Just after Portal 2 was launched, Valve and Geoff Keighley additionally launched The Final Hours of Portal 2, an interactive ebook concerning the making of 2011’s greatest potato-based puzzle game. The most revealing story within the ebook was about how Valve had spent a while making a game that was Portal’s follow-up in title solely. It was set up to now, with out Chell or the GlaDOS that we all know, and had a brand new mechanic known as “F-Stop”. It was primarily a unique game and was by no means launched.
Valve remained coy about what F-Stop was within the hope of finally utilizing it, however they by no means did. In an unlikely twist, a developer utilizing the Source Engine for their very own game got permission to point out off F-Stop’s secrets and techniques. It was based mostly across the “Aperture Camera”, which might copy, paste, and rescale objects on the earth.
LunchHouse Software have been working with Valve’s official code in their very own Portalish puzzler Punt, however have launched a small documentary about F-Stop on their own site. Here, peep at it.
This is only a glimpse. Part considered one of Exposure, a deep-dive exploration of the mechanics, in line with LunchHouse: “The mechanics are not based on speculation or hearsay. Instead, Exposure uses the original, official code from Valve’s own F-STOP, or as it was properly named, Aperture Camera. We’ve reached out to Valve, who’ve given us explicit permission to continue with our project using their original code.”
Explicit permission? I hope which means Gabe swore at them. We’ve seen the type of scaling that Aperture Camera can create in final 12 months’s Superliminal, which is perhaps why Valve are lastly blissful to let it escape their vault. If that’s the case, I hope that Arkane by accident makes Half-Life three and that Valve simply sighs and lets it occur.
