear on the other side of a large house, to be able to hit switches in two different places at once, or figuring out where 4 buttons are in a house, that need to be pushed in a specific order within a time limit, and figure out which ones you can run between and which ones need to have a portal between them. There are ways to do it, but are a little grander in scope than the Portal gameplay, and would be better suited for a spin-off series or a whole new engine rather than a sequel.
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yup, pretty much agree with all you're saying. I'm not sure a true sandbox would work with portal, the core game mechanic is just too powerful to allow that. So there needs to be *some* design built into any area making sure that no matter what hand you get dealt the puzzle is neither trivial nor impossible. That's not particularly difficult to do, the tricky part is getting people to the point where they can look at a hand and appreciate all the cards they have, which portal does admirably well.
There are also quite a few people who would say that every videogame is a toy, cannot be anything else. You can't 'magic' a goal into someone's head, they have to come up with it. If theirs aligns with the one you want them to have, great, but that's all you can hope for. The same is true of toys. They can possess an 'intended use' but they cannot have an inherent goal. The only difference between call of duty and a rubix cube in that sense is the amount of stuff dedicated to drawing the player to seeking the designer's desired goal. I know what you're saying, but you have to always remember that within any given toy or videogame you can always do anything that's possible, and people still find them fun regardless, so it's subtly something else that actually triggers your engagement.
A more open form portal game would be very interesting indeed. I think, due to the nature of the mechanic a game in which player agency in pure technical solving would be really difficult to pull off, though I think having small elements of that in a larger structure might work. My kneejerk solution as a game designer would be to do things like this
1) add agency in the order in which puzzles can be solved, with small but noticeable alterations in the gameplay based on your choices. make sure the player is aware of this so when presented with a set of new puzzles, they consider carefully which ones they want to tackle first
2) add nested puzzles where, for example, you need to get across a gap. there's a slot nearby which drops cubes, a pipe you can turn on to get goo, a switch to turn on a light tunnel and so on. Lots of resources which require non-trivial effort to acquire- you need to solve other puzzles to get to them- The catch here is you don't need ALL the resources to solve the greater puzzle, and there are multiple combinations of tools which will get you across. You can extend a flap to speed jump off with friction goo, or the same flap can let you jump into the light bridge as a basic example. This means, in a limited but not meaningless sense, the choices made by the player are meaningful and if they're aware of that it bolsters their sense of agency.
It also provides an interesting cognitive space for the player who, upon unlocking all the resources, finds they only need some to finish the puzzle. Are they frustrated they wasted time? or perhaps please they solved the puzzle in a smarter way than they percieve the developers intended: 'hah! I only needed two of these to beat your game, I'm so good at this' etc. A lot of this revolves around the expectations people will have developed from the existing portal games, so playing with and disassembling those expectations would have to be a really important part of any game of this type.
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EPT
