hile Valve is one of the developers that swallows hot new developers or development teams left and right, the Narbacular Drop team is another inspirational story. Coming out of DigiPen, this senior project was quickly noticed by Valve, and the team was hired immediately. The team quickly got to work on a Narbacular Drop transformation into Portal, which will be part of the Half-Life 2: Episode Two Orange and Black Box packages. Portal mixes the first-person world of Half-Life with a puzzler-platformer that’s guaranteed to rack your brain and make you laugh all the while.

Last week I got the exclusive opportunity to meet with two of the Portal team members, Level Designer Kim Swift and Gameplay Programmer Jeep Barnett. The two gave me a glimpse into this strange new world and a complete hands-on with an almost-final PC version, as well as an early version for the Xbox 360. While Narbacular Drop was the basis for Portal, the game’s entire engine had to be scrapped (DigiPen owns all tech created by students) and everything started from scratch with Valve’s Source Engine.

Kim Swift

In Portal, you play as a new character in the Half-Life universe that is trapped in the Aperture Laboratory Facility. You learn more about what Aperture Science is by playing Episode Two than by playing Portal. However, you find out more about who you are in the Half-Life universe while you’re playing Portal. “She” was all your character was referred to, and who “she” is has yet to be announced. Could your character be Alyx? Apparently “she” is not in Episode Two, according to Valve, but that could be just as much a trick as the rest of the game essentially is.

Your character has no idea what’s going on, why she’s in this lab, or how to get out. You are given a portal gun, which shoots two interlinked portals: blue and orange. Go in the blue, come out the orange. Go in the orange, come out of blue. Unlike in Narbacular Drop, in Portal you now have the ability to jump and lift objects. There are no weapons, and the portal gun, gravity and physics are your only tools to traverse these strangely puzzling rooms to figure out how to escape.

In the beginning of Portal, you’ll learn the basics of figuring out a room. When you walk into a room you’ll be presented with signage that lets you know which number room you’re in and lit symbols of what you can expect to be up against, such as blocks, turrets or falling objects. These symbols may be found in the environment as well to give you a little hint on where to toss a portal, and so on. While the first few rooms you’ll encounter aren’t terribly difficult, it quickly ramps up. In the beginning, your portal gun will only shoot the blue or entry portal, and the orange portal will be fixed. Early objectives may have you place a block on a switch or power a moving platform and then land on it. However, once you progress through a number of rooms, you’ll get access to the orange portal gun, which will allow for much trickier movement. Considering you place the entry and exit points in many cases, each room will have a number of solutions.

While the main gameplay centers around you getting from Point A to Point B, you’ll encounter a number of obstacles to get around. Chasms, turrets and surfaces that don’t allow portals will need to be avoided as you attempt to reach your destination. In a sense, when approaching each room I felt as if I had just entered a mini-dungeon in Zelda. By taking a step back and observing the different facets of each room, most of the puzzles can be figured out. Remembering the rules of the portals, as well as gravity and physics will also help. You can drop turrets out of your way through portals, as well as bounce back and forth between each portal each way. Getting over chasms or to further distances is done by “flinging yourself.” Drop a portal to a much lower area and feel free to make the exit away from where you actually want to land. By dropping into the entrance of a portal at a higher rate of speed you’ll exit out just as fast, or flinging yourself out of the exit.