Development
After the success of Portal, Valve decided to make Portal 2 a standalone product, partly because of pressure from other developers within Valve who wanted to work on a Portal product. Work began almost immediately after the release of Portal. Valve committed more resources to Portal 2's development than they had for the first game; Portal had a team of seven or eight people, but Portal 2 had a team of 30 or 40. The initial team of four was expanded as subgroups formed to devise game mechanics and to plot the story. Participants in internal review processes were inspired by what they saw to join the project. According to Erik Wolpaw, some Portal 2 developers worked on the Left 4 Dead games to help them meet milestones, but returned to Portal 2, "with extra people in tow." Kim Swift, Portal's designer, left Valve for Airtight Games halfway through Portal 2's development.
Project manager Erik Johnson said Valve's goal for Portal 2 was to find a way to "re-surprise" players, which he considered a "pretty terrifying" prospect. In March 2011, one month before the game's release, Valve president Gabe Newell called Portal 2 "the best game we've ever done." After Portal 2's release, Geoff Keighley wrote that according to Newell, "Portal 2 will probably be Valve's last game with an isolated single-player experience". Keighley later stated that the use of the word "probably" suggests that "this could change." Newell said that Valve is not "giving up on single-player at all", but intends to include more social features on top of the single player experience, akin to the cooperative mode in Portal 2.
Read more about this topic: Portal 2
Famous quotes containing the word development:
“I can see ... only one safe rule for the historian: that he should recognize in the development of human destinies the play of the contingent and the unforeseen.”
—H.A.L. (Herbert Albert Laurens)
“The development of civilization and industry in general has always shown itself so active in the destruction of forests that everything that has been done for their conservation and production is completely insignificant in comparison.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)
“The Cairo conference ... is about a complicated web of education and employment, consumption and poverty, development and health care. It is also about whether governments will follow where women have so clearly led them, toward safe, simple and reliable choices in family planning. While Cairo crackles with conflict, in the homes of the world the orthodoxies have been duly heard, and roundly ignored.”
—Anna Quindlen (b. 1952)