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The month of Game Informer reveals for Portal 2 continues on today with a talk with Matt Charlesworth, a concept artist at Valve. During the lengthy discussion, pieces of concept art were revealed for Chell's potential new design.
Matt continues on to briefly discuss the design of the co-op characters. Check out that brief slice of information after the break, and even more information at the Game Informer website!<!--more-->
"This is not supposed to look like a sexy Marvel superhero suit. It’s supposed to look like it was designed without any thought of making her look attractive. We don't want to make her be unattractive, but we want to balance that out. Chell is a test subject, so she should look like one. Not a prisoner or a janitor or something. We also want people to remember the character this time around. Before I started working on Portal 2, I barely remembered the character from the first game.
"The hat came up sort of halfway through the concepting phase. It just seemed to strike a chord with everyone. It's something that always makes me think of test pilots - people who were subjected to testing and extreme conditions. It serves a second purpose too, because if there's a graphic on it that's constantly readable from all angles then there can be graphics on the hat that are trackable by the computers in the world. That sort of serves the fiction of her being tested by GLaDOS. Also it keeps the hair out of her eyes."
"The hat came up sort of halfway through the concepting phase. It just seemed to strike a chord with everyone. It's something that always makes me think of test pilots - people who were subjected to testing and extreme conditions. It serves a second purpose too, because if there's a graphic on it that's constantly readable from all angles then there can be graphics on the hat that are trackable by the computers in the world. That sort of serves the fiction of her being tested by GLaDOS. Also it keeps the hair out of her eyes."
Matt continues on to briefly discuss the design of the co-op characters. Check out that brief slice of information after the break, and even more information at the Game Informer website!<!--more-->
“We went through a phase of putting stuff up and deciding what the direction was. The co-op bots, at the very beginning our concepts had a very Westworld feel. We wanted them to look human, but feel robotic. They eventually developed into being these far more graphic, very poor looking robots. We took turrets and the personality spheres and integrated them into the designs. There's so much personality in Portal that we thought we could almost tell a story with their design and get more use out of the art than we already had.
“We drew them holding hands because it just kind of describes the whole co-op idea, if slightly tongue-in-cheek. Portal’s got a sense of humor. It's quirky, but it shows that one of the biggest things that is important to Portal 2 will be that you're playing with a friend. It's one of those weird things, where somebody just kind of did it, and we had the sort of team moment where we were like “yeah that’s pretty cool.”
“We drew them holding hands because it just kind of describes the whole co-op idea, if slightly tongue-in-cheek. Portal’s got a sense of humor. It's quirky, but it shows that one of the biggest things that is important to Portal 2 will be that you're playing with a friend. It's one of those weird things, where somebody just kind of did it, and we had the sort of team moment where we were like “yeah that’s pretty cool.”