Interviews// Joshua Weier - Project Lead, Portal 2

PAX East 2011 and this time around I am queued up to meet with Joshua Weier, the Project Lead at Valve working on one of the year’s most highly anticipated multi-platform releases: Portal 2.

SPOnG’s obvious concern is that unlike its predecessor, the cult break-out Portal, Portal 2 is a heavily lead, commercially sensitive AAA release. Could this have lead to the kiss of anti-creativity that is the suits from corporate getting involved and ‘having really neat ideas'?

I approach Joshua with some trepidation and begin the questioning.


SPOnG: The original Portal was little more than a tech-demo to many people. What have you done to expand on what was technically little more than a concept title?

JW: People were so taken by the original game, so when we approached it we knew we had to get the tone and the feel right, it had to be that successor to Portal without being weird and not declaring it to be a triple-A title by default.

We felt that when we got to the end of the first Portal, there was still a ton to do, and we wanted to keep it simple and elegant like the first game, so we didn't want to add more buttons.

So, all the mechanics that we did add really expand the power of the portals. So, they still work the way they did originally, but now what players will do with them will be way past what was done with the first game.

People really loved the world and the character in GLADOS, so we wanted to bring her back of course, because she was a key element to it. It's going to be one of the few times where as a player you've killed a character and then in the next game they are right back and angry with you for what you have done to them.


SPOnG: The original game felt terribly claustrophobic, have you capitalised on this in Portal 2?

JW: We wanted play on that even more. There was a lot of things in Portal 1 that we wanted to do, but we couldn't due to the resources we had available at the time. It was kind of a test bed to see how it would be received by the general public.

This time around we took a lot of ideas and kind of made them fully fledged. The simple things like the pistons and the reconfigurations in the first Portal will be much more fully fledged in Portal 2.

In terms of pacing; we wanted to give the players that same feeling of being really contained and claustrophobic, letting them breathe a little bit and then throwing them a bunch of surprises that takes the player in directions they didn't think they would want to go.


SPOnG: One of the most appealing elements of the original Portal was the adventure playground like feeling you got when messing around in levels via the use of the portals. How is that being exploited in Portal 2?

JW: The hard thing about a puzzle game like Portal 2 is that once you beat the puzzle, there is no real reason to return to it. It's important to know that the first Portal was very small, but the second Portal, just the single player aspect of Portal 2 is about 2.5 to 3 times longer than all of the first game and the co-op is 2 times longer than the first game and it's a separate element.

The big thing we have done to address this is to add the co-op portion of the game. Having that dynamic of a second person adds a lot of re-playability. So you can play through the puzzles with your wife, girlfriend, boyfriend who ever it is and get a lot from it.


SPOnG: Steve Merchant is an excellent British comedy actor who you have managed to get for the voice for Wheatley, the new character in Portal 2. How has his humour affected the game's atmosphere?

JW: I think it has enhanced it. If you saw some of the old videos we had this really talented animator who had a great voice and was also British, so he brought across a little bit of that same kind of humour because he has that same mindset.

So, we had him embedded in the game the whole time, but the writers always had Steve Merchant in their head the whole time. We didn't think he'd be interested in doing the voice for Wheatley as it was a bit obscure, but when we reached out to him he was really into it.

He was great, the writers would give him three minutes of ad-lib to do and he'd give us 15! He would take it and give it the right spin. He speaks really quickly yet he's also very intelligible.


SPOnG: In the demo you are showing here at PAX East you have the use of special paint that gives the player special abilities. I saw this before on a game called 'The Power of Paint', are the same people who made that game working on Portal 2?

JW: It is the same people! The original Portal was made by Digipen students who were brought into Valve to make Portal 1 that was based on the game they developed called Narbacular Drop. So we went back to Digipen and saw The Power of Paint, really liked it and brought the developers of that game internally to work on Portal 2.

When we talked to them we were really influenced by Portal and this is how we learnt to build our game, so it's just so funny that they based their game on Portal and now they are working on Portal 2.


SPOnG: Thanks for your time.