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Designing killer automatons isn't as easy as you may think

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Valve has a new comic about Portal 2 for your eyes! It's a Portal 2 renaissance this week: besides lining up free DLC to compete for your time, the company also has this short strip to remind you that Portal 2's not only one of the cleverest titles to come out this year, but also one of the most whimsical. And assuming you missed out on buying a real live turret from the game a few months back, you'll just have to console yourself with this one-shot story of science's struggle to perfect the murderous proficiency of a kid-friendly, robotic babysitter. Click here to view the strip.

Above: Game design (more or less)

It will not escape the astute reader that this tale is probably a pretty good analogy for the process of building a game like Portal 2. How many improvements can you add before players get fed up? Is it really all that important to iron out bugs that might potentially break everything? Don't testers have the worst lives in the whole industry? Oh yes, don't think we were done with being clever about Portal when we told you it was all about Freud calling you fat. We could do this all day. Or at least until that new DLC's done downloading.

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  • Yumi stands on a foggy street "You did it, we did it": Anime girl horror game with wrestling finishers finally gets Steam release date
  • Deadlock Celeste Risk of Rain creator leaked Deadlock news, but no one believed the Valve dev because he calls a guy Chickenwing

Oct 3, 2011

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TOPICS
Valve
CATEGORIES
PC Gaming PlayStation Xbox Platforms
PRODUCTS
Portal 2 Portal
Tom Goulter
Read more
Fallout screenshots from Retro Gamer Magazine issue 186
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Yumi stands on a foggy street
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Deadlock Celeste
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A crop of the key art for Australia Did It, showing a group of mercenaries preparing to battle on top of a moving train - one has electric gauntlets, one has a massive bazooka and wears a skull mask, one has two revolvers, and another has a hazmat suit, gas mask, and a green energy weapon
Roguelike Games "Stop trying to get us to make the next Fortnite or Destiny," says the dev of this odd reverse bullet hell tactics game
 
 
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Games Valve approved alien orgy scene after making devs "record and send footage" and now the game's on Steam in all its glory
 
 
Yumi stands on a foggy street
Horror Games Steam might stop dev from releasing viral horror game just by ignoring them: "Be prepared for the game to be delayed"
 
 
Latest in Puzzle
The key art for the Blue Prince showing a doorway on a blue wall, which is open to reveal several more rooms within its frame, a person deep within opening another door several layers deep to a bright white light
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