Valve's Portal Prequel Revealed
With the announcement Half Life: Alyx, officially released by Valve, it seems that the company has become more frank and open to its followers. With that in mind, the company has given permission to an independent studio to show a behind-the-scenes look at F-Stop, the prequel to the acclaimed Portal that never saw the light of day.
F-Stop was a non-violent DNA puzzle game similar to Portal. The entire game - led by a Valve producer named Joshua Weier, who worked on Portal and Portal 2 - was centered around the "Aperture Camera", an item that could copy, paste, and rescale items in the game's world. Unfortunately, as shown in the 2011 interactive book titled "The Last Hours of Portal 2" , Valve has suspended the project indefinitely.
LunchHouse Software, an indie studio currently working on their own physics puzzle called Point , only now, almost a decade later, gives us a glimpse into what Valve had in mind. With permission from Valve and access to the official source code for F-Stop, Lunch House lifted the veil of F-Stop with brand new documentation titled " Exposition» . The first episode, although short, can be seen below. LunchHouse said more episodes are coming.
The studio stated that Exposure, which will document the various F-Stop mechanisms developed by Valve with the original source code, is "not based on speculation or rumor." The first episode only shows the "basic mechanics" of the F-Stop, but the team at LunchHouse are happy to "[share] all the news with you in the near future."