One of Valve's best-kept secrets, the playable experiments for a Portal prequel, the well-known puzzle game comes to light.
Shortly after launching The Orange Box in 2007, Valve carried out a series of "targeted design experiments" with which Gabe Newell hoped to further awaken the creativity of its developers. One of them was called F-Stop and for a long time, inside the company it was considered as a possible Portal prequel. The project would end up being discarded by Gabe, who kept his results in case they served him in the future and never just explained the reasons for his rejection. Well, the mystery surrounding F-Stop seems to have come to an end. Perhaps motivated by the launch of Half-Life: Alyx, Valve has given the green light to have his experiment appear in a YouTube documentary called Exposure and made by an indie studio very fond of puzzle games, LuncHouse Software. The first chapter, which you can see on these lines, is dedicated entirely to the history of the prototype, and even shows an unprecedented gameplay of it.
The video, a small preview of the series, teaches some of the mechanics they studied, most of them related to the perspective of things. The objects change in size and function depending on the place from which they look and where we put them. If you have been lucky enough to meet GLaDOs, these sinister rooms (those boxes …) are full of puzzles and challenges in the first person. It is normal. F-Stop was also known as "Aperture Camera" and was behind Joshua Weier, who worked on Portal and Portal 2. The idea, in addition to perspective games, had to do with copying, pasting and rescaling objects. All very similar, as some users have already pointed out, to what we have seen in games like Superliminal, which Valve was ahead of in his day. It is possible that precisely the existence of more games like this (we leave you another example below) was another reason that Gabe Newell and the company opened the doors of their past. After all, if there are already others using your mechanics, it makes no sense to save them as something unique and exclusive. As if Valve lacked mysteries and legends in the attic!
The effect can now handle collisions and multiple photos #madewithunity #gamedev #vfx #polaroid pic.twitter.com/NXKt8KGIcZ
– Matt Stark (@ mattstark256) January 3, 2020
