The Portal 2 puzzle creator will let players make their own test chambers without having to dive into Valve's complex level creation tools. We got a chance to catch up with Chet Faliszeck and Erik Johnson at GDC for a chat about Valve's plans for the user friendly level editor. "I believe they’re beta testing it right now," said Erik Johnson. "When the puzzle maker comes out, you will have a lot of content, that’s for sure."

Valve announced their plans for the Puzzle Creator on the Portal 2 site last year, where they released the first couple of screenshots. It looks very similar to the animated diagrams of the first Portal trailers, released way back in 2007. Much, much friendlier than Valve's Hammer editor.

Valve are expecting a rush of new maps when the new tools are released. October's Portal 2 post mentioned that Valve were also planning "a community site to host all of these player-created puzzles." The recently released Steam Workshop can do just that, presumably players will be able to use the Workshop to show off their levels and vote on their favourites.

"Correct," said Erik. We can expect to see Steam Workshop support appearing in other Valve games, too. "You’ll see the Steam Workshop coming from there, then to Left 4 Dead and then we’re going to keep using it," Chet Faliszeck added. "It’s not just for the modders, it’s for the players. It’s a super easy way to consume the creations of other people that are just really hard to do otherwise."

There's no release date for the new tools yet, but if it's in beta testing, it can't be too far off.

Not all of Valve's discarded ideas are great, the binned competitive multiplayer mode for Portal 2 is one such example, but some of them are. The video above is from a Valve talk at GDC in which they discussed many of the ideas that never made it into the full game. This scene was originally Portal 2's opening.

There were many more great ideas left on the drawing board. In fact, the whole game was set to pan out very differently. Eurogamer sat in on the conference, and describe out Wheatley was originally supposed to stay dead when Glados crushes him near the beginning. Rather than being a persistent companion, he was merely the first in a series of personality spheres you'd meet as you travelled through Aperture's labs. Other spheres included a paranoid AI and one that Valve's Eric Wolpaw calls "The Morgan Freeman sphere."

Players were originally supposed to find the Morgan Freeman sphere sat on a lonely stand in the middle of an empty room. "He'd been sitting on that little pedestal for a few centuries, and he was just incredibly, incredibly wise" said Wolpaw. "But only about the 20 by 20 space that he was in."

"As soon as you dragged him 22 feet out of the room, his mind was blown and he was pretty much useless. Although as the game progressed, he eventually got his feet under him and started delivering some homespun wisdom that all related back to this 20 by 20 space." Valve discarded the extra orbs when they found that players didn't bond to them as well as Wheatley, the first sphere went on to become an integral part of Portal 2's plot.

Valve were also planning to have several endings scattered throughout the campaign. "We had these parts throughout the game where Chell would die and that would be the end and we'd play a song, and if you wanted to you could just quit there." Wolpaw told the audience. "We had one that was like two minutes into the game, and if you died there, there was a song that was just about reviewing those first two minutes."

They also had a few other ideas. The next bit contains spoilers for the end of Portal 2, in case you haven't played it yet.

Initially, there was a scene part way through the game in which you'd catch a glimpse of the moon. To trigger an early death you could portal up there to "asphyxiate while listening to a sad song about the moon." Valve eventually dropped the multiple endings because they felt as though they didn't have enough good ideas, but the moon went on to become Portal 2's memorable finale. According to Wolpaw, it was the "perfect mix of being totally awesome and completely stupid." It's hard to disagree.

Valve's Chet Faliszek and Eric Wolpaw conducted a Portal 2 postmortem at GDC last night. The writers talked candidly about alternate endings and the difficulties of following up on their critically acclaimed first game. Chet also mentioned that, at some point in development, the team experimented with competitive Portal 2 multiplayer modes.

Chet also mentioned that they sucked. "We also tried a competitive multiplayer mode which we put together over the space of a month or two," he revealed. "It was a mix of the old Amiga game Speedball and Portal, except with none of the good parts of either of those two. The game was super chaotic and no fun, so the only good news about this part was that we cut it pretty quickly."

Speedball 2 was a competitive, violent, and featured an incredible soundtrack, and I love the Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device as much as the next man. That said, I can imagine this combo resulting in a confusing mess of nonsense. Valve made attempts to satisfy more competitive gamers by including leaderboards and a challenge mode in some later DLC.

Writing a regular column about free games has been one of the most transformative jobs I've ever taken. Buried away in the depths of the internet are some remarkable things, and being able to unearth them, then share them with a huge number of like-minded people, is always an absolute pleasure.

It's also changed the way I think about games, changed the way I write about games, and even inspired me to make games. All this from spending one day a week playing mostly amateur creations then scrawling down some words about what I made of them.



I've played some fantastic games while preparing these columns. Nous, a fascinatingly dark abstract shooter that poses as a personality-evaluating AI, was one of the more intriguing ones. It's a game that spins an unnerving story through its only character, who flits worryingly between help and harm. It's immaculately presented, and alternately amusing and sinister. A real gem.



Or how about Wonderputt? It's a crazy golf game among the most delightful freebies I've ever seen. It presents an ever-changing landscape, a world that morphs around you as you progress through its 18 holes, and one of the most fabulously animated things. It only lasts about 15 minutes, but I spent that time with my face fixed into a grin.

For absolutely no pennies, you can experience things unlike anything else in our medium. Take Terry Cavanagh's At a Distance, a co-op game that asks two players to sit on a local network, exploring an abstract maze, making changes to each other's versions of the world as they work to solve its ultimate puzzle. Haunting and abstract, it's a fascinating look at how we can work together within games in new and exciting ways.

The Snowfield, too, is an experimental game. In it, you explore a harrowing wartorn environment, a place where the snow continues to fall and haunting sounds emit from its farer reaches. Soldiers who are still standing walk among the dead bodies, crying. It's not polished, but it's utterly affecting.



And, more recently, Unmanned's split-screen dialogue-choosing and mundane-task-completion contrasted stunningly with the more hard-hitting elements of its storyline. Its central character is often unpleasant - a liar and a cheat and a racist, if you let him be - but the questions it asks you as a player go far beyond those that are a part of the game itself.

Then there's been the bigger games. Portal was free for a while (it's currently just £7). World of Warcraft got a stripped-back free-to-play version. Team Fortress 2 went almost entirely free as it continued to expand, and Bungie's Marathon trilogy turned up without charge. That even the major studios occasionally give us something for nothing is a lovely thing: it might often be a smart business decision, advertising other titles or enticing in new players, but it still presents us with opportunities to try out some truly special releases without stretching our wallets.

Perhaps most importantly to me, I've spent time delving into the Adventure Game Studio community. AGS is a free-to-use game engine that's powered a number of commercial games, such as Time Gentlemen, Please! and Gemini Rue, but it's also the tech behind a huge number of free releases created as projects of passion. Being astonished by the quality of Keys of a Gamespace, Egress and Donna: Avenger of Blood inspired me to make my own game - Masked - in AGS. And I'm currently working on an even bigger project that utilises it.



I've revisited older games and I continue to find new ones. Spelunky is still, I genuinely believe, one of the best games available on PC - a free roguelike platformer with an stupidly ruleset and a fascinating environment to explore and destroy. Digital: A Love Story is an indie adventure set in the late 1980s, and sees your teenage character embark on a touching journey of discovery. And the terrifying but brilliant Dwarf Fortress recently got an enormous update.

This week, Flatland: Fallen Angle turned up with the best name in the world and a minimalist, noir-esque vibe. It's a game in which you play as a triangle on the run in a two-dimensional city. (Its 'Appreciation Version', which functions on a pay-what-you-like model, recently fell foul of PayMate - who cancelled and refunded all orders without notice, deciding only to inform the developers afterwards that they don't work with games because 'teenagers steal their parents' credit cards to buy them'.) Meanwhile, Russian Subway Dogs sees your canine character scurrying around the underground picking up scraps of food, fighting with other dogs, and - most importantly, of course - exploding bottles of vodka.

This is my last free games column for PC Gamer, but those fantastic free games won't stop coming, and I'm sure PC Gamer will continue to write about them.



Recently, I interviewed some developers as part of a feature I was writing. I wanted to find out why, when they are clearly such talented designers, artists and programmers, they persist in giving away their creations and asking for no money in return. Some of them worked full-time in the games industry and made their freebies on the side. For others, it was just a hobby. But one thread ran through every one of their answers: games are awesome, we love making them, and we want as many people as possible to benefit from that.

In what can often be a cynical industry, these developers are quite remarkable people. Long may their fabulous work continue.

Thanks for reading, folks.

We've seen some impressive fan-made Portal guns in the past, but they've been rare, costly one-off projects. Valve are giving us the chance to get hold of our own Aperture Science Handheld Portal Devices without having to burn ourselves horribly putting together an injection mould. Joystiq mention that, at Valve's request, toy manufacturers, NECA have put together a life-sized Portal gun. It'll hit the shops this summer with a $130 price tag attached.

There will be lights and those lights will change colour, but will it make the "pwung" noise? There's only one way to find out, and that's to buy at least five. Perhaps ten. Maybe more. More. MORE.

NECA will also be releasing a line of Left 4 Dead, Team Fortress 2 and Half-Life action figures, a few of which were shown off at the NYC Toy Fair. The Team Fortress 2 wiki has a snap of the new figures, you'll find that below along with a few shots of that Portal gun. Baggsy the Heavy.

Quantum Conundrum is being developed by Portal creator Kim Swift. It's a first person puzzler in which you play a twelve your old boy lost in his mad scientist uncle's underground laboratory. It's full of safes, switches, lava and vast gaps with no bridges. This would be a serious problem but for the fact that you can switch between five dimensions, each of which affects matter differently. By switching between world on the fly, otherwise immovable objects like safes can be tossed, stacked and even surfed to make it past the mad machines and laserbeams that every mad scientist installs in their homes as standard. It's all demonstrated perfectly in the walkthrough video above from Gametrailers, spotted on RPS. It's out early this year, and looks rather good, don't you think?

As reported on Gamasutra, a bunch of Valve's writers have been taking part in a roundtable question and answer session at GDC Online.

Read on for some insight from some of the most talented writers in the industry.

Valve might be famous for its use of silent protagonists but according to Mark Laidlaw, one of the writers at Valve, it can be a restrictive on a studio's creativity: "Now that some of Valve's most popular protagonists are silent, there’s no turning back. “At this point we’re fully committed to it and taking it as far as it possibly could go.”

Eric Wolpaw, another writer at Valve, also provided some insight. Referring to Valve's hugely successful free to play game, TF2, he said: “that whole game is us desperately trying to keep our jobs."

“Comedy stuff is tougher because it’s more subjective and it’s really hard to gauge peoples’ reaction," he said. Wolpaw added that sometimes it’s a bit depressing, when people playtest a part in a game that’s supposed to be funny, and there's little reaction. “Pretty much no one that played Portal 2 cracked a smile, but testers still said the game was funny... It’s hard to tell if a joke is failing or not.”

Laidlaw was equally humble when referring to his own work: “We fail all the time, we just don’t advertise it too much...we always want to feel like we’re on the edge and challenging ourselves and growing all the time.”

What's your favourite example of writing in games? Let us know in the comments.

Wednesday October 5. That will be the day in which the Portal 2 Peer Review DLC will be released. The free mission pack will extend Atlas and Peabody's co-op adventure and add a new challenge mode for single player and co-op maps.

Back when Valve announced first DLC pack, they also mentioned leaderboards so all your friends and a bunch of strangers will all know how exactly how smart you are (or aren't), which explains the 'Peer Review' handle. That means your performance will be graded by both Glados AND the conglomerate hivemind of the The Internet. NO PRESSURE.

In more 'free stuff from Valve' news, the third volume of the Portal 2 soundtrack, Songs to Test By, is available now on the Portal 2 site, featuring such classic hits as Some Assembly Required, Your Precious Moon and Robots FTW.

If the portals in Portal could take you back in time, a) your mind would break, and b) it would look like this.

It's a video of a prototype made by game designer Arthur Lee, in which you can create portals by taking screenshots. Whatever you snapped is what you'll see through the portal. Where it gets braintingling, though, is that the portal will take you back to the time when you took that screenshot. In other words, the portals don't just fold space, they fold time as well. So that's nice.

As Mike Rose over at IndieGames.com points out, there's your Portal 3 right there.

This is a good week for those of you who like Pac-Man. Two new interpretations of the classic arcade game lie nestled below - about as far apart in style as you can imagine, but both an inordinate amount of fun. Elsewhere, there's a first-person shooter that has no right to be as enjoyable as it is, and a first-person puzzle game that I'm sort of breaking the rules for. Because it's a game from Valve, and one of my favourite games in the world. You understand, right? Read on for this week's freebie picks...


Portal

Valve. Get it from Steam. But hurry up!



I never thought for a minute that I would get the chance to write about Portal in this column. But by way of sneaky half-rule-breaking, I do. Because one of the greatest PC games ever made is now free - not forever, but until Tuesday, which is enough days away from the time of writing that I've decided it still counts.

You know the score, surely. It's a first-person puzzle game in which you fire one portal to jump through and another portal to emerge from. In doing so you'll learn to overcome a variety of increasingly complex environmental obstacles, and Valve's expert level design means that while you'll scratch your head on a number of occasions, you'll always experience the most beautiful moment of realisation when you work out how to apply your existing knowledge to a new scenario.

It's made even better by a fabulous story, one that starts with refreshing subtlety but builds, slowly, suspensefully, before releasing in a phenomenally climactic final hour. It's one of the most dazzling, innovative, smart and hilarious computer games ever made, and if you haven't tried it yet, you now have absolutely no excuses. Grab it before the 20th, and three of the most special gaming hours you'll have are yours to keep forever.

Digmaan

RWSB Games. Grab it from IndieDB.



Digmaan is a game made in First-Person Shooter Creator, which always sets alarm bells ringing. It's fixed-resolution, blocky, doesn't like widescreen formats, and textures occasionally clip and overlap with one another. One time an enemy fell out of the game, and another time one got stuck in a wall. It's an ugly, broken mess, carried by a story so flimsy it might as well not be there: the aliens are invading, and via some sort of unexplained teleportation and regeneration science you're taking them on... while your army buddies stand around doing not very much at all.

But my goodness, there's the basis of something good here. Your extra-terrestrial foes attack from a distance with pinpoint laser accuracy. At first I thought it was just awful game coding. I kind of still think that. But it works. This is a game where it only takes a hits of bullets to fell a foe, just as it only takes them a few shots to down you. It's extremely rare to be able to get close enough to see an enemy in all its gruesome glory - most of the time, you're crouching behind cover, sprinting from place to place, popping up every now and then to take a pot-shot in the hope of landing a bullet where it needs to go. You'll die a lot, but you respawn nearby with the world as you left it, BioShock-style, so it never gets too frustrating (unless you completely run out of ammo, with no way of finding any more, which caused me to reload an earlier save a couple of times).

It's hideously unpolished, in the way that all FPSC games are. But it's also got more of a spark, more tension and atmosphere, than any I've played before.



Netpack

Royal Paw. Download it from the dev's website.



It's an absolutely brilliant idea. Pac-Man, reimagined as a roguelike - a version in which you can take your time, eat one pellet at once, plan your moves, and utilise inventory items on your quest to rid the levels of foes.

And it is a proper quest, too. There's nothing in-game to explain it, but the readme file comes equipped with a big story, explaining why you're here. You're an explorer, searching for the revered Mace of Four Winds. And you've finally laid your hands on it, at the bottom of a massive network of caves. The only problem is, having stowed it away in your backpack, you've realised it's haunted. And that's why you're in trouble.

Amusingly, there's even combat, in the most perfunctory sense: you simply move into a ghost to battle it, and the game tells you how much damage you're doing to one another with each press of an arrow key. This is a really smart reinterpretation of a classic. I think you'll like it a lot.



Forget-Me-Not

Nyarlu Labs. Download it from the developer's site.



Another interpretation of Pac-Man, Forget-Me-Not is about as far removed from its slow, careful pace as it's possible to get. This is Pac-Man reimagined as an even faster-paced arcade game, one in which a whole load of other game mechanics come into play.

Originally released on iOS, Forget-Me-Not sees you shooting your way around procedurally-generated levels that fall apart under the strain of your blasting. As well as collecting pellets, you'll automatically fire at anything in your way - which sounds simple enough until a bit of the map breaks off, forms a wormhole that loops it back round behind you, and you suddenly realise you're about to die because you've been shooting your own behind for the last ten seconds.

Power-ups can be exploded for extra goodies, and they keep appearing for as long as you'd like them to, so it's tempting to stick around in a level past the point where you could move onto the next one. Take too long, though, and everything goes dark, a ghost appears, and it's a race for the finish line before you're doomed.

I'm almost certain that, in my half-hour or so spent becoming hopelessly addicted to the game, I haven't seen anything close to every secret it has to offer. You can even have a go in two-player mode. It's fabulous. Thanks eternally to Phil_Lapineau for pointing it out in last week's comments thread.