PortalStoriesMelDevs

We have had minimal contact with valve, we had some feedback from individual developers at valve but nothing official. No jobs offered :(

There are a lot of technical limitations when making VR games and Portals are very expensive to render, you have to get 90fps with a high resolution screen so you need to fake as much as possible! That's not to say its not possible to do but it was not suitable for us.

After the Aperture Robot Repair Demo added in the teleport ability I was instantly fascinated with it, it started appearing in lots of other games but I was always disappointed that it was used as just a movement system. I wanted to use the teleporting as an actual gameplay mechanic. From there the idea evolved in to making a small series of puzzles using this new mechanic.

We have been working on the game for around 3 months, pretty much all of the gameplay elements from Portal 2 had to be reprogrammed from scratch in Unreal Engine 4. All the levels and puzzles were designed over the course of a few weeks, although polishing it all up takes a lot longer!

It is a great mechanic and works really well in Budget Cuts but we don't think it works for our game without changing the gameplay a lot.

It was quite a challenge to re-program quite a few mechanics over from Source to Unreal. The retrieval tool specifically turned out to be harder than expected. I also loved how the turrets turned out! Those guys are a lot scarier in VR! - Anna

Coming up with fun ideas for levels was quite challenging, with the teleport gun and the retrieval tool, if you can see somewhere you can teleport there and if you can see a cube you can grab it from any range. I worked height in to the levels and came up with gameplay elements such as the Teleport Displacement field to better work with this. To avoid motion sickness, we made a teleport pad instead of using lift platforms. For this project I wanted anyone to be able to play it, even someone who had never played portal 2 so I had to plan the difficulty accordingly.
I think I am most proud of how the turrets turned out, we werent sure how to utilise them in a fun way in VR and then I came up with the idea of having to duck behind cover to avoid them, its pretty fun and hilarious to watch - Stephen