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Narbacular Drop Technical Design Document [pdf]

nuclearmonkeysoftware.com

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Re: Narbacular Drop Technical Design Document [pdf]

#3

Post by dpiers »

Bjartr wrote: post #2

For those that aren't aware, the dev team for this was later hired by Valve and created Portal.

Portal is a slightly dumbed down version of Narbacular Drop (ND), with lots and lots of polish. In ND, it was possible to create portals through portals, which drastically increased the complexity of certain solutions.

Re: Narbacular Drop Technical Design Document [pdf]

#4

Post by Jtsummers »

dpiers wrote: post #3
Bjartr wrote: post #2

For those that aren't aware, the dev team for this was later hired by Valve and created Portal.

Portal is a slightly dumbed down version of Narbacular Drop (ND), with lots and lots of polish. In ND, it was possible to create portals through portals, which drastically increased the complexity of certain solutions.

It also made some puzzles much simpler. Have to navigate around 20 half-walls zigzagging over a pool of lava? That was a breeze. In Portal you only get line-of-sight, meaning you had to create a pair of portals, step through, repeat. The same puzzle would have been much more challenging in Portal.

Re: Narbacular Drop Technical Design Document [pdf]

#6

Post by corysama »

verbatim wrote: post #5

Very cool. Are there similar documents available for any other games that we would be familiar with? I imagine it could be a pretty interesting exercise to read over a handful of these from different teams.

https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMakingOfGames/ collects a lot of this kind of material. Use the search function for "doc", "document" and "documents" to find a bunch of them.

Re: Narbacular Drop Technical Design Document [pdf]

#9

Post by Negative1 »

"RECODE", ha, cute.

Short and to the point, it's a good doc but not very interesting. Just glad they didn't pad it with tons of code (last I remember Digipen TDD's are required as part of the curriculum and students are known for doing this).

Haven't thought about this game in years, though. What a nice throwback. I thought Portal was great, very polished with great sense of humor but ND was in my opinion a much more fun and interesting game experience (the puzzles really gave you that fantastic "aha!" moment).

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