Portal 2 developer commentary: Difference between revisions

=== Elevator Fatigue ===

| We found that playtesters were getting fatigued at solving so many complex test chambers in a row. So, instead of a routine elevator ride to the next puzzle, we added a long funnel ride with some destruction to give players a short break while reminding them of the facility's state of disrepair.

}}

=== Kill Your Television ===

| In each of Wheatley's test chambers there is always a monitor with Wheatley on it. While placing the monitor in this level, one of our designers thought it would be funny if the monitor was the target of the faith plate and would get broken if the player or the box flew into it. We thought the gag worked well and decided to make every monitor breakable.

}}

=== Nonlinear Progression ===

| The original layout of this chamber started out much more linear; essentially a sequence of rooms that the player had to progress through somewhat blindly – not knowing what the next goal might be until they got there.  Early versions contained an extra puzzle beyond the reflector cube, but due to the linear path, it took players so long to get to it, that they were confused about which elements were still relevant. This drove us to make the level nonlinear.  To make it easier for players to visualize the puzzle, we condensed the overall test space and moved the exit near the start. This helped the players see where they had to go and which objects would help them get there.

}}

=== Birdbrain ===

| One of the larger plot holes that PotatOS introduced was: She’s your buddy now. She’s got the same goals as you. So why isn’t she helping you solve the tests? The real answer is, obviously, that if she did help you solve the tests there’d be no game. One solution we we came up with was for the bird from Act 3 to keep swooping in and pecking bits of her off your gun. As the bird kept eating the part of her that knew how to solve the tests, PotatOS would actually get dumber over time. For technical reasons, this ended up being impossible to execute, so we ended up finding another solution. Some of us though will always have a place in our heart for the bird solution.

}}

=== Evil Wheatley ===

| Finding the right balance for Evil Wheatley was difficult, because we still wanted him to be the bumbling idiot from the first half of the game, but at the same time, there had to be some sense that he was dangerous now, otherwise there wasn't much tension for the big finale. Fortunately, Stephen Merchant did a great job of intercutting funny bumbling Wheatley with occasional outbursts of power-mad, villainous Wheatley.

}}

=== Frankenturrets ===

| The Frankenturrets were an attempt to show one of the ways Wheatley has been spending his time since he threw the player down into the Underground. Using his limited brain, it didn't seem like he could have come up with a lot, so the idea of using objects he'd have access to seemed appropriate. The turret and the cube are the two most iconic portal objects and the frankenturret is little more than a crude combination of those two objects.  The hermit crab animation when you pick the cubes up began as a necessity because we really needed to make them act like cubes when you held them. It ended up being so cute that it became a simple job of making the turret widen its eye and shake its head a little, to convey to the player that these things were disrupted, and had no idea who or what they were anymore, and also to make the player feel sympathetic towards their plight. We used a combination of  in game physics pushes and canned Maya animation to allow the player freedom to move them wherever they wanted, line up races between them, or even set them up so they would walk, inevitably to their doom, into a fizzler.

}}

=== Wheatley's As Level Designer ===

| Wheatley's first test was really fun to make because we wanted it to feel like he was a first-time level designer. We see a lot of maps where people try using different textures or lights to write words or put their names on the walls.

}}

=== Rattman’s Den ===

{{Quotation | Adam Foster, Pull the Rug

== See also ==