Welcome to Dev Game Club, where this week we revisit our series on Portal with another bonus interview with Kim Swift. We get a look at the game from which it came before hearing about the development proper. Dev Game Club looks at classic video games and plays through them over several episodes, providing commentary.

Podcast breakdown: 1:23 Interview 1:03:02 Break 1:03:25 Outro

Issues covered: Kim's history, deciding where to go to college, learning to program, working with a team over multiple years, pitching each other, mixing interests, learning to work together, figuring out collaboration, the student showcase, showing to Valve, a sudden audience of twenty, walking away with a job offer, taking away only the ideas, showing at the IGF while building the new game, acquiring in Valve, a six month tech demo, borrowing the art direction, a useful constraint, extending six months more, the everyday feeling and being able to have fun, getting another year to go in the bundle, adding the behind the scenes stuff, the writing and level-building process, evaluating player progression and feeling, post-processing and robotizing your voice actress, mapping out the levels in little triples, responding to the player, a master class in tutorialization, iteration through playtesting, celebrating just shipping... and then, testing the games, focusing on your own stuff, always learning, going back to the roots, brand management, getting to do lots of new things, a game that reflected its own making, games being hard enough to make, feeling the joy, a great constraint, growing the world-building, no macro plan, how games reflect their making, explaining SKUs.

Games, people, and influences mentioned or discussed: Narbacular Drop, DigiPen, Valve, Gabe Newell, Erik Wolpaw, Left 4 Dead, Airtight Games, Quantum Conundrum, Amazon Games, EA Motive, Google Stadia, XBOX, NEAR Studios, Game Boy Advance, Super Nintendo, Tim Schafer, EverQuest, Jeep Barnett, Garrett Rickey, Dave Kircher, Lost Vikings, Robin Walker, Team Fortress 2, Crystal Dynamics, Realm Lovejoy, Human Head, Prey, Half-Life (series), Randy Lundeen, Chet Faliszek, John Guthrie, The Orange Box, Heather Cerlan, Hawthorn, Pikmin, Outer Wilds, Calamity Nolan, Final Fantasy IX, Kirk Hamilton, Aaron Evers, Mark Garcia.

Next time: More Pikmin?

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