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Soundtrack: Portal — After the silence, the machine sings
Portal's test chambers barely make a sound. The ambient score by Kelly Bailey and Mike Morasky sinks behind the ventilation, and only after hours of near-silence does GLaDOS start to sing — Jonathan Coulton's "Still Alive." Black coffee in hand, I, Doremi, take apart the design of the silence and the one song written by the antagonist, and pick out what you can carry back to your own work.
Inside Kim Swift's Philosophy — Manipulating the Player Into Feeling Clever
"After people play our game, I want them to feel clever." That is how Kim Swift describes designing Portal. She is a designer who bet not on hard puzzle walls but on invisible guidance — steering the player's eye and feelings without them noticing. Her philosophy, obsessions, failures (a boss fight that died three times), dilemmas and influences, read through her own interviews and a GDC postmortem.
