Portal Lead Designer Reveals Her New Game: Quantum Conundrum

The Wooster

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Portal Lead Designer Reveals Her New Game: Quantum Conundrum

Kim Swift, the brilliant mind behind Portal and its predecessor Narbacular Drop, gives a guided tour of her upcoming dimension-trotting puzzler, Quantum Conundrum.

Much like Portal before it, Quantum Conundrum sees a lone (and judging by this video, mute) protagonist make their way through a series of laboratory chambers, besting laser traps and environmental puzzles, aided by a gizmo that makes the laws of physics go all squiffy.

This time, the gizmo in question allows the player to shift between different dimensions. In her short playthrough of an early level, Swift shows us two of those different dimensions (well, three if you include the one she starts in, smarty pants) which are unlocked by placing collectable "batteries" into a machine. The "fluffy" dimension turns the world into a fluffy, pinky-purple wonderland, pretty much what you'd imagine the inside of a 12-year-old girl's mind to look like. Items that were too heavy to move in the humdrum, vanilla dimension became plush versions of themselves, light enough to throw around. At one point, we see Swift throw a safe in the fluffy dimension, then switch dimensions just in time to watch the now very heavy safe go crashing through a window. It was a clever, and imaginative use of the mechanic and, like similar puzzles in Portal it made me smile at its inherent cleverness.

The other dimension is less visually exciting, but will doubtlessly make for some very interesting puzzles when combined with the other dimensions. The "slow motion" dimension does pretty much exactly what it says on the tin, slowing everything in the environment down when the player switches over to it. The machine that powers these dimensional shifts had space for four dimensions at once, so we can probably expect at least two more.

Swift talks briefly about the game's story. The player is put in the shoes of a nameless child, dropped off on their uncle's door step. That uncle, a scientist who goes by the handle of Fitz Quadwrangle, disappears early on, and it's up to the player to navigate their way through his laser-filled manor/laboratory, which laughs in the face of health and safety regulations.

I admit, I was a little disappointed when Swift left Valve back in 2009 to join Airtight Games. Airtight's only effort at that point was Dark Void, and the only thing that game had in common with the seminal puzzler Portal was a propensity to make the player feel mildly nauseous. Regardless, putting Swift in charge of her own team was a wise move on Airtight's part, because even this short tidbit of gameplay is giving me that same feeling early videos of Portal did. A slight tingle in the stomach that says "this is something really special."

Quantum Conundru will be four to six hours long and will be arriving on PC, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 early next year.


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NickCaligo42

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Grey Carter said:
Regardless, putting Swift in charge of her own team was a wise move on Airtight's part, because even this short tidbit of gameplay is giving me that same feeling early videos of Portal did. A slight tingle in the stomach that says "this is something really special."
I think that's being way more than a bit generous. This is basically an identical game, but with a much less clever puzzle mechanic. :\ Need I remind anyone, Valve doesn't have titles? Even if Swift was instrumental in the original game, it's a safe bet that everybody on the team was just as much so, and she was far from being the only designer. I think it's going a bit far to give Swift her kind of credit and this kind of press for what seems like a shallow knockoff.
 

The Wooster

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NickCaligo42 said:
Grey Carter said:
Regardless, putting Swift in charge of her own team was a wise move on Airtight's part, because even this short tidbit of gameplay is giving me that same feeling early videos of Portal did. A slight tingle in the stomach that says "this is something really special."
I think that's being way more than a bit generous. This is basically an identical game, but with a much less clever puzzle mechanic. :\ Need I remind anyone, Valve doesn't have titles? Even if Swift was instrumental in the original game, it's a safe bet that everybody on the team was just as much so, and she was far from being the only designer. I think it's going a bit far to give Swift her kind of credit and this kind of press for what seems like a shallow knockoff.
While most games are team efforts, I think you're downplaying Swift's role. She was part of the team responsible for Narbacular Drop, the game portal is based on. She was a key figure in the development of both games.
 

DEAD34345

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Hey! That safe didn't keep its current momentum, it kept its current velocity. Momentum is dependant on the mass of an object, so it changed. I demand accurate scientific terminology from my dimension-swapping, physics defying video-games.

Other than that though, this trailer seems quite interesting. I don't think the idea is quite as original as Portal was, because I'm sure I've heard of dimension swapping puzzle games before, but it certainly seems like it could be fun. I just hope there's enough different dimensions and objects to make a wide variety of puzzles.
 

Sixcess

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Portal with a Team Fortress art style? (Just look at the painting on the wall.)

It looks pretty clever. The solutions to the puzzles had me smiling at the cleverness, so one to watch, definitely.
 

Not-here-anymore

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lunncal said:
Hey! That safe didn't keep its current momentum, it kept its current velocity. Momentum is dependant on the mass of an object, so it changed. I demand accurate scientific terminology from my dimension-swapping, physics defying video-games.
Curses. I was going to say that.
In the absence of an applied force, that safe should get a lot slower back in the normal dimension. Unless there's some kind of proportionality constant in the fluffy dimension that doesn't exist in ours (fair assumption, given that it's a separate universe), and momentum is a factor of ten greater than the product of the mass and the velocity. That'd probably work on the changeover...
I should really go to sleep instead of trying to justify game physics.
 

NickCaligo42

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Grey Carter said:
While most games are team efforts, I think you're downplaying Swift's role. She was part of the team responsible for Narbacular Drop, the game portal is based on. She was a key figure in the development of both games.
Yep... and so was everybody else on the Narbacular Drop team. Valve pretty much bought the whole lot of them, lock stock and barrel, from what I understand.

And again, I remind you, it was a Valve title. Valve's not like any other studio. They have no job titles, and there are no directors or leads to speak of. Everybody at Valve supplies their own direction, choosing their tasks moment-by-moment in a very spontaneous fashion as the need and opportunity arises, and ideas are accountable to the entire team for veto or approval; they're triply accountable to user testing, which out-votes whatever anybody on the team thinks. If Swift could be called the "lead designer" of Portal, it's because the team was about six people plus a writer (IE: not Swift) and she's overselling her role.

There's exactly two reasons that anyone from Valve breaks away. Either they can't deal with the pressures of self-direction and the lack of deadlines (which describes a huge number of people), or they want to be possessive of their projects. Given that Swift has entered a leadership position at this company, I'm not being struck with the "needs direction" angle as much as the "possessive" angle...
 

The Random One

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Hm, who'd think one could do two games based on the premise of 'using a physics-warping handheld device you must explore a laboratory owned by a less than normal science-loving entity' and have them be so different.

It was unique and I laughed at Grandpa's fluffy dimension picture so I want this. Also I like how they went all the way with the perspective so it's actually at a child's eye level.

Sober Thal said:
Kim needs to hire someone to explain the game for her.
I was thinking 'YOU SUCK AT YOUR OWN GAME' all the time.
 

rickynumber24

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NickCaligo42 said:
Grey Carter said:
While most games are team efforts, I think you're downplaying Swift's role. She was part of the team responsible for Narbacular Drop, the game portal is based on. She was a key figure in the development of both games.
Yep... and so was everybody else on the Narbacular Drop team. Valve pretty much bought the whole lot of them, lock stock and barrel, from what I understand.
Yeah, all four of them or something. Narbacular Drop was a capstone project in college, essentially, and those don't actually tend to have huge teams.

And again, I remind you, it was a Valve title. Valve's not like any other studio. They have no job titles, and there are no directors or leads to speak of. Everybody at Valve supplies their own direction, choosing their tasks moment-by-moment in a very spontaneous fashion as the need and opportunity arises, and ideas are accountable to the entire team for veto or approval; they're triply accountable to user testing, which out-votes whatever anybody on the team thinks. If Swift could be called the "lead designer" of Portal, it's because the team was about six people plus a writer (IE: not Swift) and she's overselling her role.

There's exactly two reasons that anyone from Valve breaks away. Either they can't deal with the pressures of self-direction and the lack of deadlines (which describes a huge number of people), or they want to be possessive of their projects. Given that Swift has entered a leadership position at this company, I'm not being struck with the "needs direction" angle as much as the "possessive" angle...
On the other hand, I can completely believe this. For all we know, it might be both of them, actually. I could not-implausibly imagine that, knowing how I work, for example.
 

NickCaligo42

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rickynumber24 said:
Yeah, all four of them or something. Narbacular Drop was a capstone project in college, essentially, and those don't actually tend to have huge teams.
Six, actually, and that's sort of my point. Portal was that same tiny team, plus a writer, plus maybe one or two more Valve regulars to oversee the thing a little since they were new blood. In my experience, student teams also aren't auteur-driven.
 

Knusper

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It's like Portal with the aesthetics of Psychonauts.

Looks like it's filled with interesting ideas.
 

DarkRyter

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I guess there's only so many different plots that first person puzzle games can be done in.
 

Custard_Angel

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Looks interesting.

I'll probably check it out after Yahtzee inevitably shits on it for being a portal clone.