Kim Swift, lead designer on Portal, has joined Xbox Game Studios to work on its publishing programme.

Xbox announced the hire today via a Twitter post which mentioned Swift's role would be to "accelerate our innovation and collaborate with independent studios to build games for the cloud".

Swift is most famous for her stint at Valve, which began when her portal-based game demo Narbacular Drop impressed Valve bosses and she was roped on board.

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A movie version of Portal is back on track, Star Trek and Lost director J.J. Abrams has said, nearly a decade after we first heard of its existence.

The project still sounds far-off, and there's no word on what has been holding up development - but the wheels now seem to be turning.

"We actually do have a script that's being written for the Portal movie now at [Warner Bros.]," Abrams said today (thanks, IGN) "We're really excited about the take and the pitch, so it feels like that thing's finally on the rails.

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Over a decade since it was cancelled, Valve's unreleased Portal prequel, F-Stop has been revived via an unusual source: an indie developer.

F-Stop, which began life as a Valve experiment before it was set to be the next Portal game following the release of the Orange Box in 2007, revolved around taking pictures in the game world, with the pictures then used to create in-game objects. Portals and the Portal gun were nowhere to be seen.

F-Stop was eventually canned and Valve went on to release Portal 2 in April 2011. Gameplay of F-Stop was never officially released, with Valve keeping its cards close to its chest in case it fancied returning to the in-game camera mechanic. But now, over a decade later, an indie developer has said it has permission from Valve itself to show off the F-Stop mechanic using F-Stop's source code - and it released a video revealing how it all works.

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Valve veteran Jay Pinkerton has returned to the developer a year after he left the company.

Pinkerton left last June, following other high profile departures from Erik Wolpaw, Chet Faliszek, and DOTA 2 writer Marc Laidlaw.

Now, thanks to eagle-eyed Redditor OWLverlord (via PC Gamer), it seems Pinkerton is back on Valve's staff page, listed under the "Other Experts" category.

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Valve has returned to the world of Portal for Moondust, a brand new virtual reality demo. Working for Aperture Science's Lunar Resources Initiative, you are sent into spaaaace to construct a modular space station, and then down onto the Moon itself for further testing.

Moondust is a sandbox experience designed to show off the Knuckles EV2, Valve's latest VR controller. Specifically, you'll be manipulating objects using the device's pinch grip technology and ability to finely detect hand poses and movement.

On board with that? Then you'll be crushing moon rocks, driving a moon buggy, building things and lobbing items onto targets in no time.

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