The experience of Portal 2 is different in so many ways from Portal that it just really made sense to make it all new. MM: There is that familiar tune played on the radio that everyone will recognize, otherwise the soundtrack is entirely new. GR: Will we hear any tracks we remember from Portal, or is Portal 2’s soundtrack entirely new?
This solution helped to lighten and energize the puzzle space without forcing so much music on the player as to distract them from the problem at hand, solving the puzzle. While we solved that problem from many different angles, the musical solution was to attempt to make the puzzle music fun and odd, as if, in an otherwise dark and threatening environment, the puzzles were happy that you were there playing with them. One of the problems we encountered early on in our play-testing was puzzle fatigue. In Portal 2, the music tends to serve as more of an expansion of the Aperture universe than anything else. While there are some circumstances where the music provides feedback of success, it isn't really there to provide gameplay data as it did in L4D. We discussed many different approaches - making the game a music puzzle was even considered - and tried a bunch of experiments, but as with everything at Valve, it was ultimately developed in a very organic fashion by identifying opportunities and challenges through team collaboration and testing.Ībove: "The Halls of Science" - A thoughtful journey through electromechanics MM: We knew we wanted some form of musical humor, surprise and interactivity, but not exactly what that would look like. GR: Was the system planned when you began development, or did it come up later? With the openness of the technology we developed for P2 it'll be easy for us to adapt it to any type of approach that we think makes sense for our upcoming games. The two games are so different, however, that the goals and challenges in Portal 2 really drove us to implement the music in different ways and to solve different problems. MM: Absolutely, the success of the interactive music in Left 4 Dead from a gameplay standpoint helped to broaden the internal interest in including dynamic music in Portal 2 as well as providing a technical basis from which we built the new, more generalized architecture.
Was Portal 2’s system inspired by that work? Will it be applied to other, future games? GR: Left 4 Dead’s AI incorporated dynamic musical cues. Most of the interactive music is also positional so that as you move through the space you also change the mix and volume of the music you are hearing, which invites explorations of the space as well.Ībove: "Science Can Be Fun" - A high-energy track that you've probably heard in the trailers
Obviously, this can heighten the sense of achievement as one completes the puzzle but also turns the mechanics of the puzzle into a sort of interactive music instrument that you can explore by selectively triggering the different channels of music with differing timings and configurations. MM: There are several cases where the music adds channels and complexity as you successfully solve portions of the puzzle, with each additional piece of music actually coming from the device that is participating in the activated game play mechanic. GR: Can you give us an example of a situation in the game especially impacted by the new system? Overall the interactive musical experience tends to become one of exploration, as if the music is emanating from the facility and devices of Aperture Science itself, often giving the player total control over how much or little they want to expand that aspect of the experience. As the system is very open and easy to customize, the types of musical interactivity we developed are widely varied and generally designed for the specific gameplay at hand. Mike Morasky: We developed a brand new system that is used to handle all dynamic audio in Portal 2.
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